There is a small monument on the southeast corner of Wacker Drive and Lake Street that marks a momentous event in Chicago’s political history, the birth of the city as the convention capital of the country.

It is a 5-foot-tall cast stone marker and on one side is a plaque that tells of the Wigwam, a two-story building where in 1860 the Republican Party, formed only six years earlier in Wisconsin, met to select a candidate for the presidency.

The building was designed by the Water Tower architect W. W. Boyington and financed by civic leaders. Taking its name from an Algonquin word for a dwelling made of tree poles and bark, the Wigwam was the first structure in the country to be specifically built for a presidential convention. It included on-site telegraph equipment and had seating for more than 10,000 people.

Chicago won its first political convention because Illinois was one of the Midwestern states the Republicans needed to win the presidency. In late 1859, attorney Norman Judd and Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, two allies of Abraham Lincoln, persuaded the Republican National Committee that the party risked “losing the West” if it did not convene in Chicago, especially if its candidate was abolitionist U.S. Sen. William Seward of New York, then the favorite for the nomination.

Judd and Medill were really trying to boost the chances of Lincoln, who was such a dark horse that no one worried a Chicago convention would give him home-state advantage. Lincoln’s local supporters packed the Wigwam, helping create an unstoppable bandwagon for their candidate.

Lincoln was nominated on May 18, 1860, and that fall was elected the 16th president of the United States and would, of course, go on to, well you know …

The Wigwam was later converted to retail uses before being destroyed by fire in 1867. But Chicago would distinguish itself over the next century as the premiere site of national political conventions. From 1860 to 1996, the city hosted 25 party conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties, more than any other city. There were 14 Republican conventions and 11 for the Democrats. There also have been several third-party conventions held in Chicago, most notably the Progressive Party’s convention in 1912 when they nominated former President Teddy Roosevelt. That party later became the Bull Moose Party after Roosevelt’s announcement that he was “strong as a bull moose.”

Interesting, yes?

But frankly, the details of most of these gatherings rest under history’s dust, long forgotten. There were some important moments, to be sure, covered elsewhere in this newspaper by my colleague Ron Grossman. And all the conventions are detailed in what is generally considered the definitive, and thick and entertaining, “Inside the Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860-1996,” written by R. Craig Sautter and former alderman Edward M. Burke.

It explains how the city became “the mecca of political conventions,” citing “its central location and excellent transportation system, the rapidly growing prairie giant attracted both major parties, and many of the third parties, over the decades. Delegates by the thousands rolled into the dynamic metropolis on the iron tracks that converged in the city’s hub. Also, Chicago’s location suggested political neutrality to both the East and the West.”

That’s become the conventional wisdom and it is accurate to a point. But there was another reason for Chicago becoming the nation’s convention capital.

“Yes, much of its appeal had to do with location, location, location. But the city also benefited from its deserved wide-open reputation and its culture of vice,” says esteemed historian and author Richard Lindberg. “This was a city that offered all that a visitor might want. There were plenty of good hotels and restaurants, but also ample opportunities to sample gambling, brothels and other diversions.”

For many convention delegates, newspaper reporters and, later, television crews and other attendees, these political gatherings were very serious affairs. But for just as many, they also offered the opportunity to let loose, to explore or indulge in some of society’s less prim and proper offerings.

Taking advantage of this, the owner of the original Billy Goat Tavern, Bill Sianis, put a sign in the window of his establishment in 1944 when the Republican National Convention was held at the nearby Chicago Stadium. It read “No Republicans Allowed,” and soon the bar was filled with Republicans demanding to be served.

Lindberg, who has written 20-some books about such local historical topics as crime, cops, serial killers and baseball, has recently been lecturing across the area on the history of “Unconventional Conventions.”

So, let us now note, much to Lindberg’s point, that the other side of the historical marker at Wacker and Lake has a plaque honoring the building that preceded the Wigman on the site, the Sauganash Hotel. It’s exactly the kind of social center that most conventioneers would have enjoyed patronizing had conventions been held in Chicago decades earlier.

Built in 1831 by Mark Beaubien as an addition to his log cabin, the Sauganash Hotel was a white, two-story building that served as the social center of the growing town. Named for the Potawatomi-British fur trader Sauganash, also known as Billy Caldwell, the hotel was in almost continuous operation, including a stint as the city’s first theater. And it also was well known for its tavern, where Beaubien entertained customers with his lively fiddle playing.

Chicago’s prominence as the political convention capital would remain for decades, only starting to wane as airplane travel took the place of traveling by train and conventions took place in such cities as Miami Beach and San Francisco.

But the Democrats came here in 1968 and you will find one of its important sites at the Hilton Chicago.

I was there on Aug. 28, 1968, a 16-year-old standing with some older men, women and children behind barriers police had set up outside the picture windows of the hotel’s Haymarket Inn. “Help, help,” came the screams, as police came at those on the sidewalk and street, and in Grant Park. Billy clubs swinging, people were forced back until they began crashing through the window.

Trouble had been anticipated, but not from those who eventually made and suffered it. Mayor Richard J. Daley, in the wake of the April 4 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that preceded unrest across the West Side, issued the unfortunate order to police: “Shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand … shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.”

A Tribune editorial would blame “Black power groups” for the West Side trouble and it was Black people, not the war protesters and other long-haired agitators coming to town, whom Daley feared before the Democratic National Convention. With the convention weeks away, he orchestrated the renaming of South Park Way to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the first of what would become 1,000-some such named streets across the globe.

And then the convention came to town and turned into a violent confrontation between the police and protesters.

During the four days of the convention I was working at the Hilton. I was stationed in a basement space where I answered phones and ran errands for the reporters and editors from the Daily News and Sun-Times covering the event.

The convention was being held at the International Amphitheatre on the South Side, where 2,623 delegates and many interested others gathered. One night I grabbed a cab with a reporter and we found what the Tribune would describe as a “steel curtain of security dropped around more than a square mile which contains the Amphitheatre, (turning it) into a veritable stockade.”

The next night I was just outside the doors of the Hilton, watching the madness in front of me. Some of the cops, who formed a line intended to keep the anti-war protesters from getting inside the hotel, eyed me suspiciously. I looked, hair a bit shaggy but not long, like those outside the hotel.

All there that night became part of what would come to be known as the “Battle of Balbo.” Though it lasted less than 30 minutes, it was ugly and terrifying. I saw blood and I saw tears and I heard the most vile words and sad screams. Heavy glass ashtrays, tossed from windows above, shattered on the sidewalk. A piece clipped my forehead.

The skirmishes on previous convention nights in Lincoln Park were as bloody, with 101 demonstrators hospitalized, and 192 police officers reporting injuries.

But the Lincoln Park protests did not have the dubious distinction of television cameras present to record the action, like at the Hilton. Yes, the whole world may have been watching but soon enough it came time to change the channel.

Daley was vilified in some quarters but in the 1971 mayoral election Daley trounced Republican Richard Friedman with 70% of the vote. Four years later, Daley received 77% of the vote against Republican John Hoellen.

As columnist Mike Royko put it, “In attacking the young, the liberal and the black, Daley was in the mainstream of America’s mass prejudices. … Daley came out of the convention even more popular than before because ‘bust their heads’ was the mood of the land and Daley had swung the biggest club.”