Background
He was the youngest son of Mary Kent Peck and Phillip F.W. Peck.
He was the youngest son of Mary Kent Peck and Phillip F.W. Peck.
Ferdinand was a civic-minded individual, and was involved in many projects around the city. He was also a patron of the arts, particularly concerned with making high art available to the working classes. To this end, he organized the Chicago Grand Opera Festival in 1885.
Out of the Festival grew a desire for a more permanent expression of his ideals.
Shortly after the Haymarket Square riot, he began planning in earnest for what would become the Auditorium Building. To make his idea real, Peck hired architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, who had worked for him previously to prepare the space for the Grand Opera Festival.
Peck provided much of the funding and the central vision for the building, and the final design reflected his ideas as well as those of the architects. There is currently an elementary school in southwest Chicago named after him.
He was a founding member of the Illinois humane society, and served on the city board of education.