Chicago is the heart of a great arterial system of steel rails, concrete roads, waterways, and airways, radiating in all directions. No railroad line passes through the city. Freight trains are shunted around belt lines connecting the various roads, and passengers shift from one to another of the six stations that border the downtown district.
A popular portage in its earliest days, Chicago remains in a sense the world’s busiest portage. Only New York with its export trade transacts a larger volume of business than the Midwest Titan, “half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”
But Chicago is also something more, a city of Protean shapes eluding any single formula, any simple characterization. It has sat for its portrait in more than 400 novels, in many poems and plays, but none has succeeded in catching all of its aspects and moods. Any full-length portrait would have to include State Street, with its glittering shops, and Clark Street, with its flophouses and cheap gin mills-the Stock Yards and the tower built by chewing gum–the Chicago Club and the shrill babel of “Bughouse Square”–Hull House and the bulging arsenals of the Al Capone and rival “mobs,” private armies waging private war.
On the canvas there would have to be room, too, for the Field Museum and the “World’s Greatest Newspaper”–for Samuel Insull’s “tallest opera building in the world” and the spectacular collapse of his holding-company empire–for Harriet Monroe, poet and critic of international reputation, and William Hale (“Big Bill, the Builder”) Thompson, who for years has carried on a valiant and almost single-handed combat with the ghost of King George III. And no Chicagoan would admit a picture of his city to be complete without the curious horrendous charm of the old castellated Water Tower, about which buzzes local Bohemia, or without the stately Gothic structures of the University of Chicago.
All of these reflect other basic patterns. Along no street in the world live so many different nationalities and races as along Halsted Street in its long course across the city.
A city of action, Chicago has been not only a peculiar focus for almost all of the major currents that have swirled across the continent, but also the spring from which not a few of them have welled. The figures of the city’s census reports kept pace with the rapid expansion of the country. With the large scale cutting of the nation’s forests and the breaking of the prairie, Chicago became the greatest grain and lumber market in the world.
The spreading railroad lines of a national network converged here as nowhere else in America. The Great Fire of 1871 pointed warningly to the inflammable condition of a country filled with wooden buildings, the violence and hysteria of the Haymarket affair and the Pullman strike were the strongest expressions of the “riotous” eighties and nineties, and in the periods of mass European immigration, Chicago became the country’s largest settlement for many foreign nationalities.
The symbolism of the Columbian Exposition sharply revealed the imperialism of the nineties, while the first appearance of the skyscraper, the changing voice of American literature, and the inspiration of American city planning were among the significant prophecies. The scandalous political graft and antidotal reform movements around the turn of the 20th century were indications of wide-spread corruption. The figures of Capone and Insull were, respectively, epitomes of the period of American gangsterism and speculation.
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