Times were indeed lush at the tip of the lake. Typical of the almost Hollywoodian order of things in that period was the case of the bankrupt backwoods tailor who came to Chicago, sold trousers for a few years, and built one of the largest and most celebrated hostelries of its day.
Race tracks, gambling saloons, and bawdy houses multiplied. Lavish “marble” mansions went up along Michigan Avenue to 12th Street. Theaters, hotels, shops, and business buildings crowded into what is now the Loop. Coal yards, warehouses, flour mills, factories, foundries, and distilleries lined the river banks and the lake front. Scattered through the city were 170 churches–25 Catholic, 21 Methodist, 19 Presbyterian, and 5 Jewish, a partial reflection of the fact that half the Chicagoans of that day were foreign-born.
In 1867, after years of violent protest that the entire community was being poisoned by “filthy slush, miscalled water… a nauseous chowder” of fish and filth, which was taken from the lake into which the city poured its sewage, a sanitary water system was installed and immediately reduced the appallingly high death rate. The flow of “Garlic Creek” was reversed in 1871, and some of its foul waters were carried down the Illinois into the Mississippi, but not in sufficient quantity, so that sewage continued to pour into the river and the lake, to be thrown back at Chicago by the winds and waves.
Public high schools and evening schools, industrial and professional schools, including one of the first art schools in the country, two colleges, three theological seminaries, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Academy of Sciences were established in this period. In 1869 a ring of unimproved parks with boulevard connections surrounded the “Garden City.” Beyond, in suburban subdivisions, carpenters were hammering out miles of houses that were to be swallowed in the city’s growth within two decades. “More astonishing than the wildest vision of the most vagrant imagination!” visitors exclaimed, and Chicagoans agreed, although they felt that a more accurate index of the city’s superiority over all others was provided when the White Stockings, its professional baseball team, defeated the Memphis nine, 157 to 1.
But, born in the haste to put wall and roof around home and business as quickly and cheaply as possible, a large part of the city’s construction ran to “shams and shingles.” Of the estimated 40,000 Chicago buildings in 1868, more than seven-eights were wooden. In 1871 the total increased 50 per cent, and while the 40 new stone buildings on State Street and many brick and iron-front structures elsewhere were promising improvements, solid blocks knew nothing but flimsy pine.
After months of severe drought a fire of unknown origin started in such a block, in a cow barn behind the cottage of Patrick O’Leary on DeKoven Street, Sunday night, October 8th, 1871. It soon spread beyond the control of the firemen, who were wearied by fighting and celebrating the defeat of a blaze that burned four blocks the previous day. A powerful wind swept flames to the north and northeast and hurled brands in advance of the roaring columns of fire, which destroyed the notorious “Conley’s Patch” and practically everything north of Van Buren Street in the areas now designated as the Downtown District and the Near North Side. So intense were the flames that hot blasts were felt in Holland, Michigan, 100 miles across the lake.
Tapering to a point near the lake at Fullerton Avenue, the boundary with the then suburban Lake View, the fire stopped after consuming 17,450 buildings in 27 hours. At least 250 persons perished. Homes of one-third the population, about 1,600 stores, 60 manufacturing establishments and 28 hotels, railroad structures, government and other public buildings, and bridges became three and one-third square miles of ashes and debris. Thousands were penniless, stripped of their last possession.
The embers were scarcely cool before rebuilding began. Generous contributions of money and supplies came from the entire country and from Europe. Thousands of temporary structures provided for immediate needs while more than 100,000 artisans were reconstructing the city under stricter construction codes, although the latter were frequently violated. Extensions of credit and payment of about half of the $88,634,022 insurance on the $192,000,000 loss helped rebuild the business district within a year.
In another two, scarcely a scar of the fire remained anywhere. Many buildings, particularly hotels and depots, were replaced by far costlier structures. Fashion took over Michigan Avenue south of 12th Street, and Prairie Avenue, and brought in granite and brownstone. Chicago dumped its debris within the lake breakwater, forming subsoil for a future park, and went about its increasing business. Local manufactures doubled between 1870 and 1873; Chicago banks, alone of those in the larger cities, continued steadily to pay out current funds during the acute financial panic of 1873.
The germ of American industrialism found the Chicago of the middle seventies an ideal medium. A circle of 500 miles contained the principal ingredients. Around western Lake Superior lay one-fifth of the world’s richest iron-ore reserve, yielding at the slightest scratch, easily loaded on lake freighters after a short land haul, and carried away by the most economical form of transportation on the continent. In Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Chicago’s railroads clutched at a trillion tons of coal. Blast furnaces and large factories forged tremendous wealth that filled Prairie Avenue and spread into Lake Shore Drive.
Nationwide labor unrest, following the wave of western settlement that had “broken against the and plains” became particularly acute here. The line between wealth and poverty, cutting sharply into a single generation of workmen with rapidity unequalled elsewhere, drew Chicago into the forefront of “radical” cities. In 1877, led by Albert R. Parsons, workers in the factories and on the railroads struck for increased wages and the 8-hour day. Federal troops broke the strike, but without removing the causes of discontent. Industrial warfare over wages and hours grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Haymarket bombing of 1886.
Although no adequate evidence was produced that they had thrown the bomb, Parsons and three other labor leaders were hanged for the crime. Two others escaped death by having their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, and a third received a sentence of 15 years in prison. These three were pardoned seven years later by Governor John P. Altgeld, “… eagle forgotten” in Vachel Lindsay’s phrase, who denounced the trials as unfair and illegal and was himself denounced as little better than a criminal for daring to doubt highly questionable evidence. Again large strikes broke out in the depression years that followed 1893, notably that which began in the local Pullman shops and spread to the railroads; once more Federal troops broke the strike.
Meantime, as one result of the Haymarket tragedy, the Civic Federation was founded by Lyman C. Gage, a banker, to provide free and open discussion of controversial questions. In 1889 Jane Addams opened Hull House in the worst slum district on the West Side. By 1890 Chicago had more than 1,000,000 people, having added 200,000 the previous year by the annexation of several surrounding municipalities. The Newberry Library, and The Public Library, had been founded, and in 1892 the University of Chicago began with the most auspicious program in university history.
Theodore Thomas had organized the Chicago Orchestral Association and had long been presenting the popular concert series that brought the city renown as a musical center. W. L. B. Jenny, Daniel H. Burnham, John W. Root, William Holabird, and other architects were constructing huge new buildings on steel frames and evolving a new architectural form. In Maitland Dictionary of American Slang, published in 1891, the new term “skyscraper” was defined as “a very tall building such as are now being built in Chicago.”
Commerce, manufacture, labor, and these new cultural developments united to bring the city one of its great triumphs, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Jackson Park was developed out of swamp land on the South Side and here were built the great white buildings of the Fair in accordance with a master plan drawn by Daniel H. Burnham.
The “White City,” as it was soon known on five continents, was hailed as the miracle of the day, the “miniature of an ideal city… built as a unit on a single architectural plan… a symbol of regeneration.” Millions crowded into the Fair to stare at and be equally impressed with “the most beautiful building since the Parthenon,” a knight on horseback made of California prunes, cannons by Krupp, the Tower of Light, and the Parliament of Religions–the whole providing “matter of study to fill 100 years.”
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