Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo

Part One Chicago and Its Suburbs: The Metropolis

Part one Chicago and Its Suburbs: The Metropolis As the nation’s boom metropolis, Chicago was a major tourist attraction,and a major source of pride to its residents.“Greetings from Chicago” was a thought, if not an actual phrase used, resonating with all the many postcards sent and receivedfromthecityearlyinthetwentiethcentury . The caption on the novelty card in figure 12 reads in part: “Chicago, Miracle City of the Age in little figure 12. Novelty postcard, ca. 1946. 24 ] Part One more than 100 years, grew from a village of a few log cabins to the fourth largest city on the globe.” The French had borrowed the word“Che-cau-gou” from native parlance, applying it to the river that, by short portage, strategically connected Lake Michigan with the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers. It was a foul-smelling, marshy world of wild leek and skunk cabbage. Chicago’s population exploded from some 4,500 people in 1840 to more than 1.7 million in 1900 (with another 400,000 in its suburbs),growing at a rate of some 75,000 each year. The metropolis stretched for more than twenty-five miles along Lake Michigan , and inland away from the lake upwards of twelve miles.“Here,midmost in the land,”penned the novelist Frank Norris, “beat the Heart of the Nation,whence inevitably must come its immeasurable power, its infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality. Here, of all her cities, throbbed the true life—the true power and spirit of America.” Chicago was spoken of in superlatives:“Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous , indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring , puissant, preposterous, transcendent—call it what you like—throw the dictionary at it!” exclaimed the travel writer Julian Street. Chicago’s official motto became “I will,” although the city founders had originally adopted Urbsinhorto (city in agarden) in acknowledgment of the fecundity of the surrounding prairie hinterland .The descriptor“Windy City”became popular in the twentieth century,referencing not only the gales that sometimes raged off of Lake Michigan, butalsotheballyhoowithwhichChicagoanstended to boast of their city.Postcard publishers played to boosterism,relying on an array of pictorial conventions in doing so. Preferred viewpoints and compositional conventions repeated over and over again in the city’s postcard art. For example, distanced views that emphasized the grand while obfigure 13. A view over Chicago’s central business district, ca. 1935. Chicago and Its Suburbs [ 25 scuring the menial,especially the untoward,were favored,presenting visual“tableaus”by which the city might be understood and remembered. Nothing distanced the city better than a “bird’s-eye view.”“If you look at Chicago from the air,”wrote journalists John and Ruth Ashenhurst, “you will see how it is divided into segments by the railroad lines which converge upon its central district, cutting great gashes through the city’s roofs like the fingers of a hand or the ribs of a fan. Contrasting with these are the twin ribbons of the Chicago River diverging outward to the northwest and southwest from the fork, half a mile west of the lake front.” The view in figure 13 is out over the Chicago River just west of the lakefront,the array of skyscrapers along North Michigan Avenue disrupted by the river,with the avenue’s bridge as a focal point. It was there—the site of Fort Dearborn —that, a century earlier, Chicago had its start as a city. “The city has a surprising beauty,” journalist Graham Hutton observed.“The beauty shines through all of its grime, the dirt of hard work.I have stood many a time,of a fall evening or in the depth of terrible winters, on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and looked west to see the girders of the many bridges over the Chicago River and the skyscrapers and the sunset beyond;and I have wondered why a Midwest school of painting did not spring up here.” state street and the lOOP Following the fire of 1871, State Street became the city’s principal retail street,and thus the symbolic center of downtown. figure 14a shows a view taken about 1925 south along State Street, with the eye directed to architect Louis H.Sullivan’s celebrated Schlesinger and Mayer Department Store (later Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company), located at what was claimed to be “The Busiest Corner in the World.”The caption reads:“It is said that more people pass this corner in 24 hours than...