In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 the shAPIng of ChICAgo p E r r y r . d u i s Chicago holds a special place in the history of American cities. It frequently assumes the role of the great American exaggeration, the place where common characteristics are stretched to their limits. Other cities grew during the nineteenth century, but Chicago mushroomed. Every town had its boosters, but the Windy City’s were obstreperously boastful. Crime and political corruption were everywhere, but in Chicago they seemed to be elevated to an art. More positively, Chicago became a synonym for “the new” and “the first,” leading the way in architecture, literature, and social reform— in part because, as a brash upstart, it possessed few encumbering traditions. As the archetypal American industrial city, Chicago’s rise and metamorphoses not only illustrate the urbanization process at its most basic but also demonstrate how the compelling forces of concentration, which allow efficiencies of space and time to outweigh all other considerations, both attract people and activities into cities and drive them outward toward the fringes. The creative efforts of talented individuals are the substance of this book. But location, challenges, opportunities, and calamities also shaped Chicago and stimulated the city’s problem solvers to reach inventive solutions. Many conditions, events, and movements have shaped the city: the following are some that have had a special impact on the built environment. The Power of Place Chicago’s location has been both a curse and a blessing. The land at the banks of the Chicago River was swampy, and the stream itself flowed too slowly to turn a waterwheel or clear the mouth of silt. But it sat at the southwestern end of the massive Great Lakes navigation system. Via these waterways , prerailroad commerce penetrated the midsection of the continent and, interrupted only by a dry-weather portage, was linked to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers via the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers and the south branch of the Chicago River. Its advantages made Chicago’s site a spot to control. When the first outsiders, Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, explored the region in 1673, the warlike Potawatomi had already displaced peaceful Indian tribes. Around 1779, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable built a cabin roughly where the Equitable Building stands today and became Chicago’s first permanent resident. A French-speaking black man, Du Sable was one of many Great Lakes traders who exchanged iron and cloth goods for furs. In 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States established Fort Dearborn, the nation’s westernmost military post, near what is now the south end of the Michigan Ave. Bridge. In 1812, in an incident known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre, the Potawatomi attempted to regain the valuable site. They burned the stockade, while three miles to the south, a raiding party killed most of the garrison members and their families as they fled along the lakeshore. The fort was rebuilt in 1816, the same year that surveying began for the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which would provide a year-round link between the Chicago River and the Illinois-Mississippi River system some seventy-five miles away. A national financial panic in 1819 and fears of Indian unrest halted progress until the 1830s. On August 5, 1833, thirteen electors gathered to incorporate the Town of Chicago, and newcomers, many of them land speculators , began arriving in droves. By 1836, when work on the canal began in earnest, optimism about Chicago’s future had boosted land prices to astronomical levels and attracted more than three thousand additional residents. In March 1837, Chicagoans demanded and received a city charter from the state legislature. In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about finding the option. Job Name: -- /359560t the shaping of chicago 2 The Golden Funnel and the Growth of Transportation In the mid-1840s, Chicago’s merchants began to exploit the city’s site by creating what might be called the golden funnel. The development of farmland throughout the West produced agricultural surpluses that could be shipped to eastern markets most efficiently via Chicago’s water linkage. Wheat shipped through Chicago rose from a meager few bushels in 1840 to nearly two million bushels seven years later. In 1848, several events improved the funnel’s flow. The Illinois & Michigan Canal was finally opened, plank roads to the hinterlands made it...

Share