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176 11 An Overgrown Gawk of a Village D uring the pre-panic years of the early to mid-1850s, while William Ogden was cobbling together his Chicago and North Western Railway system, Peshtigo Company lumbering monolith, real estate empire, and Pennsylvania iron mines and smelters, the remainder of Chicago’s citizenry also prospered. When the Panic of 1857 hit, they demonstrated the same resilience that had carried them through previous hardships. The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad opened its final extension into Chicago in 1858, completing the first rail link between Chicago and New York City. There was now both a land link and a water link—the Hudson River–Erie Canal–Great Lakes corridor—between America’s two most important cities. It meant the handwriting was on the wall for other major inland cities: henceforth they would play second fiddle to Chicago. Philadelphia, which for years had been the country’s second most important city, recognized its plight, evident in this report made to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad : “In a survey of the map, the eye of the observer is naturally drawn to Chicago, and all the investigation he may give it will only strengthen the first impression, that it is destined to become a place of such magnitude as to leave Philadelphia no alternative in a commercial view but to obtain a direct railroad to it. The stake is too large in bulk and value to be permitted to pass wholly and forever through more northern channels, whither it is now tending, because it has no outlet leading towards sunrise.”1 The report went on to say that Chicago would no longer be “an agency post on main routes passing through her. It will perform the functions of a commercial city, and not the secondary part of a station-house agency.” The report summarized, “In a word, Chicago is an independent city, and will trade with the Atlantic ports as the Atlantic ports trade with each other.” These were bitter words for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston and words of warning to St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and other major river ports. An Overgrown Gawk of a Village 177 Despite the grand words, Chicago was not without its hardships: poverty and vice, corrupt police and an inefficient fire department, abysmal public health and crushing infrastructure problems, rampant immigration and ineffective public service. Much of what muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote of the Chicago of the 1890s would have also been apt to the Chicago of the 1850s and 1860s: “first in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling , irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation.”2 Unlike many mushrooming cities of the period, where rich and poor developed their own enclaves completely separate from one another, Chicago was a hodgepodge. The homes of the wealthiest citizens were on the North Side and the South Side, but those were also sites where the deepest poverty and degradation were found. The West Side was home to industrious workers “with their tens of thousands of labor-bought homes.”3 The South Clark Street area, primarily Italian, was like most of the other poverty -stricken neighborhoods in the city, as Chicago historian Joseph Kirkland described it: “Emerging on a second-story balcony at the back of one of these Italian houses one comes upon a long vista of house rears and tumble-down back-sheds, squalid beyond conception. Neighboring windows are filled with faces peering out with interest and amusement at the stranger. Here and there are bits of rope stretched from one nail to another—from house to shed, from fence to banister, from window-sill to door-post—carrying forlorn arrays of washed clothing. Each is the effort of some lowly woman to preserve a little cleanliness in the garments of herself and her household.”4 It was not as if the wealthy did not attempt to succor the poor; they certainly did, but there were simply too many of them. For example, prior to the Great Fire the city directory listed hundreds of benevolent organizations, including fiftyseven hospitals and asylums, twenty-eight free infirmaries and dispensaries, forty-one missions, sixty temperance societies, and thirty-seven full columns of secret benevolent associations, lodges, circles, and so on.5 The amazing thing about nineteenth-century Chicago was that it continued to grow and prosper despite its problems. The men who ran the city found it easier...
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