News Travel March 10, 2025 0 Comments

The City Of Chicago: One Of The Unstoppable, Fast-growing City

Entering the last quarter of the 1800s, no city on Earth was better positioned for commercial supremacy than this one. The capital of the Midwest had recently helped the Union win the Civil War, and its great concentration of businesses along its several train lines, large lakefront, and re-engineered river attracted thousands of new immigrants every month.

Not only did it provide boards and planks for homes for its fast growing population, but it also kept massive amounts of wood ready for transportation to cities sprouting up all over the western prairies. The metropolis is constructed without of regard for the realities of the prairie or for the environment. Praises are burning. It was created with money in mind. Do it fast, turn around, start making money. Naturally, the city is also constructed largely from wood.

The streets are made of woods. The bridges are made of lumber. The tar on some of the roofs begins to blister in the sun from such heat. One October night in 1871, following an exceptionally dry summer, a powerful wind blasted into Chicago from the west. Though exactly what transpired next remains a mystery, somehow a fire began in a barn and rapidly extended to neighboring buildings. A few minutes later, after a spark landed in a railroad car loaded with kerosene, the north side of the river shook with a great explosion.

Tens of thousands of tons of extremely flammable stuff all throughout the city combined with the whipping wind produced their own weather system from the great heat. The city built on wood resembled a tinderbox. Thousands of panicked citizens swamped into the lake and stayed there all night in order to avoid probable death. The extent of the damage was evident as the sun at last rose, lighting a black, smoke-filled sky. Suddenly vanished 73 kilometers of roadways and over 17,000 structures.

The City Built On Wood Resembled A Tinderbox

Amazingly, just approximately 300 people died, but over 100,000, a third of the city’s population were instantaneously homeless. Among the worst fire tragedies of contemporary times. Still, some of the surrounding neighborhoods suffered much worse. Major fires all throughout the Great Lakes, most tragically in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, the town engulfed so quickly that 2,500 people perished and 1.5 million acres of surrounding forest burnt from the same windstorm.

Cut off from the rest of the world when the size of property damage in Chicago, the little-known Peshtigo Fire is still the worst fire in American history burned and obscured by its telegraph wires. To discover more, I visited with the Director of Exhibits of the Chicago History Museum. Many people are unaware, nevertheless, that it left the south side and the west side essentially intact.

And that was really crucial considering Chicago’s capacity for fast reconstruction. Many of the most well-known people of the city lost no time trying to start the reconstruction effort. But New York’s bankers were cautious about losing their money in another fire.

Chicago swiftly embraced new building laws requiring the use of less combustible materials like brick and terracotta in order to allay their worries, therefore ushering in the biggest building boom in American history and a new architectural era. Hemmed in by water on three sides and railroad yards to the south, there was nowhere in the central loop area of the city to grow.

Elevators and structural steel made two developments necessary for the skyscraper feasible. Chicago saw the first steel-framed high-rise structure open in 1885. Chicago architects started experimenting with employing a steel skeleton or an iron skeleton or a frame that you could essentially hang the outside of the building on instead of having a structure where all the weight is in the walls and it’s kind of holding the structure together.

It also lets you build far more dynamic, lighter, more flexible constructions with great height. You also get far more decoration. The outside gets more artificial and less utilitarian. Glass manufacture has also evolved using these ideas. Chicago architects are among the first to sort of experiment with employing ever bigger glass plates, which let more natural light flood in.

The beginning of the skyscraper age has changed not only this metropolis but our whole globe. Chicago still ranks among the world’s densest skylines and tallest cities today. But the beginning of this era of growth was an exhibition of well-organized anarchy. Coming off the street, this cloud of smoke hanging over the city, the rush of people, this cavalry charge on the streets, streetcar lines all over the place, trolleys running along, buildings going erected.

Three days of a narrative every day. People are observing like in urban performances. The sound of newly invented rivet guns, at that time. boom, boom, bang of the rivets. It simply looked like one large building site. Chicago staged the Columbian Exposition, sometimes known as the World’s Fair, amid this flurry of activity in 1893.

Built on more than 600 acres of former marshland at Jackson Park’s current site, the fairgrounds attracted 27.5 million visitors over six months, at a time when the nation’s total population was only little over 60 million. Its displays reflected American hope, enhanced Chicago’s reputation as the nation’s industrial center, and had a significant impact on culture. Your substructures were iron or steel.

Chicago Global Standing

Then you had covered over it these exteriors composed of a substance known as staff, essentially a sort of plaster easily formed and molded and controlled. And that’s how you produced something looking more or less like marble with all these decorations, but it wasn’t a really permanent substance. Chicago’s ability to stage an event of this scope was amazing, despite depending on a little illusion.

In his masterful book, The Devil in the White City, Eric Larson chronicled the frenzied preparations to get ready for opening day, following the real story of the eminent architect entrusted with fulfilling the great idea of the fair. Daniel Burnham had overcome several challenges to create the fair, each one of which could have, should have killed it long before opening day. He and his designers had created a dream metropolis whose grandeur and beauty outstripped everything he could have dreamed taken together.

It’s hard to overestimate how important this era was for Chicago’s ascent to prominence as an urban hub, just as the rest of the nation was starting to become a worldwide power. About 300,000 people lived in the city at the time of the early 1870s fire. But Chicago had developed to be a city of more than a million people by the time the 1893 World’s Fair came around. It had topped Philadelphia as the second biggest city in the nation. By then, Chicago was the only city in history that had grown rapidly to be large. None else had ever done.

Actually, it had grown to be the fourth biggest city in the world by population. You had London, New York, Paris, Chicago by the end of the 1890s. Those four cities ranked highest worldwide. I appreciate your viewing. In part three, we examine how forward-looking Chicago’s leaders set it for success both now and down road.