THERE IS A FAMOUS CURRIER & Ives Lithograph Of A bird’s-eye view of Chicago in 1892. In the foreground is Lake Michigan, and behind it a giant has unrolled an enormous quilt of streets and buildings. The quilt stretches almost all the way to the horizon, where beyond the distant suburbs, there is a glimpse of virgin prairie. The center of the city is defined by the lakefront, the Chicago River, and its South Branch. The first steel-framed skyscraper, the Masonic Temple Building, is plainly visible; so is Louis Sullivan’s recently completed Auditorium Building, whose office tower is the world’s tallest building. The surrounding city is chockablock with apartment houses, factories, and warehouses; the roofscape is punctuated by a few church steeples and many belching smokestacks. Commercial vessels—steam and sail—cram the river; railway trains chug along the lakeside, and rail lines radiate out from the city into the prairie. Everything appears in motion; intentionally or not, the illustrator has portrayed Chicago as a horizontal anthill.
In 1892 Chicago had more than 1.5 million inhabitants. It was the second-largest city in the United States after New York, which had grown to a staggering 3.4 million; Philadelphia, which had long since surpassed Penn’s original grid, now stood at about 1.3 million people. These three enormous cities signaled an important demographic shift: four out of ten Americans now lived in a city or town. Sixty-one years earlier, in 1831, when Tocqueville and Beaumont visited the United States, only about one in ten of the population was classified as urban.
Such measures of urbanization indicate where people live, but don’t necessarily describe how they live. Generally speaking, a national urbanization level of 10 percent—the level of present-day Ethiopia, for example—denotes a society whose population, despite the presence of a small number of towns and even large cities (Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, contains 1.5 million inhabitants), is overwhelmingly rural. Typically, in such a society, sharp contrasts exist between the urban minorities and the rest of the population whose way of life is culturally traditional, socially conservative, and technologically backward. America, however, was different.
The difference was already apparent by the time Tocqueville came to America. He had read James Fenimore Cooper’s novels set in the wilderness, and he anticipated that a nation that included pioneering settlers as well as urban patricians would display cultural extremes even more striking than those between the rustic French provinces and the sophisticated capitale. A travel essay he published in a French magazine describes how a visit to the frontier (present-day Michigan) confounded his expectations. “When you leave the main roads you force your way down barely trodden paths. Finally, you see a field cleared, a cabin made from half-shaped tree trunks admitting the light through one narrow window only. You think that you have at last reached the home of the American peasant. Mistake. You make your way into this cabin that seems the asylum of all wretchedness but the owner of the place is dressed in the same clothes as yours and he speaks the language of towns. On his rough table are books and newspapers; he himself is anxious to know exactly what is happening in old Europe and asks you to tell him what has most struck you in his country.” Tocqueville continued: “One might think one was meeting a rich landowner who had come to spend just a few nights in a hunting lodge.”
Long before the universal ownership of televisions and videocassette recorders, long before the spread of regional malls, nationwide franchises, mail-order catalogs, the Home Shopping Network, and the Internet, long before the decentralizing impact of the private automobile, American culture already demonstrated a startling tendency toward a far-flung homogeneity. Tocqueville’s sketch confirms that consumer goods were widely distributed, as were books and newspapers and ideas; elsewhere, Tocqueville observes with wonder that anything that can be bought in New York City is also on the shelves in small-town stores. “The spirit of equality has stamped a peculiarly uniform pattern on the habits of private life,” he writes.
It is significant that the uniform pattern Tocqueville describes was neither countrified nor peasantlike; Americans were rural but that did not mean that they were rustic. Rather, they were, at least culturally speaking, urban. The roots of this urbanity were deep: they were present in the civic ambitions of Annapolis and Williamsburg, in the rapid spread of gentility and middle-class comforts from the main cities to country towns, and in the sophisticated architecture of colonial villages and towns. The British custom of building country houses migrated to colonial America in the form of the riverside plantation mansion, and such prominent republicans as Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison continued to build country houses that would become famous and acquire the status of shrines. Washington’s Mount Vernon, Madison’s Montpelier, and George Mason’s Gunston Hall, with their formal gardens, well-stocked cellars and libraries, and refined domestic comforts, were distinctly urbane, not provincial. When Jefferson undertook a radical redesign of Monticello in 1794, he based his ideas on a stylish contemporary Parisian city residence, the Hôtel de Salm, and much of his furniture came from France. Jefferson may have lived on an isolated mountaintop—behavior that would have branded him an eccentric in Europe—but he was in many ways a man defined by urban culture.
Lewis Mumford defined the city as a “point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.” This was undoubtedly true of the historic centers of Europe and Asia, whose royal courts and centralized cultural institutions were isolated from the traditional agricultural society of the surrounding countryside. But in nineteenth-century America, as Tocqueville observed, culture was much more diffuse. The early American urbanization process did not mirror the social evolution of peasant to townsman that had occurred earlier in Europe. (The only people who could properly be described as constituting a tradition-bound rural society in America were Indians and black slaves.) In the New World it wasn’t the town air that made you free—as the medieval German saying went—it was American air, unless you were an Indian or a slave. Because many new settlers were themselves former townspeople and because Americans were inclined to move from place to place, the line between town and country—rural and urban—blurred. Life on plantations and country estates, especially in the South, could be as mannerly as life in the city, and life in small country towns and on prosperous farms was only slightly less refined. As a result, the United States is the first example of a society in which the process of urbanization began, paradoxically, not by building towns, but by spreading an urban culture.
Here is an important distinction, and perhaps also another reason for the ambivalence that marks American attitudes toward the city: there never was a sense of cities as precious repositories of civilization. Because urban culture spread so rapidly, it lost its tie to the city, at least in the public’s perception. Institutions and customs that elsewhere would have been considered marks of urbanity, here were simply thought of as national traits. Because of this uniformity, there was, as Tocqueville observed, a less dramatic difference than in Europe between the countryman and the townsman. In America, to say that someone is a farmer merely gives an occupation; in most of Europe, it describes a set of cultural values. A mythical regional distinction between town and country did develop as the American West was settled, with life in the wide open spaces contrasted to that in the crowded eastern cities.
The implantation of an urban culture greatly accelerated the actual building of towns. Braudel, writing about the historic process of urbanization, speculates that about 10 percent of the total population living in towns was the threshold at which urbanization began to attain a minimum degree of efficiency. He suggests that this provided a sufficient concentration of townspeople and a sufficient number of towns to form a network of interdependent urban economies. This may have been true in Europe, but in the United States the threshold appears to have been lower, for urbanization increased at a constant rate, starting at a level of only 5 percent, which was recorded in 1790, the year of the first census. Forty years later urbanization stood at 10 percent, and by 1850 it had grown to 15 percent.
In 1850 there were seven American cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants: New York, Baltimore, which had jumped to number two, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, which had become the main southern port, and ever-growing Cincinnati. The other city close in size was the old French outpost of Saint Louis, which thanks to the opening up of the Mississippi to steamboats had grown in only a decade from a town of about 17,000 to a city of more than 77,000. Over the next fifty years, immigration swelled the total population of the United States from 23 million to 76 million. By 1900, in addition to the three great metropolises—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—three other cities had grown to about half a million inhabitants: Boston, Baltimore, and the booming Saint Louis, the fourth-largest city in the nation. Cities with more than a quarter of a million people now included not only Cincinnati and New Orleans but Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee, as well as the recent gold-rush mecca of San Francisco; Washington, D.C., with 279,000 people, was finally starting to fill out according to L’Enfant’s expectations.
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During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fastest-growing city in the United States, probably in the world, was Chicago. The evolution of Chicago bears closer examination, for in many ways twentieth-century American urbanism got its start here. This is where the skyscraper was invented and given its definitive architectural form, this is where the idea of the American commercial downtown took root, and this is also where the issue of urban design, after a hiatus of almost two centuries, emerged as a topic fit for public and political discussion.
Chicago was a latecomer among American cities. When Tocqueville visited the Northwest Territory he didn’t mention Chicago, which was then a village and was described by another traveler as consisting of “little more than a dozen or so log cabins, a store, two taverns, and Fort Dearborn.” The village prospered, and by 1850, the population reached 20,000. Life must have been hard in the muddy town, with its unpaved streets and flimsy wood buildings, but if one believed the claims of Chicagoans, this was the “Gem of the Prairies” and the “Queen of the Lake.” Such boosterism was typical of the civic spirit that would distinguish Chicago, which aspired to be more than just another frontier outpost. As early as 1839 there were signs of civic ambition when the city council purchased two acres for a park and also set aside land for what would one day be Grant Park.
Just as Amsterdam was shaped by the Dutch Golden Age or Manchester by the British Industrial Revolution, Chicago was formed by the great commercial and industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century. After the construction of the railroads and a business boom during the Civil War, the city took off like a rocket. Indeed, as far as popular legend is concerned, Chicago was born in a shower of sparks. On October 8, 1871, the preeminent city of the western half of the nation, bursting at the seams with 300,000 people, suffered a calamitous fire that devastated the business center and much of the surrounding area. Catastrophic urban fires were commonplace throughout the nineteenth century and laid waste great portions of New York (1835), Pittsburgh (1845), San Francisco (1851), Saint Louis (1851), Washington, D.C. (1851), Troy, New York (1862), Portland, Maine (1866), Boston (1872), and Seattle (1889). Dense, fast-growing cities like Chicago were particularly vulnerable to fire because most of the buildings were of wood; people used wood- and coal-burning stoves; and the water supply and fire protection were inadequate. When urban fires started, they were hard to put out. The three-day Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed more than 2,000 acres, razed 18,000 buildings, and left 90,000 people homeless. Perhaps as much as a third of the city was burnt to the ground.
The resilience of Chicagoans was extraordinary. The disaster was widely perceived to be a great opportunity. A report published within two months of the fire had chapter titles such as “Good out of Evil” and “The New Chicago.” Politicians and businessmen rallied together. Chicago was being tested, and it would rise to the challenge. Partly this was civic propaganda, an optimism made possible because the industrial and manufacturing districts and the grain- and livestock-handling facilities, the foundation of Chicago’s prosperity, were not damaged by the fire. So there was plenty of private money available for rebuilding; a year after the fire, almost $40 million worth of new construction was complete. But Chicago’s faith in the future was also an expression of a widespread popular belief that it was a new kind of city—different, that is, from the old, established eastern centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. These places represented the past—a decadent past, Chicagoans would have said; Chicago was the future.
The Chicago fire provided a tabula rasa for land developers, builders, and architects. Not guided by any new planning theories, they kept the same street layout. Nevertheless, the new city emerged dramatically different from the old. This was due to a wide range of new urban technologies. Chicagoans thought of themselves as different, but they were not opposed to adopting urban technologies that had been developed chiefly in eastern cities. In 1878, New Haven introduced the country’s first telephone switchboard; Chicago got its own the same year. Thomas Edison invented the electric lamp in 1879; two years later electric lights were installed in a railroad-car factory on Chicago’s Far South Side, and the following year in a Prairie Avenue mansion. San Francisco introduced cable cars in 1873; Chicago followed suit in 1881. The first electric streetcar ran in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888; four years later Chicago streetcar companies began switching from horse-drawn and cable cars to electric trolleys.
Electric trolley cars and railroads allowed the city to expand horizontally into the surrounding prairie; at the same time the center of Chicago began to grow in an unexpected direction. Of all the technologies that fashioned the new city, few were more influential than the elevator. Passenger elevators originated in mines, but for a long time they were considered too dangerous for the general public and only freight elevators were installed in buildings. It was during the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York City that Elisha G. Otis unveiled the first “safety elevator.” In a dramatic demonstration, he had the lifting rope severed as he himself stood in the elevator cab; to the astonishment of the public, the cab didn’t fall, held in place by a system of pawls and ratchets. Four years later Otis installed the first regular operating passenger elevator in a New York office building, and the device quickly spread. The earliest elevators were powered by steam; after 1889, when the first electric elevator was installed in a New York building, electricity became the chief motive power.
Before the advent of the elevator, the height of buildings had been limited by human endurance in stair-climbing.I Urban buildings were four to six stories, with the occasional church steeple or dome protruding above this height—this was no less true in Victorian London than in ancient Rome—but with the introduction of elevators, buildings could be made as tall as construction techniques and engineering would allow. At first, that was not very high. Buildings with solid masonry walls could be built higher only by making the walls thicker and thicker at the base to resist toppling over; the practical height limit was about twelve stories. This limit was pushed to sixteen stories in Chicago’s Monadnock Building, whose massive walls were six feet thick at the bottom, but by the time the Monadnock opened in 1891, it was already obsolete. There was now a cheaper and more efficient building material: lightweight structural steel.
Rolled steel had been widely used in Europe and in America for railroad tracks and bridge construction, but not for buildings. Steel-frame construction was pioneered in Chicago, where it was first used in 1884, in the upper floors of an iron-framed building, and where the first complete steel frame was erected in 1890. The steel frame had many advantages: not only was it cheaper and more efficient, it also enabled architects to build higher. In 1892 the steel-framed Masonic Temple Building, designed by Daniel Burnham and John Root, the architects of the Monadnock, rose to 302 feet (twenty-two stories). For a short time it was the world’s tallest building, soon exceeded by the office tower of Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building.
The skyscraper, almost always an office building, changed more than the skyline of Chicago; it greatly increased the value of real estate, which in turn altered the character of the center of the city. When buildings were lower and land was cheaper, the center of all American cities since Williamsburg had been a mixture of commercial, residential, and industrial uses. Inevitably, once the price of land was based on renting sixteen to twenty floors of office space, only sixteen- to twenty-story office buildings could and would be built. The low-rise rooming houses, private residences, workshops, industrial lofts, small manufacturing plants, and factories that had previously stood side by side with commercial offices had to move elsewhere.
Where did people live? The greatly increased price of land in and around the Loop, as well as new fire codes prohibiting inexpensive wood-frame construction, guaranteed that most people would live outside the center of the city. Low-paid factory workers lived in tenements in industrial neighborhoods close to their places of employment, but skilled craftsmen and white-collar workers had another option. They could afford to move to new residential neighborhoods where the new fire codes did not apply; the land was cheap, and so was the cost of traveling by railroad and trolley car.II These neighborhoods consisted largely of owner-occupied dwellings, for the most part detached houses with gardens. Although the streets were usually laid out on grids, these new districts did not have a mixture of uses—they were almost exclusively residential.
The character of these outer neighborhoods was initially countrylike, but as the city continued its precipitous growth, they filled up, houses and building lots were subdivided, the density rose, and the hemmed-in streets became less bucolic in appearance. Workingmen’s cottages replaced villas, duplexes replaced cottages and, eventually, apartment buildings replaced duplexes. Still, with their broad, tree-lined streets and low buildings, these outlying neighborhoods could not be confused with downtown. No longer rural, but not quite urban either, they presaged the suburban communities that would grow up in the early 1900s on the edges of all large cities.
Thus was the modern American city born. It was different from its European counterpart not just because the buildings were so tall, but also because what people now called “downtown” (the word, too, is of American origin) was a homogeneous, commercial concentration of offices, hotels, and department stores, with a sprinkling of cultural institutions. People worked and shopped and played downtown, but lived elsewhere.
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One chief engine of urban growth was immigration. Between i860 and 1890 ten million immigrants, chiefly from Europe, came to the United States. Then—as today—immigrants settled first in the large cities: New York, Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and especially Chicago. By 1880, nearly nine out of ten Chicagoans were first- or second-generation immigrants, a larger proportion than in any other American city. Between 1870 and 1880, the decade after the Great Fire, the population of Chicago almost doubled, and by 1900 the city was a full-fledged metropolis.
As the fastest-growing city in the world, Chicago was an unprecedented urban phenomenon that would not be duplicated until the explosive growth of Third World cities in the second half of the twentieth century. What attracted people to Chicago was the promise of employment in the stores, offices, factories, warehouses, slaughterhouses, breweries, and railroad yards that filled the city. The image of a place so unrelentingly devoted to work struck foreign visitors as quintessentially American. “Chicago is conscious that there is something in the world, some sense of form, of elegance of refinement, that with all her corn and railways, her hogs and by-products and dollars, she lacks,” observed an English writer, G. W. Steevens, who passed through the city in the 1890s. Steevens went on to record his impressions of the United States in the now forgotten but wonderfully titled travel book, In the Land of the Dollar.
One could easily slip into condescension when writing about Chicago; it was so new and so raw compared with European cities. No doubt, American cities were unabashedly places for doing business and for making money, and Steevens’s opinion is mirrored in Lewis Mumford’s description of nineteenth-century American urbanization: “That a city had any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values and to grow is something that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city stands is the place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that and nothing else.” This is unfair. European cities like Paris had started as cities of wharves and markets and trade, too, although by the 1890s Parisian industrial and manufacturing activities were being pushed to the periphery, and the center was being graced by boulevards and public monuments (beautifications that, not coincidentally, increased land values).
The city in the Currier & Ives lithograph may have resembled an anthill, but Chicago was trying to put itself on the cultural map, too. Daniel Bluestone, an architectural historian, suggests that a desire for civility and culture, as well as a celebration of profit-making, characterized the aspirations of the nineteenth-century politicians and businessmen who built Chicago. Many commercial buildings, such as William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Company Building and Burnham & Root’s exquisite Rookery Building, transcended their utilitarian nature by, as Bluestone puts it, “self-consciously setting out to ennoble commerce with monumental forms, using rich materials, traditional architectural motifs, and expressions of white-collar cultivation.”
To say that the architecture of these buildings is grand is to put it mildly. The composition of the facades generally follows that of Italian Renaissance palazzi: there is a solid-looking base, then the main body of the building (much higher, of course, than a palazzo), and an often richly ornamented roof cornice to top things off. The impressive entrance on the street usually leads to an extraordinary lobby, often several stories high. These public spaces are invariably finished in luxurious materials: stained glass, mosaics, hardwoods, bronze, and marble. The durability of construction is attested to by the fact that many of these commercial buildings, after almost a century, continue to exist and to give service. They incorporated a level of craftsmanship and interior refinement unmatched in any contemporary buildings except perhaps the mansions of the extremely wealthy. The atmosphere consciously evoked a cross between a first-class hotel and an exclusive club. This was “an aesthetic that created a necessary connection between commerce and culture, denying their incompatibility and suggesting instead that refinement might emanate from tasteful workplaces,” writes Bluestone.
Refinements were not limited to architecture or decor. The skyscrapers provided their tenants with electric lighting, central heating and ventilation, and hot and cold running water—amenities by no means widespread at the time. The latest comforts also included washrooms on every floor and large expanses of glass for light and view. The first skyscrapers were not simple loft buildings. They offered a host of in-house facilities from restaurants, coffee shops, and newspaper stands to barbershops and rooftop observatories, as well as the services of doormen, cleaning staff, and messenger boys. These buildings were small cities in their own right.
A building like Louis Sullivan’s renowned Schlesinger & Mayer (today Carson Pirie Scott) department store is often cited as an example of functionalism because of its undecorated upper facade. For the passerby, however, the impression is different: the richly modeled cast-iron ornament covering the walls and surrounding the display windows along the sidewalk creates a sense of lavish commercial celebration. The contrast between the plain upper floors and the flamboyantly decorated base suggests that Sullivan was reacting to the necessity of making a department store attractive to middle- and upper-middle-class shoppers without spending a lot of money on the less visible upper floors.
It was a sign of how downtown had changed that many of these shoppers were women. Previously, it would have been considered unseemly (and probably unsafe) for respectable women to venture downtown alone. Now there were places for them to go, not only department stores but also office buildings, fashionable retail shops, and high-class hotels. The construction of such civic amenities as arts clubs, Sullivan’s Auditorium Building, the imposing new public library, and the Art Institute also contributed to the changed atmosphere of downtown. Middle-class tastes were transforming the center of the city from a raucous, unfettered, and rough place to something more genteel.
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Chicago’s motto is Urbs in horto (City in a garden), which originally referred to the surrounding fertile plains, but starting in 1869, “garden” might just as well have described the green spaces within the city itself. Following the example of New York City, whose Central Park was begun in 1858, Chicago, like Brooklyn, Buffalo, Boston, Louisville, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, undertook the construction of large urban parks. Most of the parks were planned by the same man, Frederick Law Olmsted, who exerted a powerful influence on the beautification of cities throughout North America. (In 1873, he was engaged to design an urban park in Montreal.)
Olmsted’s original inspiration was European. The English architect and horticulturalist Sir Joseph Paxton, who later designed the Crystal Palace, is credited with creating the first public urban park, the “People’s Garden,” in Liverpool, in the early 1840s. Similar parks were established in other British cities, as well as in France and Germany. These were not merely fashionable promenades, as had been the case with eighteenth-century fenced urban gardens used exclusively by the upper class; they were specifically intended for the general public. Olmsted visited Liverpool and thought that Paxton’s park was a concept ideally suited to American democracy. Moreover, in his opinion, cities like New York and Chicago, bursting at the seams of their tight, practical grids and increasingly disease-ridden, overcrowded, and noisy, needed healthy green open spaces. It is worth recalling that the nineteenth-century city was an industrial city, and industry then was extremely dirty. Coal-burning factories and electrical generating plants, polluting stockyards and slaughterhouses, stood side by side with the homes of working people. Hundreds of horse-drawn vehicles, including horsecars, polluted the narrow, crowded streets. To Olmsted and his collaborator on many projects, Calvert Vaux, green spaces were not a mere ornament but a crucial antidote to the nervous, inhospitable city; these parks are not conceived of as urban gardens but rather as large chunks of healthy natural landscape.
The largest European parks, like Paris’s Bois de Boulogne or London’s Hampstead Heath, were outside the city; central urban parks were limited by the cost of acquiring land. London’s Victoria Park, for example, which was laid out in 1842, is about 200 acres, and the older Hyde Park is smaller than that; the Tuileries gardens is only 56 acres. Since the construction of urban parks in America coincided with the early stages of cities’ growth, it was easier and cheaper to appropriate empty land for park building, and Olmsted was able to achieve an unprecedented scale in many of his parks: Mount Royal Park in Montreal, one of his smallest parks, covers 450 acres. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is more than 500 acres; Central Park spreads over 840 acres; San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is more than 1,000 acres, and Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, the largest urban park in the country, encompasses about 3,800 acres.
At one time, Chicago had intended to build a great linear park—-a sort of giant greenbelt, a quarter of a mile wide and fourteen miles long—roughly following the city limits. This would have girdled the city on three sides, leaving the lake to border the fourth. This ambitious plan was ultimately scaled down by Olmsted and Vaux from 2,240 to 1,800 acres, and from a continuous greenbelt to eight individual parks, many named for presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant. The parks are large—200 to 600 acres each—and intended for full-day excursions. They include lakes, canals, sports fields, band shells, conservatories, arbors, zoos, bicycle and pedestrian paths, and broad carriage roads. There were originally no commercial distractions, however—no amusement parks, penny arcades, or beer gardens. This was a conscious effort to provide a civilizing public setting for an urban population with a growing amount of leisure time. The parks are linked by parkways, a favorite Olmsted device. Parkways were not simply big streets, but were really linear parks that achieved several ends: they brought parklike space closer to more people, they further reduced urban congestion, and they could be a tool in directing urban growth, providing an attractive setting for new residential developments.
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The Chicago park and parkway system was successful, but its advocates had seen it chiefly as a counterbalance to the congestion of the city—a green refuge—and so had paid less attention to the character of its urban surroundings. The little grid of the 1830s had multiplied and was now filled with fancy skyscrapers and public parks, but this did not really amount to a beautiful city. The laissez-faire attitude to construction was producing some beautiful buildings, but architecture alone is never enough. What was missing was an urban vision grand enough to encompass Chicago’s growing and justifiable sense of importance. City planning is not merely about practicalities, it also reflects human ambitions and desires. That is what drove Louis XIV to transform Paris from a medieval town into a modern city. It is the same urge, albeit on a small scale, that impels us to redecorate the kitchen or to move the furniture around in the living room or to repaint the family room. The old rooms don’t suit us anymore, they don’t feel right; maybe they are starting to look a bit dowdy or old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s just time for a change.
Ultimately, the change in Chicago was accelerated by the World’s Columbian Exposition, which took place during the summer of 1893. The master plan of the fair was devised by Olmsted and his associate, Henry Sargent Codman, working with Chicago’s most prominent architects, Daniel Burnham and John Root. The fair was located beside Lake Michigan on the site of Jackson Park—originally planned by Olmsted and Vaux, but never built. Olmsted produced a spectacular new plan incorporating his concept of the fusion of town and country. He transformed what had been a 600-acre marsh into an entirely man-made landscape, including a system of canals as well as a great, naturalistic lagoon. Root is generally credited with the idea of the Court of Honor, a formal urban grouping of buildings arranged around a 1,100-foot-long water basin. A 600-foot-wide parkway (part of the original Olmsted and Vaux plan) extended almost a mile inland and contained an amusement park, the Midway Plaisance, and the world’s first Ferris wheel, 250 feet in diameter and carrying aloft 1,500 passengers at a time.
Burnham was appointed chief of construction, and after Root’s untimely death he assumed the leadership role in planning the exposition. He invited several celebrated architects to design the individual pavilions: Richard Morris Hunt, America’s premier society architect, was awarded the choice commission, an imposing 250-foot-high domed building standing at the head of the water basin; Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead, and White from New York City designed the Agriculture Building, which he modeled on a Renaissance palazzo; Louis Sullivan built the beautiful Transportation Building; George B. Post was responsible for the largest of the exhibition halls, the Manufacturers Building; Charles B. Atwood designed the train station as well as the Palace of Fine Arts. Peabody & Stearns from Boston, Chicago’s William Le Baron Jenney, as well as Henry Ives Cobb, who had just built the new Rockefeller-financed University of Chicago, were also involved.
The Columbian Exposition was a spectacular combination of naturalistic and formal landscaping combined with grand public buildings. (As many of these buildings were painted white, the exposition became popularly known as the White City.) The architect Robert A. M. Stern has called the Columbian Exposition “the first effectively planned complex of public buildings built in America since the Jeffersonian era,” and, indeed, the Court of Honor does recall an enlarged version of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, with Hunt’s tall dome at the head of a water basin occupying the place of Jefferson’s library. The planners conceived of the fair as an explicit exercise in forward-looking urbanism; moreover, they saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate the application of classical design principles to public buildings. Burnham, Hunt, Atwood, and McKim were all confirmed classicists, as was the fair’s chief adviser on sculpture, the artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The classical approach, as practiced by these American designers, demanded not only the use of the classical architectural vocabulary—fluted columns, capitals, and entablatures—and buildings sited along formal axes, but also restraint. The buildings grouped around the basin, for example, all respected a uniform height for their cornice lines, and all incorporated porticoes, providing an almost continuous colonnade.
As for the public, the experience of the Exposition was an eye opener. Only seven miles from the Loop’s undisciplined commercial downtown choked with traffic, they could walk around enjoying water pools, the lake view, landscaping, and public art. It was like going to Europe, which is to say that for most people it was their first experience of the pleasures of ordered urbanism. The implication was there: our cities could be like that.
Because most of the fair buildings were in the classical style, nativist architecture critics have derided the Columbian Exposition as a foreign import, merely an imitation of European architectural and planning ideas. It is true that classicism originated in Europe, but by 1893 ^ had deep American roots, not only in colonial architecture, the Federal style, and the Classic Revival, but also in the 1820s Greek Revival of New England. The Colonial Revival had dominated American residential architecture since the 1876 centennial. Thus, to the 27 million visitors who attended the Columbian Exposition, although the grand urban arrangement would have appeared foreign, the architecture would have been familiar. Moreover, the monumental buildings and spaces were in keeping with the burgeoning American cities, as well as in scale with the American landscape. The shore of Lake Michigan is not the bank of the Seine, and the massive white constructions of the Chicago fair were to be appreciated against the backdrop of the vast inland sea. Altogether, the fair was a potent and realistic vision of a new direction for the American city.
The historian James Marston Fitch, who considered the architecture of the Columbian Exposition an impediment to modernism, described the White City as reactionary and subversive, but he did admit that “from contemporary accounts it is clear that the Fair left Americans dazzled by a totally new concept of urban order.” There was, for example, what has been called the “sanitary wonder” of the fair—the public areas that were swept and cleaned nightly, the neatly maintained public toilets and drinking fountains, and the segregated delivery vehicles, all suggesting the possibility of how real cities could be made to function more effectively. Public transportation included a rail link to the Loop, an elevated railway that traversed the fair site, and a moving sidewalk.
The most dramatic and novel urban technology demonstrated at the Chicago fair was electricity. The General Electric company built a Tower of Light with ten thousand Edison bulbs, and the Ferris wheel, as well as the pavilions around the basin, were outlined in incandescent bulbs. At night, the White City must have appeared magical. Electricity also powered the elevated railway as well as a fleet of fifty gondolas that cruised the canals and lake. Lake steamers that carried passengers between the fair and the Loop followed a string of electrical buoys; electrically powered communications included telegrams, telephones, and fire alarms. There was, in addition, an entire pavilion devoted solely to the wonders of electricity.
The technological feats fired the public imagination. But the technologies and ideas that the fair espoused were intended not merely for a utopian city of the distant future. It’s true that the buildings surrounding the Court of Honor, because they were temporary, were built of steel frames covered with a kind of plaster, but the fountains, the public sculpture, the landscaping, and the urban spaces were real, as was the electric lighting and the sanitation system. This was a tangible demonstration of the collaborative, can-do spirit that turned 600 acres of marshland into the White City. The demonstration could not have come at a more opportune time. There were hundreds of thousands of acres of marshland and forestland and prairie across the continent waiting to be turned into fairyland cities.
I. The height of commercial buildings was also limitd by the need for easy communication; tall office buildings would not have met with such rapid success had the telephone not been invented.
II. In some cases, these new, outlying residential neighborhoods were actually closer to their places of work, since the fire had forced many business to move to peripheral locations.