Chicago History | Fall 2010

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Emily H. Nordstrom Amanda B. Stenlund Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Publications Interns Lesley Burr Margaret M. Whitesides

Copyright 2010 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago History Museum’s Publications Office.

In recognition of the centennial of the Plan of Chicago, this issue of Chicago History explores the legacy of Daniel Burnham (pictured on the cover, c. 1910), the efforts of his collaborators, and the lasting influence of their work on the city.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

TRUSTEES

Sharon Gist Gilliam Chair

James L. Alexander David P. Bolger Warren K. Chapman Patrick F. Daly T. Bondurant French Timothy J. Gilfoyle Thomas M. Goldstein Cynthia Greenleaf Barbara A. Hamel David D. Hiller Dennis H. Holtschneider Tobin E. Hopkins Daniel S. Jaffee Falona Joy Barbara Levy Kipper Randye A. Kogan Judith Konen Paul R. Lovejoy Timothy P. Moen Michael A. Nemeroff

John W. Rowe Chairman Emeritus John W. Croghan Vice Chair Walter C. Carlson Vice Chair Patrick W. Dolan Treasurer Paul H. Dykstra Secretary Gary T. Johnson President Russell L. Lewis Executive Vice President and Chief Historian

Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Samuel J. Tinaglia Noren Ungaretti Jeffrey W. Yingling Joan Werhane LIFE TRUSTEES

Lerone Bennett Jr. Philip D. Block III Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon Alison Campbell de Frise Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Henry W. Howell Jr. Philip W. Hummer

Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Potter Palmer Bryan S. Reid Jr. Paul L. Snyder HONORARY TRUSTEE

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

The Chicago History Museum is easily accessible via public transportation. CTA buses nos. 11, 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. For travel information, visit www.transitchicago.com.

The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Museum’s activities.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Fall 2010i VOLUME XXXVII, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 26 40

From Shock City to City Beautiful Russell Lewis

The Geometry of Chicago Jill Van Newenhizen

The Business of Reform Emily Clark

From Shock City to City Beautiful Daniel Burnham’s spectacular World’s Columbian Exposition design inspired a movement that reimagined not only Chicago but cities around the world.

RUSSELL LEWIS

4 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Daniel Burnham (left, c. 1910), the architect well known for his design for the 1893 world’s fair (below), reflected that in Chicago, “whatever man undertakes . . . should be either actually or seemingly without limit.”

C

“

hicago Leads Them All” blared the headline in the August 8, 1890, edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune. “It is by far the biggest of Uncle Sam’s inland cities,” the article continued, “our population 1,098,576.” The results from the United States Census of 1890 that Chicago’s population had surpassed Philadelphia and was now second only to New York came as no surprise to Americans and even to Europeans.

Indeed, the newspaper’s claim that within another decade or two Chicago would be crowding the heels of New York seemed plausible, even inevitable. After all, Chicago had already increased its land area to 182.9 square miles in 1889, making it physically the largest city in the world, and this latest achievement was just one more reason to marvel at the evolution of this American city.

Chicago was founded in 1833 as a small frontier town situated by a river and a lake. By the 1850s, it had already outgrown its humble beginnings and was becoming not only a major city but also a new kind of urban phenomenon—a place that repeatedly astonished the world. Between 1830 and 1890, the population of both London and Paris almost doubled, while Berlin’s more than quadrupled. America’s largest city, New York, also saw its population increase 4.1 times. Chicago topped them all, however, growing from 29,963 citizens to 1,098,576, an increase of almost 37 times. Chicago was the shock city of the nineteenth century.

Chicago’s lakefront location established it as a commercial stronghold, above c.1890, and contributed to its exponential industrial and population growth during the nineteenth century.

City Beautiful | 5

The success of Chicago-based industrial and agricultural innovations, such as the McCormick Reaper (below), lured people to Chicago at a rate faster than its leaders could plan for. The city grew dense quickly without forethought for basic amenities.

It was in this environment that Daniel Burnham came of age as an architect and honed his craft. His sensitivity to social order and the critical role the built environment played in its formation; his willingness to engage the business community in embracing and shaping the future; and his determination to channel the forces of the urbanization-industrialization dynamic in a new direction would fulfill the promise of an urban society. With a great understanding of a city’s potential to thrive and sustain, Burnham played a critical role in redefining Chicago.

The city’s unprecedented explosive growth came as the result of a remarkable fusion of two powerful nineteenthcentury juggernauts: urbanization and industrialization. In Chicago each reinforced and fed the other, transforming the city into a national crossroads, a position tied to the intersection of far-reaching inland networks of waterways and rail lines that connected the continent from east to west and north to south and converged in the city. In its ideal geographic location, Chicago not only introduced innovative manufacturing methods but led other cities in creating and exploiting new markets.

The culmination of these powerful forces in the 1890s, however, forced Chicagoans to confront an urban paradox: the urban-industrial success was making cities unlivable.

Most city streets were considered unsafe because of traffic and animal waste; refuse filled all corners of the city; and smoke and soot plagued anyone walking in the business district. Adding to the disorder was civil unrest. Dystopian thinking about the city was stimulated by a history of social disruption and civil disorder: The 1871 Great Chicago Fire, the national 1877 railroad strike, the Haymarket Affair in 1886, and the Pullman strike of 1894 had brought social unrest to the city. Corrupt and inept government and politicians were at their zenith in the 1890s. Rampant boodling and a town council epitomized 6 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

by gray wolves (aldermen who owned public utilities) depleted confidence in city government. Chicago reigned as America’s crossroads, but the city faced vexing obstacles to support a livable infrastructure for its residents.

How did Chicago reach this frenetic state? Chicago sits in a strategic location between the watersheds of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers: the Mississippi drains west and south, and the St. Lawrence drains east. This unusual position opened Chicago to the possibility of a transportation hub of people and goods from the East Coast through the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 made this possible. The arrival of the first railroad in Chicago the same year created the beginning of unprecedented water and rail transportation networks that made Chicago the leading commercial city of the West. Adjacent to extensive timber forests and rich farmland, Chicago emerged as a leading center for the processing and shipping of agricultural products and implements. The city became the leading port for grain, the world leader in lumber production and shipping, and the center for the processing and shipping of meat. These three industries— grain, lumber, and meatpacking—formed the nexus of Chicago’s commercial power and stimulated the city’s rapid urbanization. The population of the city grew through a multiplier effect: Opportunity brought people to Chicago. More people meant more construction, more services, more provisions, and more entertainment.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal, pictured above in an illustration from 1871, and the railroad (below, running along Michigan Avenue, in 1866) were both evidence of the city’s central role in increased national transport and trade.

City Beautiful | 7

8 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

This 1857 lithograph of Chicago by Christian Inger (after a drawing by I. T. Palmatary) shows the city’s still-dominant street blocks. Instead of today’s parkland, however, railroads dominate the shoreline south of the river.

City Beautiful | 9

The fire provided a chance to rebuild from the ground up and allowed architects and developers a fresh start to realize their ideal vision of Chicago. Above: An 1872 depiction of the fire by William Flint; below: State and Madison streets.

10 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Chicago’s astonishing growth in the 1850s and 1860s came to an abrupt halt on October 9, 1871. That evening, a fire that began on the city’s Southwest Side spread rapidly and consumed the city center. The fire burned for two-and-a-half days, and when it finally died out, a threeand-a-half-square-mile section of the city was destroyed.

Twelve thousand buildings were lost, and 90,000 people were left homeless; miraculously only 300 of the city’s 300,000 citizens died. Chicago was also fortunate because much of its rail infrastructure and meatpacking facilities survived, and commercial activity resumed with only minimal disruption. Despite the devastating losses, most Chicagoans were optimistic about the city’s future, and some saw great opportunity in the destruction; for them, the fire was a chance to rebuild a better city. Rebuilding efforts began immediately, and within three years, virtually no trace of the fire’s destruction was visible.

The fire had two major consequences. First, the rebuilding attracted some of the nation’s most innovative and ambitious architects who brought new skills and new ideas about architecture and its relationship to the city.

Second, the city center, called the Loop, became almost exclusively commercial. Prior to the fire, the center was evenly split between residential housing and business structures, but after the fire, residents left the Loop to build homes and resettle further west. The Loop became the exclusive domain of Chicago business.

One of the key figures in building Chicago after the fire and into the early twentieth century was Daniel Hudson Burnham. At the time of the fire, Burnham was twenty-five years old. Biographers tell us that Burnham and John Root, his colleague at Carter, Drake and Wright, like many other young architects, saw a unique opportunity to help design and build a new Chicago, and they formed their own firm in 1873. The post-fire urban environment in which Burnham lived and worked formed the crucible in which his architectural practice and vision solidified. Burnham learned three important lessons during this period that resonated throughout his career. The first was the fragility and precariousness of the social order. The devastation of the fire created a huge population of refugees. Equally important, however, by destroying the physical boundaries that simultaneously unified and segregated the city—streets, rail lines, buildings, and bridges—the fire also threw together people from all classes and ethnicities helterskelter, comingling Chicagoans as never before. With the specter of the working-class-driven Paris Commune from the previous spring in their minds, the business elite quickly identified restoring the pre-fire social order as their most pressing task. They did so by installing the Chicago Relief and Aid Society as the arbiter of relief efforts. For Burnham, this lesson of the fire surely would have been the direct and very clear connection between rebuilding the city and maintaining the social order.

The Cook County Jail, which reopened just three years after the fire, helped maintain “social order” and control in the otherwise chaotic time of the fire’s aftermath.

City Beautiful | 11

12 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Over three-and-a-half square miles of densely packed blocks downtown were destroyed by the fire, whose destruction recast the area as the commercial center of the city. This 1858 view of Randolph Street (opposite) depicts the mix of residences and small business structures that comprised the area prior to the fire.

The Union Stock Yard (above in 1920 and below in 1904), located south of the Loop, survived the fire intact and was a key part of Chicago’s economic foundation during reconstruction.

City Beautiful | 13

Burnham’s second lesson was the effectiveness of an organized business community in the face of a crisis versus inept and often corrupt city government officials and politicians. In the wake of the fire, Mayor Roswell B. Mason quickly organized a group of alderman and citizens to dispense and control aid and issued a variety of proclamations outlawing the sale of liquor, relocating city government, and establishing policing efforts. Within a day, however, the business elite forced the mayor to relinquish control of security to General Phillip Sheridan and his federal troops and relief to the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. The notion that the business community had responsibility over city government and could embrace this charge for making city improvements was clear to Burnham and others.

Although much of Chicago was destroyed, much of its nascent industrial infrastructure was intact. The Union Stock Yard, rail and freight terminals, the lumberyards, and outlying grain elevators survived. While the myth of the fire tells us that Chicago’s indominitable I Will spirit was a powerful drive to rebuild, the intact infrastructure gave eastern investors faith in Chicago’s future. Business prevailed: the fire destroyed most of the churches, schools, and residences in the city center, which led to harder boundaries between business and residential districts and pushed the central commercial core into a modernizing mode of solidity and great scale and height.

Burnham learned a third powerful lesson from the fire.

While many are convinced that location played the critical role in Chicago’s rise, this view does not account for other cities—such as St. Louis and Cincinnati—that were perhaps even better situated geographically.

Chicago prevailed because it was a center for innovation, risk-taking, visionary thinking, and deal-making, qualities that Burnham recognized and embraced.

One of the most visible changes in post-fire Chicago was the physical transformation of the Loop in the 1880s and 1890s through the addition of skyscrapers.

Although small by today’s standards, these early skyscrapers were technological marvels that could be built only after a series of innovations came together in a partnership between business leaders and architects who shared a vision for a new kind of commercial building. The invention of the telephone in 1876, the lightbulb in 1879, and the electric elevator in 1889, as well as innovations in plumbing and in steel, made the erection of tall buildings economical and practical as hubs for commercial activity. Chicago became the leading champion of this architectural solution for business. Burnham and Root forged alliances with the business community to build some of the first skyscrapers, and Burnham was among the first architects to embrace these structures as an innovative solution for the Loop’s new identity and purpose.

14 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Two of the earliest skyscrapers designed by Burnham and Root: The north portion of the Monadnock Building (above), completed in 1891, and the Rookery (below), in 1888.

Their first tall building at ten stories, Burnham and Root’s Montauk Building stood on Monroe near Dearborn Street from 1882 to 1902.

City Beautiful | 15

16 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

European visitors to Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s were particularly fascinated by the concentration of these buildings. While centralized business districts were not new and certainly not unique to Chicago, the Loop epitomized a new commercial spirit and vitality through the speed and scale with which the skyscraper transformed it. Moreover, the highly focused, shamelessly singleminded purpose of the Loop—the pursuit of profit— eschewed tradition, culture, and public civility in favor of speed, efficiency, and expanding economic markets.

Chicago was a city purged of its past and focused on its present. For many Europeans, who saw nothing like this in their own cities, Chicago was not only the city of the century—it was the future.

Not all Chicagoans shared this enthusiasm for the Loop and its tall buildings. Although skyscrapers today are celebrated as one of Chicago’s most distinctive and innovative creations, they were hardly a solution for the urban ills that plagued the city. A number of concerned citizens felt that skyscrapers diverted Chicagoans’ attention from the real challenges facing the city—pollution, crime, congestion, poverty, and corruption. They felt skyscrapers only added to these environmental and social concerns: they blocked what little sunlight made its way through the industrial smoke and thus threatened public health; they emitted their own volumes of smoke from coal-fed boilers to further pollute the atmosphere; and the armies of workers in the buildings added to the growing congestion of the district. For progressive Chicagoans, the skyscraper represented laissez-faire business and commercial success at the expense of the public good; they were simply one more product of the industrialization-urbanization dynamic, not an alternative to it. Chicago remained a challenging place to live, and the vision of a skyscraper city, while attractive to Europeans, offered little hope for solving Chicago’s and America’s pressing urban problems.

All of this came to a head in 1893, a year of remarkable contrasts. In March, Grover Cleveland took office as president of the United States, and on May 1 he officially opened the World’s Columbian Exposition, a grand showing of culture and innovation held in Chicago.

During the same week a financial panic gripped the nation resulting in bank failures and tight money.

Burnham, the fair’s chief of construction, and Root, the supervising architect, worked with landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Henry S. Codman to transform the swampland and sand dunes of Jackson Park. Although a champion of the skyscraper, Burnham This scene of the intersection of Dearborn and Randolph streets in 1909 mirrors the Burnham Plan’s assertion that “the American city, and Chicago preeminently, is a center of industry and traffic.” The plan aimed to eliminate this and similar chaotic scenes by improving public transit and the geometric street-grid system.

City Beautiful | 17

realized that cities needed more than one approach if they were to solve their physical problems. He drew heavily on the lessons he had learned as an architect practicing in Chicago when he took on a leadership role in the design of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Stretching across 686 acres, the exposition’s plan called for a Court of Honor formed by a grand basin surrounded by five major exposition halls and a lagoon to the north with a large island connected by a system of canals and waterways. The goal was to create a vision of harmony and beauty through an orderly arrangement of architecture, nature, and art.

Burnham selected five East Coast architects to design the Court of Honor buildings with uniform cornice heights to create harmony and five Chicago firms to design the other structures. The scale of the project was daunting—nothing less than the erection of an entire city—and the engineering and architectural challenges could be met only because the buildings were temporary structures. Drawing on their expertise in wood and steel framing, Chicago workers erected sturdy structures in a minimal amount of time. The exteriors were coated with staff, a plaster-like material that allowed for the massive neoclassical-inspired architectural edifices while hiding the steel and wooden trusses and columns. Fair directors commissioned the nation’s most talented artists to create murals, sculptures, and fountains to complement the buildings and the landscaping with the aim of giving visitors the most powerful artistic experience ever conceived.

The theme of the fair was progress in the New World since Columbus’s arrival. It was the largest world’s fair ever built—almost ten times as big as the 1889 Paris world’s fair. The fair ran six months—from May 1 through October 31—and more than 21 million people visited it.

Most visitors to the fairgrounds were initially awestruck by the magnificent and enormous buildings. Once they adjusted to this monumental Beaux-Arts style, the harmonious and formal arrangements of buildings proved to be the more powerful and enduring lesson for the public. The scale of the buildings and their white facades powerfully reinforced this vision of unity, harmony, and beauty. The Court of Honor—which included the Great Basin and the Peristyle, plus buildings for agriculture, machinery, administration, mines, electricity, manufacturers, and liberal arts aligned along a northwest-southwest axis—was a visual and emotional focal point for the fair that firmly reinforced a new vision for cities. For Americans, many of whom lived in haphazardly constructed cities and towns, the White City was their first encounter with a planned, harThe Court of Honor, looking east toward the Peristyle from the roof of the Administration Building. Set in a semicircle, the precise symmetry of the Court of Honor epitomized Burnham’s plan of beauty for the White City.

18 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

City Beautiful | 19

A central component of the fair’s design, the waterways reflected the stunning whiteness of the buildings during the day, and at night, the magical glow of electric lighting. Photographs by C. D. Arnold.

20 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

The extravagant sculpture on the Administration Building, shown here in a photograph by C. D. Arnold, cost $97,923.06 in 1893— the equivalent of $2.3 million in today’s economy. Burnham thought there could not be too much beauty in a perfect city.

monious, and inspiring arrangement of buildings and their first opportunity to imagine a city that was beautiful and functioned efficiently. Civic leaders attributed the sense of security, order, and conviviality enjoyed on the fairgrounds to the power of its architectural aesthetic and commended the organizers for their efficient municipal operations— policing, refuse collection, and administration. Thus the most enduring legacy of the World’s Columbian Exposition was a model city for the future free from the urban problems that plagued Chicago and other nineteenth-century American cities.

The financial panic of 1893 brought discredit to a laissez-faire economy and a survival-of-the-fittest business doctrine in favor of a commitment to positive government and the active role it could play in regulating America’s commerce. In turn, the country’s growing urban society would reflect a new moral and civic virtue.

This progressive approach to the nation’s social prob-

lems had generally focused on the overall decline of cities. Religious, educational, civic, and governmental organizations and agencies formed to address urban ills on specific fronts, including sanitary conditions, corruption, temperance, housing, and business practices. The City Beautiful movement, which grew from the inspiring vision of the World’s Columbian Exposition, was one of the few reform efforts to address the physical problems of cities and propose solutions through scientific planning and a new urban aesthetic incorporating symmetrical organization of buildings and Beaux-Arts design.

Proponents envisioned comprehensive plans that pinpointed the city core as the primary place to inspire inhabitants to embrace moral and civic virtue; for these boosters, developing a beautiful city was one of the lynchpins of America’s progressive municipal reform effort. Daniel Burnham emerged as a leader of the movement and one of its chief practitioners.

City Beautiful | 21

The 1901 McMillan Plan, with its meticulous geometry for the national mall (above) exemplified Burnham’s cross-city influence. A style similar to that employed in Washington, D.C., would later be the foundation of the 1909 Plan of Chicago.

City Beautiful advocates believed the movement would have four major effects: 1) the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and moral rectitude, thus eliminating vices and other unsavory behavior, especially among the impoverished population; 2) American cities would be brought to cultural parity with their European counterparts through the use of the European Beaux-Arts idiom; 3) a more inviting city center would attract the upper class to work and to spend money; and 4) beauty would help shape positive social behavior, inducing order, calm, and propriety among urban dwellers and awakening a sense of community among residents.

The first example of world’s fair–inspired City Beautiful planning is found in Washington, D.C. Conceived in 1901, the McMillan Plan developed by Burnham, Olmsted, and sculptor August St. Gaudens, removed large areas of slum and railroad tracks around the capitol buildings and replaced them with a national mall punctuated with monuments and bordered by new government buildings. They built the area as a national civic and cultural center, which saw its final element, the Lincoln Memorial, put in place in 1924.

Washington’s City Beautiful effort inspired Cleveland’s Group Plan in 1903 (Burnham also served on the design 22 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

The Burnham Plan’s proposed civic center plaza, shown above looking west in a 1909 illustration by Jules Guerin, which would have been the hub of circulation routes throughout the city and surrounding area. Opposite: Guerin’s depiction of a wide and raised boulevard to accomodate a growing population.

team): a mall designed as a civic center with courthouses, a city hall, a public auditorium, the public library, and other governmental buildings surrounding it. Drawing on his successes in Washington and Cleveland, Burnham developed plans to revitalize Manila and Baguio in the Philippines in 1905. His plan for San Francisco was abandoned in 1906 after that city’s devastating earthquake.

City Beautiful–inspired urban designs were developed and implemented in a host of American cities—Denver, Des Moines, Oklahoma City, Oakland, New York, and New Haven—and a number of cities outside of America— Calgary, Montreal, and, most notably, Canberra and Melbourne. But the greatest example of City Beautiful design was the Plan of Chicago.

Burnham was approached independently by the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Merchants Club to work on a citywide improvement project for transportation, parks, and civic buildings. It was not until 1906, when the two clubs merged, that the project was launched. When it was published in 1909 under the auspices of the Commercial Club, the Plan of Chicago, or the Burnham Plan, as it became popularly known, was hailed as a turning point in urban planning, a symbol of sound government, good business, scientific planning,

and putting the broad interests of the public first. Coauthored with Edward H. Bennett and illustrated by Jules Guerin, the plan recalled the Columbian Exposition and European cities, especially the boulevards, squares, monuments, quays, and river promenades of Paris. Central to the plan was the civic center plaza that would harness the cultural and intellectual life of the city. Burnham also proposed the straightening of the Chicago River, building a bridge across the river at Michigan Avenue, the construction of a double-decker drive, the widening of Michigan Avenue, the reclamation of the lakefront and park lands, and the creation of a green belt of forest preserves. For Burnham, the existing chaos of Chicago made functional coherence and visual order a matter of necessity. Building a harmonious city would provide an aesthetic order in its public spaces and also create the arteries necessary for the convenient and efficient movement of traffic that was choking Chicago and impeding its commercial potential. In Burnham’s mind beauty was good for instilling civic pride and good for business, too.

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago is notable for another very important reason: It is America’s first metropolitan plan, which encompassed a sixty-mile radius around the city.

City Beautiful | 23

The Burnham Plan called for a series of exterior highways that would radiate from the center of Chicago. These highways would provide a “vital connection” between the suburbs and the city.

By including interurban train lines as well as a highway system that improved the existing radial throughways to outlying towns, Burnham created a regional transportation network that would foster ongoing economic development and help concentrate activity at the city’s center.

Many aspects of the Plan of Chicago were implemented after 1909, but by the 1930s and the onset of the Great Depression, cities like Chicago all but abandoned the principles of the City Beautiful movement. Although cities no longer embrace Beaux-Arts design for buildings 24 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

and monuments, the impact of beautification plans is still with us today in zoning codes, cultural and business partnerships for urban development, and standardized planning processes. But the idea that art and culture are essential to the life of a city has had new rebirth. One of the best examples of this resurgence is Chicago’s Millennium Park, a privately financed cultural space along the lakefront in the Loop, which has won critical acclaim and which many Chicagoans see as inspired by the Plan of Chicago. Some claim that it is the final step in realizing Burnham’s vision.

Russell Lewis is executive vice president and chief historian at the Chicago History Museum.

The development of Grant Park, a priority of Burnham’s since the 1890s, culminated in the 2004 opening of Millennium Park, a perfect application of Burnham’s ideals to the twenty-first century. Above: Michigan Avenue skyline from inside the Pritzker Pavilion.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 4, i02550; 5, top: HB-06614, bottom: i40069; 6, top: i34324, bottom: i29774aa; 7, top: i05836, bottom: author’s collection; 8, i05656; 10, top: i02957aa, bottom: i02811aa; 11, i62358; 12, i05724; 13, top: i20649aa, bottom: DN-000979; 14, top: i51001, bottom: i19186; 15, i38280; 16, i04192; 19, i61668; 20, top: i13849, bottom: i61710; 21, i02525aa-1620; 22, top: courtesy of the National Capital Planning Commission, Washington, D.C., bottom: i40381; 23, i40386; 24, i40370; 25, photograph by Scott McDonald, Hedrich Blessing F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Thomas S. Hines’s biography of Daniel Burnham, Burnham of Chicago (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2009, second edition), remains

the definitive volume about Burnham’s life and work. Eric Larsen’s Devil and the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (New York: Vintage, 2004) has won legions of new fans of Burnham and the White City.

William H. Wilson provides a compelling history of city design in The City Beautiful Movement: Creating the North American Landscape (Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press, 1994). In Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993), Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell provide an excellent overview of the fair. Arnold Lewis’s An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) examines the fair and Chicago in a broad urban context.

City Beautiful | 25

26 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

The Geometry of Chicago Burnham’s vision for the city echoes Classical Greek mathematics with its order, simplicity, and inspiring fundamental ideas.

J I L L VA N N E W E N H I Z E N

T

he design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for which architect Daniel H. Burnham was the leading spirit, illustrates his knowledge and admiration of ancient Greece; the remarkable Mediterranean civilization that produced both timeless, architectural gems such as the Parthenon and the elegant, enduring geometry collected and set down by Euclid of Alexandria. Burnham’s devotion to Classical Greece is also evident in his twentieth-century city plans, which the 1893 White City inspired. In fact, a comparison of the geometric foundation of Euclid’s Elements Book I with the seminal 1909 Plan of Chicago co-authored by Burnham and Edward H. Bennett reveals the echo of early Greek mathematics in the underpinnings of twentieth-century urban planning.

Burnham was a natural choice to take on the challenge of reshaping Chicago. Along with his partner, John Root, he was largely responsible for bringing high-rise office buildings to downtown, an architectural wonder that established a sea change in how commercial activity was planned. Burnham and Root designed the Masonic Temple Building (1892), the first twenty-story metalframed skyscraper in Chicago, located at Randolph and State streets. Other notable Chicago buildings by Burnham and Root include the Monadnock (1891), traditional in its wall-bearing function but ahead of its time in its freedom from historic ornamentation, and the Rookery (1888), a hybrid of masonry wall-bearing and steel-frame construction. Burnham alone was the designer of the iconic Flatiron Building (1902) in New York City and the grand Beaux-Arts style Union Station (1908) in Washington, D.C. Following the success of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Burnham became a respected and sought-after city planner. He produced city plans for Washington, D.C. (1902), Cleveland (1903), the Philippine cities of Manila and Baguio (1905), as well as for San Francisco (1906, submitted three days before the earthquake).

The Plan of Chicago was created at the request of the Merchants Club in 1906 and completed under the direction of the Commercial Club of Chicago after the two organizations merged. The members hoped to “rationalize, and thereby, improve the city.” The success of the plan proved historic. While shortcomings have been cited, such as failing to address the impending need to provide off-street automobile parking, and its overly simplistic strategy to eradicate what Burnham called the “slum conditions,” the plan did propose cutting “broad thoroughfares through the unwholesome district” while establishing and remorselessly enforcing sanitary regulations. In her introduction to the Princeton Architectural Press edition of the Plan of Chicago, Kristen Schaffer argues that Burnham’s plan was originally motivated by social idealism and responsiveness, but the businessmen and merchants who commissioned it rejected this agenda. Historian Perry Duis writes, “Burnham and Bennett settled for designing beautiful public places, hoping these would inspire private landowners to beautify their holdings.” Chicago architectural historian Wilbert R. Hasbrouck insists in his introduction to the Da Capo Press reprint that even with its shortcomings, “The plan . . . ought to be looked at in a positive manner, for it was, after all, the prototypical city plan to which virtually every similar work undertaken ever since has been substantially indebted.”

The Masonic Temple (opposite), with twenty floors of commerce neatly stacked on top of each other, was an example of Burnham’s goal to bring order, beauty, and income to city centers riddled with vice districts and slums. Above: Jefferson Street, 1909.

Geometry of Chicago | 27

The Plan of Chicago, and for that matter, the sum of Western civilization is also fundamentally beholden to Euclid of Alexandria’s Elements. Written around 300 B.C., the work consists of thirteen books covering plane geometry, solid geometry, and number theory.

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago and Euclid’s Elements are prototypical models. According to Hasbrouck, virtually every city plan undertaken since 1909 reflects the influence and ideas of Burnham. Similarly, most everyone who takes a plane geometry course in school uses a textbook based on the work of Euclid. Often modern texts are written in the style introduced by Euclid, and they contain the same proofs found in Elements. In fact, all scientific communication, including the so-called “scientific method,” is rooted in the practices introduced in Elements some 2,300 years ago.

In contrast to Burnham’s life, almost nothing is known about Euclid the man; it is believed that he was taught by followers of Plato. After the fall of Rome, Islamic scholars preserved and studied Greek mathematics and Euclid’s work was rediscovered during the Renaissance.

Elements stands out as his seminal work because of its axiomatic structure. Book I of Elements begins with twenty-three definitions of terms, such as point, line, circle, and parallel lines. Five common notions, such as “the whole is greater than the part,” are listed along with five postulates. The latter are statements that Euclid accepts without proof, for example, “all right angles are equal.” The genius of Elements is that from this handful of definitions, common notions, and postulates Euclid

builds all of plane geometry. These elements are combined to prove propositions such as “in an isosceles triangle the angles at the base are equal to one another.”

Propositions, once proved, are then used to establish the validity of additional propositions. Each stone in the tower of propositions comprising Euclid’s geometry is firmly supported and can, in turn, support others.

Euclid’s five postulates can be more easily understood by applying them to Chicago streets and maps.

Postulate 1 says that it is possible to draw a straight line from any point to any point. Consider that most of the streets in Chicago run due north-south or due east-west.

This postulate says that you can get from University of Illinois at Chicago south of the Loop to DePaul University on the North Side by simply walking straight north up Halsted Street. A walk due west on Adams Street takes you from the Art Institute to Union Station.

Postulate 2 says that it is possible to extend a finite straight line continuously in a straight line. To understand this postulate, think of the northward expansion of Halsted Street as the city of Chicago grew. The Plan of Chicago reports that at that time Halsted Street was known as the “‘king of streets’ by reason of its extreme length.” As the straight line of Halsted Street was extended as Chicago expanded, the longer street was still a straight line.

Postulate 3 says that it is possible to describe a circle with any center and distance. Illustrating this postulate is easy in Paris, Boston, Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia. In

A 1922 view of the “king of streets,” Halsted, which stretches in a straight line through the city of Chicago to now comprise nearly twenty-five miles.

28 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Clybourn Avenue to the north and Division Street to the south. The demonstration of Postulate 5 begins when one goes to the northeast corner of Halsted and Division equipped with a tool many believe was used by ancient Egyptians to create right angles. The tool, which uses the Pythagorean Theorem’s logical converse to measure right angles, is a rope with twelve equal intervals marked off by knots. Three intervals of the rope are stretched along Halsted and, continuing around the corner, four more intervals of rope are stretched along Division. Since the remaining five intervals of rope prove to be exactly the

The Chicago Circle Interchange (above, 1965) and the “world’s most beautiful plaza” in Grant Park (right) are both examples of how circles contribute to Burnham’s ideal “well-ordered and convenient city.”

Chicago, the best example of this postulate is the Circle Interchange where the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Dan Ryan expressways all meet. A more attractive if incomplete illustration features two bronze Native Americans on horseback, Bowman and Spearman, watching over the semicircular roadway connecting the eastern ends of Van Buren and Harrison streets in Grant Park. The traffic semicircle’s “center” is the intersection of Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue; its distance (radius) is the distance from Congress to Harrison.

Postulate 4 says that all right angles are equal to one another. The north-south, east-west rectangular grid of Chicago’s streets is the result of the Federal Land Ordinance of 1785 that dictated such a perpendicular street system because of how surveyors measured areas of land that would eventually be divided for sale. Thanks to Chicago’s nearly fanatical adherence to the grid, almost all intersections in the city feature four corners that are right angles and therefore all equal. Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street adhere to this grid scheme; they intersect perpendicularly. Postulate 4 assures us that the oft-photographed four corners occupied by the Prudential Building, the Chicago Cultural Center, the 150 North Michigan Building (with its familiar diamondface top), and Millennium Park are equal because the corners are all right angles.

Postulate 5 says that if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles. Let the king of streets, Halsted Street, be the straight line falling on the two straight lines created by

The Smurfit Stone and Prudential buildings, photographed in 1986, sit on two corners of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. This major intersection is just one example of the grid system of downtown streets that has brought order to the city since 1830, when surveyor James Thompson drew the first map of land lots for sale.

Geometry of Chicago | 29

length of rope needed to complete the third side of the triangle connecting the Halsted and Division sides, the northeast corner of Halsted and Division is a right angle because 52 = 32 + 42. When the experiment is repeated at the southeast corner of Halsted and Clybourn the remaining five intervals of rope are more rope than is needed to complete the triangle. This means the southeast corner of Halsted and Clybourn is less than a right angle. Euclid’s Postulate 5 says we can walk southeast away from Halsted on Clybourn and we will eventually arrive at an intersection with Division, provided the streets extend far enough, because the interior angles on the same side of Halsted are less than two right angles.

In fact, Clybourn Avenue extends southeast just far enough to intersect with Division.

Like Euclid’s Elements, the Plan of Chicago is based on a few central assumptions. While it begins with historical background, the rest of the volume makes a forceful argument that embracing, then quickly enacting, the six principal elements composing the plan is both highly advisable and financially feasible. According to historian Carl Smith, the plan’s six recommendations “follow a general geographical progression from the periphery of Chicago to its center: encircling highways, transportation systems, and downtown. They conclude with the heart of the city, the Civic Center.” The six principal elements of the plan are summarized in Chapter VIII: First The improvement of the lake front Second The creation of a system of highways outside the city Third The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete traction system for both freight and passengers Fourth The acquisition of an outer park system and parkway circuits Fifth The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within the city, in order to facilitate the movement to and from the business district Sixth The development of centers of intellectual life and of civic administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to the city The fundamental nature of Euclid’s postulates can be used to elucidate the principal recommendations of Burnham’s plan.

The potential for dialogue between Euclid’s Postulate 1 “[It is possible] to draw a straight line from any point to any point” and the fifth principal element of the plan “The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within the city, in order to facilitate the movement to and from the business district” is a good place to begin.

30 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

When Euclid considered what facts he needed to assume without proof, his very first need was to draw a straight line between two points or to connect the dots. The plan’s suggestion for improvements to Chicago’s street organization makes use of this postulate. The rigid grid of Chicago’s street plan was already in place when the plan was published in 1909. While this rectilinear street system conformed to the line of the lakefront and location of the river and appealed to what the plan calls

“ideas of rightness inherent in the human mind,” it made travel difficult. As the city’s boundaries extended and its area increased, getting from one point to another in the city became more and more problematic.

Burnham’s proposed solution to this problem invokes the fundamental nature of Euclid’s first postulate, connect the dots: “In order, however, to care for the traffic that flows from northeast to southwest and from northwest to southeast, and vice versa, diagonal avenues

become a necessity, in order to save time and consequent expense.” A considerable number of diagonal roads already existed in 1909 Chicago. In fact, many of the diagonal streets that traverse whole sectors of the current metropolitan area began as Native American trails, paths, and portages. Milwaukee Avenue was a trail, later a stageAerial view of the North Side, c. 1925, showing the grid bisected by diagonal streets (clockwise from right) Ogden, Lincoln, and Clark.

Geometry of Chicago | 31

32 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

“The intellectual life of the city will be stimulated by institutions grouped in Grant Park . . . vivifying and unifying the entire composition,” from the Plan of Chicago regarding lakefront development. Compare Jules Guerin’s 1909 illustration with Inger’s 1857 artwork on page 8.

Geometry of Chicago | 33

The convenience of elevated passenger trains resulted in neighborhood expansion as people moved away from the center of the city.

Above: The ‘L’ system, 1904.

34 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

coach run to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Elston and Blue Island avenues were originally plank country roads. A portage between downstate Bloomington and the South Side became Archer Avenue.

The plan argued that the “large part which they [existing diagonals] play in promoting circulation offers the best argument for their extension and completion.”

The diagonal thoroughfares promoted by the plan permitted travelers to take advantage of Euclid’s first postulate—a straight line can be drawn from any point to any point—more often than they could on a purely rectilinear grid. “Thus it happens that no rectilinear city is perfect without the diagonal streets; and conversely, having the rectilinear system, the creation of diagonals produces the greatest convenience.” Even if a direct diagonal route was not available to connect the dots for a traveler, taking at least part of a journey on a diagonal thoroughfare would in many cases expedite their travels.

Although Chicago lacks many circular street configurations, the spirit of Euclid’s Postulate 3 “[It is possible] to describe a circle with any center and distance” is very much present in the recommendations concerning the plan’s second and third principal elements, which cover the creation of highways and rail lines. Freedom to choose the circle’s center (placement) and distance (radius) is part of the postulate. The essence here is that circles exist. They are geometric objects that are bound by one continuous line such that all the points on the object are equal distance from a center. If the idea of being bound by one continuous endless line is strictly retained, while the condition requiring equal distance from a center is relaxed, then Euclid’s third postulate joins his first in influencing Burnham’s ideas about how to efficiently move people and goods around the city.

The first postulate suggests the value of diagonal streets and avenues; the third postulate suggests the value of loops of railway traction.

The third principal element of the plan calls for “the development of a complete traction system for both freight and passengers.” Indeed, the plan proposes an oval-like loop of railroad tracks, surrounding the heart of the city, to be located approximately where the elevated Loop tracks are today. The plan suggests that two different subways follow approximately this same circuit, one subway circuit for freight and the other for passengers. Three more loops of tracks all tangent at the same point on the western side of the first loop are also proposed. The three additional western loops would increase in size and area with the first completely surrounded by the second and both inner loops surrounded by the third. The plan theorized, “By means of these circuits a complete system of distribution of passengers and freight may be secured.” None of the proposed circuits of tracks are perfect circles, however, just like a circle,

Although Burnham’s circuitous plan for freight and passenger rails was not entirely fulfilled, Chicago has become the nation’s railroad hub, with the most rails radiating in the most directions from its center. Above: A view looking south at freight lines running through Grant Park between the lake and Michigan Avenue, 1918.

each of the railway circuits is bound by one continuous line that has no distinct beginning or end. Making all four endless circuits tangent at a single point compounds the value of their continuous, unbroken, unbranched, circular nature. The endless nature of the proposed traction system is its allure.

The essence of Postulate 3 offers a resolution to the plan’s second principal element—“The creation of a system of highways outside the city.” The plan’s intended outer highway system features nested, more-or-less semicircular routes—imperfect, incomplete circles. The northern and southern ends of all of the proposed routes touch Lake Michigan; the waters of the lake occupy the missing parts of the circles. The plan urges the establishment of four such nested semicircular highways. The outermost encircling highway’s northern end is in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and its southern end is in Michigan City, Indiana. The route runs through the Chain of Lakes region, out to DeKalb, and down to Kankakee while in Illinois then heads northeast to Valparaiso, Indiana, and turns north to return to the lake. The other three nested

highways have their northernmost points in the Illinois cities of Waukegan, Winnetka, and Evanston, respectively. After going westward and southward all three highways eventually turn northeast and return to the lake in the region around Gary, Indiana. The circle’s endless boundary is not the appeal here, instead, it is the fact that all of the points on an outer highway are approximately equidistant from the developing city center. This makes the semicircle the clear geometric choice for highways outside a city that has its proposed center on the edge of one of the Great Lakes.

By combining diagonal thoroughfares with nested semicircles of highways and loops of railroads, the plan creates a transportation web. Diagonal thoroughfares create efficient branches for the deliberately branchless collection of railway loops and highway semicircles. Burnham’s transportation plan for Chicago takes full advantage of Euclid’s assumptions that any two points can be connected with a straight line and that circles exist.

Euclid’s second postulate “[It is possible] to produce a finite straight line continuously in a straight line” can also Geometry of Chicago | 35

36 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

be linked to the Burnham Plan. Its suggestion that finite lines can be extended indefinitely is very similar to Burnham’s ideas about parks. According to the plan, “The two prime considerations for every large city are first, adequate means of circulation and second, a sufficient park area to insure good health and good order.” Indeed the fourth principal element of the 1909 plan calls for “the acquisition of an outer park system.” The plan argued that continuing to set aside land for parks in the areas into which the city was expanding was of fundamental importance: “Density of population beyond a certain point results in disorder, vice, and disease, and thereby becomes the greatest menace to the well being of the city itself. As a measure of precaution, therefore, the establishment of adequate park area is essential.” Euclid believed it possible to extend a finite straight line indefinitely. In the same spirit, Burnham believed that park area offered city dwellers essential, finite islands of peace; however, that the peace of mind visitors found in parks extended indefinitely, when they returned to their daily lives.

This same essence of Postulate 2 can also be found in the sixth principal element of the plan calling for “centers of intellectual life and civic administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to the city.” The plan envisioned a great intellectual center at Grant Park comprising the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, Orchestra Hall, the Auditorium Theater, and the John Crerar Library. Just as visitors’ sense of place remained with them after they left the park, visitors to this intellectual center would leave the finite space with their lives expanded by the culture and knowledge they found in its great institutions; this enrichment would last forever. The Plan of Chicago proposes that just like Euclid’s straight line, intangible things such as knowledge can radiate outward unchanged. Culture, knowledge, civic pride, and civic responsibility can extend unaltered and indefinitely far beyond the edges of the grand but finite public spaces that inspire them.

Mathematicians call Postulate 5 the Parallel Postulate because it clarifies the definition of parallel lines by explaining the conditions under which two lines do in fact intersect. The unusual history, nature, and character of Postulate 5, rather than its actual geometric meaning, illuminates and parallels the plan’s first principal element, “the improvement of the lake front.” Postulate 5 has a long, interesting history. No one ever doubted its truth. However, many doubted its unprovable status.

Many of the greatest mathematical minds over the span of two thousand years tried in vain to provide an indisputable proof of Postulate 5 using only Euclid’s definiBeauty and order were essential elements in Burnham’s plan, as was the development of Grant Park. This aerial view (c. 1935) shows the symmetry that was the hallmark of the park’s design.

Geometry of Chicago | 37

The argument to preserve a public lakefront resulted in what is now considered one of Chicago’s greatest attributes. Above: An early photograph of a lakeshore dumping ground at Twenty-third Street; below: the transformed shoreline at Jackson Park Beach, 1949.

tions, common notions, and other postulates and propositions that are independent of Postulate 5. All attempts at proof ultimately failed; in 1868, mathematician Eugenio Beltrami ended the search by irrefutably establishing that Postulate 5 could not be proven using only Euclid’s tools.

Not all of the doomed attempts to prove the postulate were fruitless. Mathematicians who were trying to prove the fifth postulate uncovered surprising worlds that speak to the development of Chicago’s lakefront. Many conditions are logically equivalent to Postulate 5. For example, one of the equivalent conditions is that the angle sum of a triangle equals 180 degrees. Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of history’s most important mathematicians, formulated a position that rejected the prior notion that the angle sum of a triangle is 180 degrees. He expected utter chaos as a result, but the fact remains that he discovered a perfectly sound alternate geometric world in which the angle sum of a triangle is less than the required 180 degree angle sum of every Euclidean triangle. Indeed, there is no fixed angle sum at all in this strange, alternate geometry. Georg Riemann discovered a distinctly different non-Euclidean geometry in which the angle sum of a triangle is more than 180 degrees and lines of finite length can be unbounded.

38 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Beltrami showed that non-Euclidean worlds are just as logically sound as the Euclidean world. The consequences are mind-boggling. The angle sum of a triangle can be less than, equal to, or even greater than 180 degrees. If the equivalent to Postulate 5—the angle sum of a triangle equals 180 degrees—is assumed, the result is the familiar Euclidean geometry experienced in everyday life. If Postulate 5 (or the equivalent) is rejected, then the resulting non-Euclidean geometries are altogether logically sound and are used to explain scientific ideas like Einstein’s theory of relativity. The unfamiliar, non-Euclidean geometric worlds discovered

by Gauss and Riemann offer a striking vision of what Chicago might be without its grand park along the shore of Lake Michigan.

The authors of the Plan of Chicago asserted the importance of keeping the lakefront public against arguments to the contrary. The authors believed passionately that the lake should be accessible to the public: “The Lake front by right belongs to the people. . . . Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated by individuals to the exclusion of the people.” Montgomery Ward felt just as passionately about the area that is now Grant Park. Ward spent many years (and much of his own fortune) waging legal battles to remove all permanent structures from the area and to keep it public forever. Just as mathematicians challenged the status of Postulate 5 for more than two thousand years before they understood that Euclid was correct to assume it was not provable, some Chicagoans challenged Ward’s demands. Happily Chicagoans took only a couple of decades to embrace Ward’s argument and understand the wisdom of his vision. Chicago celebrated the Euclidean vision of Ward by designing Grant Park’s Millennium addition as free, open, public parkland on top of permanent, underground structures.

The plan’s intent to preserve the lakefront as public land met with protest. Thankfully, the plan prevailed.

Hasbrouck states, “The most complete realization of a portion of the Plan of Chicago, however, was the development of the system of lakefront parks.” In his essays written to accompany the Chicago Historical Society’s bicentennial exhibition, Perry Duis contends that it was the adoption of Burnham’s plan that “fixed in the public mind the idea that the lakefront must be preserved for public use. Today, most of the shoreline consists of public beach.” These parks had some precedent, but Duis and Hasbrouck give Burnham and the plan full credit for establishing the lakefront park system that now exists. Miles of beautiful public land along Lake Michigan are what define Chicago.

“Chicago, unlike many American cities, has not been drawn away from the water. The creation of Grant Park adjacent to the Lake and extending along the entire business front of the city is of inestimable value.” Today the vibrant Chicago lakefront thrives on the gift of green park-

land created from the waste of past generations. Rubble from the Great Fire of 1871, dirt from the excavation of subway tunnels, and millions of cubic yards of other waste material were for years routinely dumped in the cheapest place possible, the low-lying areas at the edge of Lake Michigan. The plan encouraged this practice as a means of redeeming the lakefront from the village of Winnetka, Illinois, to the Indiana state line. Thanks to the plan, miles and miles of lakefront parks and recreation areas were created on the landfill. Without the lakefront park system the city would be as unfamiliar and bizarre as the nonEuclidean worlds discovered by Gauss and Riemann. If the plan’s campaign for the improvement of the lakefront had been rejected then trying to envision a plan-less Chicago is as difficult as trying to picture non-Euclidean objects resulting from the rejection of Postulate 5.

Since Burnham passed away only three years after the publication of the plan, he did not get a chance to see which parts were implemented. Hasbrouck argues that despite the untimely loss of Burnham, while alive he had “the vision, the courage, and the ability to prepare for Chicago a plan with Grant Park as its focal point—a plan which architects and planners still point to as the foundation of the Chicago we know today . . . ” The realization of the first principal element of the Plan of Chicago, to create a great system of public parks along the shore of Lake Michigan, is what makes the lakefront city into Chicago—just as accepting Postulate 5 is what makes geometry familiar Euclidean geometry.

Jill Van Newenhizen is an associate professor of mathematics at Lake Forest College.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 26, i59186; 27, i62153; 28, i32078; 29, top: HB-27928, center: i34856, bottom: i62152; 31, i62151; 32, i40377; 34, i15627; 35, DN-0070393; 36, i18352; 38, above: i03211, below: i37328 F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more information on the origin of diagonal streets, see Hollis Birnbaum’s article “The Angle on Angled Streets” in Chicago magazine (August 2006); a good translation of Euclid’s Thirteen Books of the Elements is by Thomas L. Heath (Dover Publications, 1956, second revised edition); read Kristen Schaffer’s introduction to the Plan of Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); for an analysis of the Plan of Chicago, heavily illustrated with photographs, maps, and artwork, see the interpretive digital essay on the Encyclopedia of Chicago website, encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org (Chicago History Museum and Newberry Library, 2005).

Geometry of Chicago | 39

The Business of Reform Progressive Era business leader John V. Farwell Jr. dedicated his life’s work to improving Chicago and the welfare of its citizens.

E M I LY C L A R K

A

t the turn of the twentieth century, the Progressive movement attracted disparate types of reformers—settlement workers, labor leaders, philanthropists, journalists, and politicians, among others—although they often worked toward opposing goals. Local businessmen, eager to impose rationality on their sprawling cities, also banded together to improve urban conditions. Locally they formed associations, such as the Commercial Club and the Merchants Club, to use their combined experience, skills, and professional connections to bring about urban reform. A number of factors led these men to action, including the unbridled development of the city after the Great Fire of 1871, an increase in the immigrant population, and growing labor unrest. They strongly distrusted local government’s ability to make what they considered necessary changes, as rampant corruption ruled Chicago politics at the time.

Businessman John V. Farwell Jr. played a crucial leadership role in numerous Progressive reform activities.

He first acted on a specific local issue (pawnshops), then on a citywide effort (the Plan of Chicago), and finally on a national level (the Federal Reserve Act). His development as a reformer serves as a prime example of how business leaders worked to enact change on multiple fronts during the Progressive Era. 40 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Mr. and Mrs. John V. Farwell, pictured above with their family, owned a very successful wholesale dry-goods firm. John V. Farwell Jr. (opposite) inherited the family business in the 1910s. Under his leadership, the company grossed approximately $20 million annually and employed more than a thousand people, making it among the nation’s top three wholesalers.

Business of Reform | 41

This 1866 summer sales advertisement promoted new products from Farwell and Company. The closing signature, “your friend and fellow citizen,� portrays the company as being accessible and having integrity.

42 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Farwell was born in Chicago on October 16, 1858, to John Villiers and Emeret (Cooley) Farwell. His father came to Illinois from upstate New York as a boy, eventually settling in Chicago, where he established a very successful wholesale dry-goods firm, John V. Farwell and Company.

Farwell Jr. graduated from Yale in 1879, took an extended trip around the world, and returned to Chicago in 1881, where he joined the family firm. He rose through the ranks, eventually serving as chairman of the board until Carson Pirie Scott bought the company in 1926. When Farwell was in his mid-thirties and had not yet made his most significant contributions to reform in Chicago, a biographer wrote of him: “In these days of laxity of thought, word and action, it is refreshing and inspiriting to meet a man who is abreast of the question of the day; who is ready to lend his efforts to benefit his fellow men, [and] brings to bear upon all questions the test of his principles.”

Throughout his life, Farwell accepted many leadership roles, serving as the president of organizations and boards and heading committees. He gained early experience on the board of managers of the Chicago YMCA, which he joined the same year he returned to Chicago after college. His father, a founding member of the Chicago Y, served as the group’s president from 1874 to 1876. The younger Farwell held the position from 1884 until 1894.

Above: The Chicago YMCA building at LaSalle Street and Arcade Place, 1908. Below: Old Farwell Hall inside the Y. Farwell served as the organization’s president from 1884 to 1894. Throughout his career, he strove to improve the city’s social and economic conditions, advocating for the greater good.

Business of Reform | 43

In 1885, Farwell undertook what may have been his earliest reform effort. As part of the Citizens’ Association, he helped to prosecute corrupt members of the Cook County Board. Farwell inspected the county’s bills for dry goods and discovered that it was paying twice what his own firm normally charged. Outraged, he organized a group of nine friends, who each contributed one thousand dollars to investigate the matter. Their action led to a successful prosecution of the corrupt politicians.

On April 10, 1890, Farwell became a member of the first board of directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Although President William Henry Harrison had not yet signed the bill that announced Chicago as the world’s fair site, local civic leaders had formed the Exposition Company to lobby for Chicago and raise funds through the sale of stocks. The stockholders voted to establish a board of directors made up of forty-five local men “of recognized business ability who could be counted upon as having both the time and the inclination to labor in behalf of the proposed Exposition.” At the age of thirtyone, Farwell was both young and energetic enough to contribute to the cause and was named to the Committee on National and State Exhibits. During the following year, the board raised funds for the fair, selected a site, and named Daniel H. Burnham to the newly created post of chief of construction. The dynamic Burnham quickly embraced the assignment, imposing his vision on the creation of the exposition and displaying an extraordinary ability to effectively organize the huge undertaking.

Planning for the exposition drew upon the municipal improvement activities that had taken place in the preceding years. In Chicago, activists had attacked such issues as sanitation, transportation, and green space, which all became important considerations in the development of the exposition grounds. Truly a collaborative effort, the exposition involved professionals (architects, landscape designers, and engineers) working in tandem with citizen groups responsible for garnering public support and funding. Burnham’s genius was his ability to bring these groups together while maintaining the strong aesthetic unity that became an important feature of the fair. He would later use those skills in his work on the Plan of Chicago, a project in which Farwell played an important role.

Although Farwell left the board of directors in April 1891, he had strengthened ties to men with whom he would continue to work over the coming years, including Edward B. Butler, Charles L. Hutchinson, Rollin A. Keyes, Cyrus H. McCormick, Martin A. Ryerson, and Charles H. Wacker. These men were also members of the Commercial Club, one of the two most notable businessmen’s groups in Chicago in the late nineteenth century; the other was the Merchants Club. Both elected Farwell to their membership in the mid-1890s.

44 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

The Commercial Club, founded in 1877, emulated similar clubs in East Coast cities: The membership was intended to be representative of the large business interests of the city, to consist of men of probity of character, of broad public spirit, who had proved their interest in the general welfare by a record of things actually done and of liberality, as well as by willingness to do more. To be eligible for membership a man must have shown conspicuous success in his private business, with a broad and comprehending sympathy with important affairs of city and state, and a generous subordinating of self in the interest of the community—he must be a man of good deeds and clean thinking and high ideals . . . It was to be a club of serious purpose, tolerant of opposing opinions, recognizing its obligation to the community . . . In short, to be a member a man must be animated by the highest code of business and social ethics.

Some of the early causes taken up by the club included reducing smoke and noise nuisances; improving the quality of paved streets; establishing industrial training schools; licensing alcohol and tobacco; developing methods for increasing city revenues; and addressing municipal corruption.

In 1896, nearly twenty years after the founding of the Commercial Club, an up-and-coming and energetic group of businessmen established the Merchants Club, stipulating that no man over the age of forty-five was eligible for membership. The founding members, “full of vitality and an irrepressible desire to do something to promote public welfare,” envisioned their club as a complement to the Commercial Club: When a man was asked to join the Merchants Club he was asked quite bluntly whether or not he would respond to any call for public service at the Club’s command—whether he would give not merely his money and his influence, but himself . . . It came as an honor, a much prized distinction, a call and an opportunity for service with a powerful, congenial, inspiring group.

Within a few years of its formation, the Merchants Club took on an ambitious, concrete, and practical project, with Farwell at the helm. Member Harry G. Selfridge (who would later establish the British department store Selfridges) suggested that they organize a philanthropic pawnshop. His inspiration was the Provident Loan Association, founded in New York in the mid-1890s.

Pawnshops had existed in Chicago since the 1850s but had never enjoyed a favorable reputation. The public associated pawnshops with stolen goods and believed that pawnbrokers took advantage of the vulnerable poor by imposing exorbitant interest rates. As the depression

Charles Dickens once described London pawnshops as presenting “striking scenes of vice and poverty,” a perception shared in the United States and one that Farwell and his colleagues worked to change. Above: An 1888 engraving from Harper’s Weekly illustrates detectives recovering stolen goods from a pawnshop.

Business of Reform | 45

of the mid-1890s forced increasing numbers of middleclass citizens to make use of pawnshops, the need for pawnshop reform became ever more apparent.

The club took up the cause, finally approving the project in January 1899. Their first order of business was to lobby the Illinois legislature for a law to provide for the organization of state pawners’ societies. Regular pawnbrokers, of course, strenuously opposed this effort. Nonetheless, the Municipal Pawnshop Bill was passed in March 1899 and took effect on July 1 of that year. The Merchants Club immediately formed the First State Pawners Society, a private corporation. Their plan was to charge a low monthly interest rate of 1.5 percent as opposed to the average of 10 percent charged by other local pawnshops. To fund their organization, the Merchants Club undertook a subscription drive. The net result was fifty thousand dollars of capital raised almost entirely from club members, despite the fact that subscribers were forewarned “that they might never see their principal again, to say nothing of dividends.”

The original directors of the Pawners Society—Farwell, Edward B. Butler, John G. Shedd, Nelson P. Bigelow, Edwin G. Foreman, Leslie Carter, and Rollin A. Keyes— named William H. Bennett as state director and Dunlap Smith as city director. Farwell served as the first president and continued in this position until his death.

Official business began on November 6, 1899, at 72 East Washington Street in Chicago.

Keenly aware of the unscrupulous reputation of traditional pawnbrokers, the directors sent anonymous agents to the Pawners Society, bearing fake jewelry, to test the appraisers’ honesty. Farwell reported on one such incident: “Mr. Shedd even tried them on a Patek Philippe watch, which he had [had] made for him in Switzerland, without the maker’s name. The appraiser, however, spotted it at once, telling him it was a Patek Philippe, but that he had never seen one without the name on it before. Such reports were very reassuring to us.”

In the 1904 annual report to the stockholders of the First State Pawners Society, then-president Farwell summarized the total loans and gross earnings and advocated for a change of location to better carry out the organization’s purpose.

46 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

A year after opening, the society increased its capital stock to $200,000 by conducting another subscription drive. Farwell stated with confidence: The society is performing a useful function in the city, as its success would indicate that it has not only saved a large amount of interest to its own patrons but has also obliged all pawnbrokers to reduce rates to most, if not all of their customers, that its work tends to reduce pauperism, to encourage independence, and to save many who might otherwise be plundered by excessive interest charges from entering the ranks of anarchy or vagrancy.

Within the first ten years of its existence, the society made 286,276 loans for a total of nearly six million dollars and reduced the interest rate charged to 1 percent per month. According to historian Vilas Johnson, through the establishment of the Pawners Society, Chicago afforded the world the unique spectacle of gentlemen of the highest social and business standing conducting with clean hands and in the spirit of pure

human brotherhood what generally had been looked upon as a sordid, contemptible business, often conducted in a heartless, oppressive manner, sometimes even criminally trading on the necessities of the poor.

In the end, however, the society could not replace traditional pawnshops and forfeited its philanthropic nature in 1949, becoming a private business.

Within a few years of the establishment of the Pawners Society, Farwell became involved in a project that would have a major effect on the city—the Plan of Chicago.

Beginning in the mid-1890s, members of the Commercial and Merchants clubs conducted an ongoing series of discussions to generate a more focused approach to planning for the city’s future. The conversations first centered on plans for a park along the lakefront and grew into more comprehensive ideas about civic spaces and transportation. Architect and city planner Daniel Burnham became a crucial figure in the project. He gave numerous speeches on related topics to both clubs, and their members encouraged him to take an active role in preparing plans for the city. Yet, the gloomy financial situation of the time,

Business of Reform | 47

Farwell’s father and uncle owned homes just north of the Chicago Water Tower at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Pearson Street. Both residences are visible in this 1933 photograph by Ken Hedrich. Built in 1882 by architects Burnham and Root, Farwell’s father’s home (to the east) remained in the family until 1905.

48 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

Farwell and other members of the Commercial Club strongly supported the city improvements recommended in the Plan of Chicago (above), including widening North Michigan Avenue to encourage the growth of Chicago’s business district. Below: North Michigan Avenue, June 1933. Photograph by Ken Hedrich.

Business of Reform | 49

In this formal photograph from a Commercial Club meeting in 1908, Farwell sits on the right side of the table, second from the end.

along with Burnham’s work in other cities, conspired to keep any concrete plans from taking shape until after the turn of the century.

In April 1903, the Commercial Club convened a “Committee of Nine . . . to formulate a plan for Chicago’s improvement.” In addition to Burnham, the committee included Farwell; Charles L. Hutchinson and Martin A. Ryerson, who had served on the first board of directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition; and Leslie Carter, a director of the First State Pawners Society. While there was strong interest in pursuing a comprehensive plan for the city, Burnham became distracted by his work on the plan of Washington, D.C., while the Commercial Club focused its energies on the development of the Field Museum.

Thus, the Plan of Chicago did not become formally organized until 1906, this time under the auspices of the Merchants Club.

Although the members of the Commercial Club graciously ceded the project to the Merchants Club, they retained a strong interest in the undertaking and conver50 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

sations continued between the two groups. Early in 1907, the clubs merged, largely as a way to focus their combined energies on this very complex project.

Continuing under the Commercial Club name, the members of the merged group selected Farwell as their first president and named him to the General Committee, which oversaw the Plan of Chicago. Farwell continued in that position throughout the plan’s development and also served on the Committee on the Lake Front (later the Committee on Lake Parks). His colleagues on these committees included Charles H. Wacker, from the board of the World’s Columbian Exposition; Harold F. McCormick, Leslie Carter, and Edgar A. Bancroft, from the Pawners Society; and Edward B. Butler, who served on both. Each of these men (with the exception of Carter, who died in 1908) went on to serve with Farwell on the Chicago Plan Commission, which was formed to implement the recommendations made in the Plan of Chicago. Farwell served on the commission’s executive committee from 1910 until 1929.

William H. Taft campaigns for the presidency in Chicago in 1908. He won an easy victory and served one term in the White House, but he was unsuccessful at convincing Farwell to join him in Washington.

The Plan of Chicago afforded business leaders the opportunity to address multiple issues of concern in one overarching program. In the preceding years, the Commercial and Merchants clubs had discussed related topics such as the city’s bridges, lakefront, streets, and transportation. Each of these issues could now be dealt with as part of a cohesive whole.

Meanwhile, business reformers across the United States were expanding their activities from the local to the national level. Daniel Burnham exposed the men who helped develop the Plan of Chicago to wider issues of urban reform, bringing his experiences in Cleveland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Manila to bear on the local project. Several of the men from the key committees of the Chicago plan went on to serve on the national level. President Taft, elected in 1908, had strong connections to the Chicago business community and tapped two key leaders to serve with him—Franklin MacVeagh became the Secretary of the Treasury and Charles D. Norton, Taft’s private secretary. Farwell was touted as a

possible candidate for Secretary of the Interior. Taft knew him from Yale University, where he was in the class behind Farwell. Farwell declined to consider a position in Washington, however, citing the pressing demands of his family’s business.

Despite his active role in his family’s dry-goods firm, Farwell continued his involvement in reform projects, eventually working at the national level. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States had suffered numerous financial panics. In the aftermath of the panic of 1907, the need for a major reform of the country’s banking system became increasingly obvious.

The National Board of Trade appointed a committee, which met in Chicago on April 26, 1911, to support the passage of such a reform. The result was the National Citizens’ League for the Promotion of a Sound Banking System with Farwell at the helm.

The league, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization, undertook a “comprehensive campaign of education” to “disseminate accurate information and right thinking on Business of Reform | 51

52 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

sound principles of banking.” To keep it untainted by Wall Street and other New York financial interests, banking reform supporters decided to base the group in Chicago and to fill the board of directors with businessmen who were not bankers. According to J. Laurence Laughlin, “the directors were the most influential and trusted men in Chicago and in every way competent to care for the purposes of the organization.” The Chicago Association of Commerce appointed eighteen local businessmen to the board of directors. Appointees included John G. Shedd, Frederic A. Delano, A. C. Bartlett, Clyde M. Carr, Cyrus H. McCormick, Charles H. Wacker, A. A. Sprague, and F. W. Upham, all of whom had served with Farwell on either the First State Pawners Society or the Plan of Chicago.

The league held its first public meeting on May 24, 1911, before the Chicago Association of Commerce. At this meeting, members established their position “in favor of borrowers, freedom from panic and unemployment, the need of an elastic currency . . . and of an elastic credit organization for banks and borrowers which would improve our lending powers, rather than by expansion of bank notes.” The league developed sections in each state and named local businessmen to staff those offices. They created educational materials for the general public, explaining the need for banking reform and outlining specific tactics for transforming the banking system. Their hope was that the public would use this information to petition local congressmen, who would, in turn, take these sentiments to Washington.

In 1912, the league published the book Banking Reform, in effect, a campaign “bible” that provided detailed information and persuasive arguments for writing articles and speeches. The league’s individual state offices were then responsible for placing relevant articles in the local press and engaging speakers for local venues. The league even produced a fortnightly paper, also titled Banking Reform, with articles aimed toward the general reader. The purpose of all of their efforts: “To give organized expression to the growing public sentiment in favor of, and to aid in securing the legislation necessary to insure an improved banking system for the United States of America.”

In February 1913, the league’s newsletter stated that the organization had ten thousand members.

Not long after President Woodrow Wilson took office in March 1913, Farwell and other league members met with him. The president seemed lukewarm about the need to pursue banking reform and did not think there was adequate public support for such legislation. In response, the league immediately mobilized its state organizations.

A crowd fills the street in front of the Chicago National Bank during a bank crisis in 1906. The crisis typified the social and commercial disorder that Farwell and his contemporaries sought to rectify.

Business of Reform | 53

In 1913, the first year of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson was convinced by Farwell and the National Citizens’ League to sign the Federal Reserve Act. Above: Wilson (second from the right) outside Chicago’s Union Depot shortly before he became president.

Within three days, the White House received twenty-seven thousand telegrams in support of banking reform legislation. Wilson’s secretary wired the league’s Chicago headquarters: “Call off your members. The President has all the evidence he needs.” Wilson soon became an enthusiastic supporter of the banking reform movement and signed the Owen-Glass Bill (commonly known as the Federal Reserve Act) into law on December 23, 1913. With this success the league disbanded.

Shortly after he began work on the banking reform issue, Farwell was also named an alumni representative to the Yale University Corporation. The appointment was significant, as he was the first “western” member and, as such, the first to represent midwestern sensibilities and interests. He brought his business acumen to his work at Yale, helping transform the university “into a modern corporate entity reflecting the kind of structure and values for which it educated its graduates.”

The most notable of his activities at Yale came after he was named chair of the Committee on the Architectural Plan in 1913. He continued in that position until stepping down in 1930, at the age of seventy-two. During Farwell’s tenure, the architecture of the campus transformed completely. The change occurred as part of the larger, national movement toward town and city planning, a direct out54 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

growth of the World’s Columbian Exposition. The classical architectural forms of the buildings constructed at Yale during this time reference both the exposition and the Plan of Chicago. Like the latter, the Yale campus plan was “embedded in the Progressive Era urban reform movement and motivated by its preoccupations: rational order, efficiency, and the perceived need for a long-range vision to meet the demands of modern growth.”

Farwell also used his many personal contacts to help identify qualified people to fill positions of importance at Yale. Architects William Adams Delano and James Gamble Rogers, fellow alumni who had designed homes in Lake Forest, Illinois, where Farwell lived, became key players in the Yale campus plan. Rogers was also related to Farwell by marriage. In addition, Farwell was instrumental in the selection of James Rowland Angell as the first non-Yale graduate to become the president of the university. Angell had taught at and served on the administration of the University of Chicago for more than two decades prior to his appointment at Yale. Like Farwell, he was “a Western man thoroughly familiar with Eastern ideals.”

Throughout his many civic reform activities, Farwell worked with a group of fellow businessmen to affect change in a city and a nation hampered by government bureaucracy. Farwell and his contemporaries brought

John G. Shedd, pictured at his desk in 1916, was Farwell’s business rival but also a frequent collaborator and close friend. Farwell and Shedd shared philanthropic priorities and served on many of the same committees, including the Chicago Plan Commission.

their business expertise, organizational skills, fundraising abilities, and numerous connections to the table in order to enact much-needed reforms. One of Farwell’s most frequent collaborators was John G. Shedd.

Farwell and Shedd led the two most successful drygoods establishments in the city. Shedd came to Chicago in 1872 and joined the firm of Field, Leiter and Company as a stock boy. He continued with the firm (later known as Marshall Field and Company) for his entire career, becoming president after Field’s death and eventually serving as the chairman of the board. His favorite maxim was: “the man who is continuously at work is the man who is happy and continuously successful.” Like Farwell, he undoubtedly understood this to mean that he had a social responsibility to give of himself for the betterment of society beyond his business activities. Along with Farwell, Shedd served on the First State Pawners Society, the Plan of Chicago (on the Committee on Railway Terminals from 1907 to 1909), the National Citizens’ League, and the Chicago Plan Commission.

Both men were also very active in the Chicago YMCA. Farwell, in addition to his decade-long service as president, served as president of the board of trustees from 1901 until 1944. Shedd spearheaded a major fundraising campaign for the Y in 1908 to build the YMCA

Hotel, contributing fifty thousand dollars of his own funds. The campaign was part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration for the Y, and Farwell served as the chairman of the anniversary planning committee. Both men also served on the Greater Expansion Committee formed in 1922 to carry out plans for the future of the Y; again, Farwell acted as chairman.

During World War I, Farwell and Shedd, along with J. Ogden Armour and Harry Pratt Judson, organized the Chicago Council of National Defense to “mobilize all the resources of Chicago, so that the demands of the nation in the prosecution of the war may be met speedily and efficiently.” The alliance between Farwell and Shedd, despite the fact that their companies were major business rivals, typifies the social and business networks that aimed to further civic reform and improve Chicago. At the final dinner meeting of the Merchants Club, before its merger with the Commercial Club, Farwell and Shedd received tribute in the form of a song (sung to the tune of George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway”): Give our regards to Farwell, Remember us to old John Shedd.

And tell all the boys of our old club, That we will soon be wed.

Business of Reform | 55

Left: Farwell pictured in 1938, the day after his eightieth birthday. Right: In 1940, he was honored as one of the longest standing members of the Commercial Club.

Whisper of how we’re yearning, To tarry with this old time throng.

Give our regards to Commercial Club, And say that we’ll be there ere long.

When Shedd died in 1926, Farwell served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral.

Farwell continued his active role in business and the community, serving as a trustee of Lake Forest College from 1898 until 1921; as mayor of Lake Forest, Illinois, from 1931 to 1934; and on numerous boards and committees. In 1940, he was the guest of honor at a Commercial Club dinner feting him as the member of longest standing. A few years later, a newspaper article reporting on his eighty-fifth birthday celebration stated that Farwell still went into the office every day and walked from his office to lunch at the Chicago Club.

Farwell died of a heart attack at his Lake Forest home on June 17, 1944. An obituary stated, “Throughout his life, Mr. Farwell took a hand in virtually every endeavor affecting the progress of Chicago and the welfare of its citizens . . . When the depression hit Chicago, many persons lost faith in the future, but not John V. Farwell.

[He declared] ‘Chicago never has failed to surmount her difficulties. She will not start failing now.’”

56 | Chicago History | Fall 2010

A former librarian at the Chicago History Museum, Emily Clark has also worked as a book designer and historian. She is now the owner of Allium Press of Chicago.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 40, top: i26093, bottom: i62142; 41, i25581; 42, i62143; 43, top: DN-0006098, bottom: i25624; 45, i62139; 46–7, left to right: i62135, i62136, i62137, i62138; 48, HB-01660-A; 49, top: 1964.1051, bottom: HB-01660-B; 50, i59519; 51, DN0052939; 52, DN-0003052; 54, i62134; 55, DN-0066830; 56, left: i51038, right: private collection.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | To learn more about the themes discussed in this article, see Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Emmett Dedmon, Great Enterprises: 100 Years of the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1957); Vilas Johnson, A History of the Commercial Club of Chicago (Chicago: privately printed, 1977); J. Laurence Laughlin, The Federal Reserve Act: Its Origin and Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Vincent Scully, et al., Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); and Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).