The100 100 year year H The H Michigan Avenu Michigan Aven by Suzanne Hanney
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he opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge 100 years ago - on May 14, 1920 - began a transformation of the area directly north into the “New Gateway of the Greater Chicago” and the glamorous street of today. Both north and south of the Chicago River, Michigan Avenue had been narrow and congested, a street of utility buildings. Between Randolph Street and the river, there were wholesale stores, industrial buildings and warehouses for the shipping canals and railroad spurs to the east, as well as the South Water Street Market, the city’s central produce market, to the west. North of the river, “Pine Street,” as it was then known, was an area of light industry, food processing, and warehouses. As early as 1904, however, the old Michigan Avenue Bridge and the Rush Street Bridge were termed inadequate for their volumes of traffic, according to a story in the Chicago Daily Tribune.
The idea of making Michigan Avenue a major north-south thoroughfare and of developing the area gained traction from Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s “Plan of Chicago” in 1909. Burnham had been the architect for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago’s Jackson Park. Afterward, he had continued his career in urban planning along the lines of the world’s fair’s Beaux Arts ideal, where “the goal was to produce structures of monumental grandeur, buildings that both delighted the eye and conveyed an image of rational order,” according to the Chicago Landmarks Commission. Three facets of the Plan of Chicago -- construction of the new Michigan Avenue Bridge, widening Michigan Avenue, and redesigning Michigan Avenue and East South Water Street as bilevel roadways -- shaped the city of today.
