by H. W. Brands
But their danger hardly diminished on the street. The black sky continued to bombard them with burning missiles, which singed their skin and set their clothing alight. Coughing and running, they proceeded east on Ontario Street to the lake. There, on the shore, amid some fifty acres of open space, they felt reasonably safe.
Yet what they saw as they looked about was heartbreaking. “We found thousands of men, women, and children, and hundreds of horses and dogs, who had already fled there for refuge. The grounds were dotted all over at short intervals with piles of trunks, chairs, tables, beds, and household furniture of every description.” Dawn remained hours distant, yet the light of the conflagration revealed the scene as starkly as day. “Whole families were huddled around their little piles of furniture, which was all they had left that morning of their yesterday’s home. Here and there a mother sat upon the ground clinging to her infant, with one or more little ones, who, exhausted by the prolonged interruptions to their slumbers, were now sleeping, with their heads reclining on her lap, as peacefully as if nothing unusual was transpiring. Several invalids lay helplessly stretched upon mattresses, but still surrounded by relatives, who were endeavoring to soothe their fears. One young girl sat near me, with a cage containing a canary bird in her lap, whose life she was seeking to protect.” Most bore up under the strain; others broke down. “Some men and women who had found liquor among the household stores there, and who sought to drown their present woes in the bottle, were now reeling about drunk.” Tough-looking thugs broke into boxes and trunks, taking what they wanted while demoralized police officers and impotent judges—including Tree—looked on. A poor woman, seriously ill on arrival at the shore, died amid the crowd. “The fact seemed to be received with comparative indifference.”
The eastern sky gradually brightened but none could take their eyes off the burning west. The flames moved closer and closer. A brewery and the city water works caught fire to the north, cutting off one potential avenue of escape. To the south the flames reached a planing mill and several lumber yards; their wood stocks fueled an especially intense blaze that prevented retreat in that direction. Fiery bombs fell among the refugees, igniting their furniture, their bedding, and in some cases their clothes. By tens and then hundreds they retreated toward the water.
“Then came the period of our greatest trial,” Lambert Tree recalled. “Dense clouds of smoke and cinders rolled over and enveloped us, and it seemed almost impossible to breathe. Man and beast alike rushed to the water’s edge, and into the water, to avoid suffocation.… Some persons drove their horses into the lake as far as the poor beasts could safely go, and men, women, and children waded out and clambered upon the wagons to which the horses were attached, while the lake was lined with people who were standing in the water at various depths, from their knees to their waists, all with their backs to the storm of fire which raged behind them.” Everyone realized further retreat was impossible; if the fire continued to advance, the final choice of their lives would be to burn or drown.
For hours the fire pinned them to the lake’s edge. Most had been up all night; the strain and the lack of sleep made them long for rest. Some on the wagons dozed; others lay down in shallow water. Tree’s wife grew utterly exhausted and risked her fate by letting herself collapse on the shore, semiconscious. Tree was slightly more aware, enough to see her clothing catch fire and to beat out the flames with his bare hands. They both realized they had to stay on their feet if they hoped to live.
Ever so gradually the inferno weakened. The heat became less intense and the smoke diminished. Sometime after five o’clock—this was now Monday afternoon—a horse-drawn grocery wagon emerged from the smoke in the direction of Superior Street. Tree ran forward and offered the driver whatever he’d charge to rescue his family. The man might have demanded a thousand dollars but settled for ten. Tree and the others piled in. The driver turned the wagon back toward the smoke, and all aboard covered their heads and mouths as the dutiful horse plunged ahead. The worst of the fire had burned itself out, having consumed everything combustible in its path, but the ruins still smoldered profusely. “We saw enough to know that the North Side at least was destroyed,” Tree wrote, “and that all that was left of the thousands of happy homes of the day before were a few chimney stacks and an occasional broken and cracked wall.”6
The Tree family reached the safety of the West Side not far from where Mary and David Fales had finally crossed the river. Mary, too, remarked the entire devastation. “Every family I know on the North Side is burned out,” she wrote her mother. “I can’t enumerate them. It would be useless. It is sufficient to say every individual one.” Though the fire had burned toward the east and the lake and had there run out of fuel, no one could say for certain that the worst was over. “Everyone felt nervous lest some change of wind might cause another conflagration on the West Side,” Lambert Tree recalled. If it did, the city would be worse off than ever, for the fire had destroyed the water works, leaving firemen little with which to battle the flames. All Chicago spent an anxious evening and night until, about three in the morning, rain began to fall—first lightly, then more heavily. “I never felt so grateful in my life,” Mary Fales recorded the next day, after the rain doused the last of the flames.7
SEVERAL QUESTIONS EMERGED in the wake of the fire. The first involved the extent of the damage. Journalists Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin conducted the most thorough survey and reported that the fire had burned 2,124 acres of urban real estate and destroyed, wholly or in large part, 17,450 buildings. More than 300 people died in the blaze; 100,000 lost their homes. The property damage exceeded $200 million.8
A second question had to do with public order. As Lambert Tree discovered on the shore of Lake Michigan even while the fire was raging, human greed took no time off for civil calamity. If anything, the fire provided opportunities for theft and looting that wouldn’t recur till the next such disaster. (A similar observation had prompted Benjamin Franklin to specify that his Philadelphia firemen carry large leather bags to fire scenes, to preempt the theft of the valuables of those driven from their homes and offices.) Chicago’s police could hardly keep up with crime under normal circumstances; in the extraordinary aftermath of the fire they needed help.
It arrived in Union blue. General Phil Sheridan was in Chicago when the fire broke out; at its height he employed a company of his men and some army gunpowder to blow up buildings in the fire’s path, to deprive the blaze of fuel. The measure did little immediate good, but it reminded Chicago officials that federal help was at hand if necessary. As the flames died down, Sheridan suggested that the small federal force in Chicago could be supplemented by soldiers from forts farther west. Chicago mayor Roswell B. Mason accepted the offer and then some: he placed the city under martial law, with Sheridan in command. The condition lasted two weeks and provoked both opposition, chiefly from Illinois governor John Palmer, who alleged a power grab by Sheridan and contended that if soldiers were needed they should have been state militia, and applause, primarily from property owners. William Bross, a partner in the Chicago Tribune, recalled his reaction upon the arrival of the federal troops. “I saw Sheridan’s boys, with knapsack and musket, march proudly by. Never did deeper emotions of joy overcome me.”9
The third question facing Chicago in the aftermath of the fire was the most challenging. Put simply, could the city be rebuilt? No major American city had ever been so completely destroyed as Chicago (only San Francisco, dealt the double blow of earthquake and fire in 1906, and New Orleans, hammered by hurricane and flood in 2005, have been since). Capitalism had built Chicago; could capitalism rebuild it?
In fact it did, and far more quickly than anyone expected. (So quickly that a popular joke told of an expatriate Chicagoan who rushed to buy a train ticket to his erstwhile home. The ticket agent asked if had lost a loved one in the fire. No, he said; he just wanted to see the ruins before a whole new city was built on top of them.) The first structures erected upon th
e ruins were not homes or hospitals but businesses. W. D. Kerfoot, a prominent real estate agent, returned to the site of his office at 89 Washington Street, between Dearborn and Clark, on the morning of October 10, with a load of lumber; discovering that the remains of the building were still too hot to allow entry, he built a shack in the street. A sign above the door proclaimed, “W. D. Kerfoot. Everything gone but wife, children, and energy.”
Kerfoot rightly guessed that the fire had created opportunities for buying and selling land, which was about the only tangible thing the flames hadn’t destroyed. Merchants were harder pressed, having lost their inventories along with their shops and warehouses. But people still needed what the merchants had sold—needed it now more than ever, in most cases—and this demand was sufficient collateral for the merchants’ creditors. Alfred T. Andreas, a publisher, entrepreneur, and chronicler of Chicago’s growth, destruction, and resurrection, told of merchants receiving telegrams from their creditors even before the extent of the destruction was known. “The general tenor of the dispatches was: ‘We suppose you are burned out. Order what goods you need, and pay what you can. We want your trade.’ ”10
For centuries American Indians had burned the Great Plains to replenish the soil and ensure a fresh crop of grass for the buffalo; white farmers adapted the incendiary technique to their wheat fields. Chicagoans discovered that fire had a similar revivifying effect on a capitalist cityscape. Cities accrete old buildings and infrastructure, to which individuals and firms grow attached for emotional and pecuniary reasons. A fire can clear away the old stuff, making room for buildings that wouldn’t have sprouted otherwise. Chicago sprang up from the ashes of the 1871 fire more vigorous than ever. Voters authorized the reconstruction of the major public buildings, including the post office, the custom house, and the court house. The work served the dual purpose of reasserting the city’s identity and employing thousands of Chicagoans rendered jobless by the flames. Skilled workers did particularly well in the “great rebuilding,” as their talents made them the object of increased demand and won them higher wages. Unskilled workers did less well, but after the Panic of 1873 the continuing construction in Chicago sheltered them from the worst of the depression.11
Chicago’s entrepreneurs competed to hire the best architects, who, lured by the tabula rasa of the post-fire skyline, strove to imprint their particular visions of modern architecture upon the city. They might have built outward, onto the prairie that stretched away to the north, west, and south. But the burned-over district beckoned, and in any event Chicagoans had already defined their commercial area as bounded on the north and west by the Chicago River and on the south by the tangle of rail yards that connected Chicago to the outside world. For this reason, the Chicago Tribune explained, “Chicago must grow upward.”12
It did so, more rapidly and spectacularly than any other city in the world. New York, Philadelphia, London, and Berlin built tall buildings, but they were scattered among existing shorter structures. Chicago’s towers went up wall-to-wall, lining the major thoroughfares for blocks on end. Only the fire made this density possible, accomplishing in two days what deference to the prerogatives of private capital wouldn’t have allowed in two decades. “That part of the burnt district north of Van Buren street and between La Salle street and the South Branch of the River,” an investor recalled, “before the fire was covered with countless old rookeries and miserable shanties, occupied for the past twenty years as dens of infamy and low gambling dives, the resort and rendezvous of thieves, burglars, robbers, and murderers of all grades and colors, to the exclusion of all decency, or business purposes.” Yet because those dens of infamy turned a profit, their landlords resisted their removal. The fire solved the problem.13
In place of the dives rose monuments of commerce. The Columbus Memorial Building soared sixteen stories above State Street; the Masonic Temple Building, at the corner of State and Randolph, became the world’s tallest building (twenty-two stories and 302 feet) upon its completion in 1892. Chicago’s architects and their clients made personal and civic statements with the buildings they erected. “From foundation to roof, every inch of the building bears the impress of superb workmanship,” a contemporary remarked of the Chamber of Commerce Building. “There is not a trace of shoddyism about the structure. There is no veneering. There is no paint. Everything from the mosaic ceiling of the first floor to the Italian marble wainscoting of the thirteenth is real—not an imitation. No cheap substitutes have found their way into this work.” The Chicago Tribune put the matter more succinctly in commenting on plans for the Columbus Memorial project: “A million dollars is a large sum to expend on a lot 100 × 90 feet, when a building costing from $650,000 to 750,000 would in all probability bring in the same rental.”14
The new buildings married art to technology. Steel-frame construction took loads off the walls and allowed the inclusion of large windows, which transformed the interior aesthetics of the buildings. “With the owners, light has been a prime consideration,” an architecture critic for the Tribune remarked. Skylights and multistoried foyers extended the feeling of openness deep into the heart of the structures and diminished the need for artificial lighting. “A perfect flood of light penetrates the central court, so that the interior of the building is almost as brightly illuminated as the exterior during the day,” another critic said of the Chamber of Commerce Building. Elevators whisked visitors to the highest floors, in the highest style. The Hale Elevator Company, based in Chicago, produced a line of elevator cars that ranged in price from $200 to $2,000 and in design from the utilitarian to the baroque. Building lobbies served as portals to the interiors but also as gateways to distant lands and times. “Rising to the height of a story and a half, the walls of the outer vestibule are composed of Numidian, Alps, Green, and Siena marbles,” a guidebook explained of the Unity Building. “Passing through the rotunda, the eye is dazzled by its surprisingly brilliant beauty, designed in the style of the Italian renaissance.”15
The Chicago buildings set new standards for commercial offices. “Dark rooms will not rent, and it therefore does not pay to construct them,” the Tribune explained. “The old practice was to cover the entire lot, and the consequence was dark rooms in a considerable proportion of the space.” That old practice had become uneconomical. “Buildings constructed according to the latest ideas have readily taken tenants away.” The directors of Chicago’s First National Bank, justifying their decision to spare no expense in fitting out their building, described it as a market response to the “demand for perfect office quarters.”16
Many architects left their signatures across Chicago’s skyline, including Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Frederick Baumann, and William Le Baron Jenney. But the most distinctive autograph belonged to the firm of Burnham and Root. Daniel Burnham was the elder by three years and the face of the firm. “Daniel Hudson Burnham was one of the handsomest men I ever saw,” remembered Paul Starrett, a Burnham and Root associate. “It was easy to see how he got commissions. His very bearing and looks were half the battle. He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.” When proposing building designs, Burnham rarely asserted the commonplace. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” he told his colleagues. (The message stuck with Starrett, who moved on from Burnham and Root to construct New York’s Empire State Building.)
John Root was the better artist and designer, a man who could conjure whole buildings from thin air. “He would grow abstracted and silent,” Burnham said of his partner. “A faraway look would come into his eyes, and the building was there before him—every stone of it.” Together the two built several Chicago landmarks, among them the Montauk, which demanded a novel floating foundation and was the first structure to be called a “skyscraper” (“What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral,” a critic swooned, “the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building”); the Rookery, whose broad windows seemed to bring Lake Michigan indoo
rs; and the Monadnock, which opened as the world’s largest office building in 1893.17
BUILDINGS ARE THE bones of cities; streets and railways their arteries and veins. America’s older cities suffered atherosclerosis as avenues built for smaller populations clogged with traffic never anticipated by the designers. New York had it worst, constrained as it was by geography and bursting with new arrivals. Writing at the end of the Civil War, a New York editor deplored the state of transit in his city. Horse-driven omnibuses, the primary mode of surface transport, were a formula for “modern martyrdom,” he said. “The discomforts, inconveniences and annoyances of a trip in one of these vehicles are almost intolerable. From the beginning to the end of the journey a constant quarrel is progressing. The driver quarrels with the passengers, and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle.… Respectable clergymen in white chokers are obliged to listen to loud oaths. Ladies are disgusted, frightened and insulted. Children are alarmed and lift up their voices and weep.” The principal alternative to the omnibuses, steam-driven city railway cars, were differently but comparably odious. “The cars are quieter than the omnibuses, but much more crowded. People are packed in them like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery. To enter or exit is exceedingly difficult. Silks and broadcloths are ruined in the attempt. As in the omnibuses, pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation.… The foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache.”18
