Kathleen A. Brosnan - City of Lake and Prairie: Chicagos Environmental History

WILLIAM C. BARNETT

Humans have been altering the natural world of prairies and wetlands along Lake Michigan ever since they first built communities here. From the opening chapter on native peoples expanding the tallgrass prairie to the closing chapter on twenty-first century efforts to restore the damaged Calumet ecosystem, this volume provides rich stories of people transforming this region. Many of these groups believed they were improving their community and its use of nature, even as they reversed their predecessors efforts. First, native peoples expanded the tallgrass prairies, then early farmers plowed up those prairie lands, and later industrialists and suburban developers built where farms once stood. Assertions that these transformations represented progress, however, have been called into question in recent decades because of increased understanding of ecology and, later, of growing awareness of environmental justice, sustainability, and climate change. This trio of emerging concepts points the way to new types of human transformations that can improve built environments and restore natural landscapes by balancing economic prosperity with the health of ecosystems and human communities. People will continue to remake Chicago, but this constant process of urban transformation can yield healthier environmental relationships. To achieve this goal, it is critical to examine the history of the intricate and constantly evolving system of man-made and natural components thatpeople have woven together to build the city of Chicago on this dramatically altered landscape of lake and prairie.

Chicago residents and visitors to the city each have their own unique understanding and personal map of the complex web of interconnected neighborhoods along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. And all of these maps are in motion, as Chicago is in an ongoing process of transformation and reinvention, one that is surpassed by few American cities. Longtime residents have multiple layers to their understanding of Chicagos urban geography, with memories of the built environments of their early years lying beneath a contemporary map that accounts for urban redevelopment. Historians and geographers possess an ability to dig deeper into the citys past, researching and writing about the ways that previous generations reshaped the urban environment, and revealing broad patterns such as industrial booms, transportation shifts, or one immigrant group replacing another. Chicago has been reconfigured by American migrants moving west, by ongoing waves of European immigrants, by African Americans migrating from the rural South to the urban North, and by more recent newcomers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Each group fought to make a place for itself, providing labor and ideas to fuel the citys economy, creating new communities and businesses, and reshaping neighborhoods. Todays Chicago is the result of the struggles and contributions of countless men and women, and the citys environmental history is a complex story of a landscape transformed by its people.

Visitors and newcomers to Chicago soon become familiar with a few neighborhoods, but most have difficulty creating their own maps that reflect the complexity of this sprawling city. Outsiders typically start not with a micro-level understanding that emerges from childhood, but instead with a macro-level perspective that is less detailed but can show how Chicago differs from other cities. For the first-time visitor flying into OHare or Midway airports, the view from an airplane window is arrestingthe topography is as flat as a table, with a cluster of skyscrapers rising from the lakeshore, and development radiating across the landscape. Especially at night, with the lake in darkness and streets lit up, the traveler looks down on a built environment that appears to be a perfect Cartesian grid, with straight lines extending north, south, and west, as regular as graph paper. Immigrant communities cannot be identified, and lines drawn onto the landscape by ethnicity, religion, class, and race are not visible. This flat plane can be viewed as a blank slate, a vast canvas on which to plan, build, and then rebuild a city. In the nineteenth century boosters such as land speculator Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard and first Chicago mayor William Butler Ogden inscribed canals, railroads,and industrial facilities onto the prairies and wetlands, and twentieth-century city planners and political leaders such as the architect Daniel Burnham and Mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley sketched out new visions for the booming metropolitan region. For better and for worse, a myriad other Chicagoans have also left their marks on the constantly evolving urban landscape.