Joseph D Kearney - Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago

This book has been an unusually long time in the making. We began more than twenty years ago, when each of us had been a longtime resident of Chicago. Both of us moved to other cities, one to Milwaukee and the other to New York, where we acquired teaching and administrative responsibilities at different law schools. We found ourselves neverthelessor, perhaps, all the moreunable to resist the challenge of untangling the history of the Chicago lakefront, which is at once a large puzzle and a kind of miracle. Given our other duties, these efforts were mostly concentrated in the summer months, when it was possible to return to the city. Three articles eventually emerged that are reflected in portions of the book. For example, aspects of chapters 1 and 2 originally appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, and we appreciate its permission to draw on our article, cited in the notes; similarly, for chapters 3 and 4, we rely on our subsequent articles in the Northwestern University Law Review. At the same time, we have extensively reworked this material and drawn on further research. The balance of the book, covering most of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first, is entirely new.

Through the years, we have accumulated an extraordinary number of debts. We have benefited from a variety of excellent collections of archival material in Chicago. The Newberry Library includes in its holdings many of the papers of the Illinois Central Railroad, primarily up to 1906. Given that the railroad was a central player in most of the disputes on the lakefront during this period (to anticipate our story), these were invaluable, especially the onion skin copies of correspondence between the officers of the company. We thank the librarians at the Newberry for helping us locate and decipher these materials.

The Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Public Library were also important sources of primary material. Both have important collections of old Chicago newspapers, many of which are not available online. The Chicago History Museum has an unmatched archive of old photographs, to give only one other of many relevant examples. We wish to thank Lesley Martin, Johanna Russ, and others at these institutions for their assistance in mining their rich and well-curated collections.

The Chicago Park District provided critical assistance, especially in connection with the material in chapters 6 and 7 on the construction of Lake Shore Drive and associated lakefront parks. We are most indebted to Julia Sniderman Bachrach for giving us access to the park districts extensive archives, without which these chapters could not have been written.

This scarcely exhausts the catalog. Much of the source material for the book comes from court records. We uncovered these in a number of different places, including the Illinois State Archives in Springfield; the Archives Department of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County; the National Archives and Records Administration at Chicago (with help from Glenn Longacre), at College Park, Maryland, and in Washington, DC; and the library of the Supreme Court of the United States. We gathered legislative materials from the Library of Congress as well as places already mentioned. Additional information came from the records of the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. We express our appreciation to each of these institutions for its help.

We were fortunate to enlist Dennis McClendon not only in making numerous original maps for the book but in helping sort out various relevant details. We are particularly grateful to him.

The librarians and archivists of the universities with which we have been affiliated or places at which we have presented ourselves also provided invaluable support. In addition to the entities noted above, these include Northwestern University School of Law and the McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives at Northwestern; the Evanston Public Library; the libraries of Columbia University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin Law School; the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming; and, last but especially, the Raynor Memorial Libraries and the Eckstein Law Library at Marquette University.

We drew on conversations and support from colleagues and others. James B. Speta and David A. Strifling made a number of helpful contributions to our work. Robert E. Bailey, Gerald A. Danzer, David A. Epstein, Richard A. Epstein, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Jack Guthman, Richard H. Helmholz, Libby Hill, Ann Durkin Keating, John H. Langbein, Kevin B. Leonard, the late Dawn Clark Netsch, Carl Smith, Henry E. Smith, and John Fabian Witt provided suggestions or counsel at one point or another in this lengthy project. Our families heard and bore much of the lakefront projectand, to be sure, offered encouragement.

We owe our largest debt to our research assistants, whose number the descriptive phrase army of would only slightly exaggerate. Some were law students at Northwestern and Columbia.