Whet Moser - Chicago: From Vision to Metropolis

M y favorite description of Chicago comes from one of its greatest writers, Richard Wright, introducing one of its greatest books, the sociological work Black Metropolis. Wright called it the known city: perhaps more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world. A few hundred years before it even became a small village, its earliest visitors knew that the modest site, at the intersection of a Great Lake and a muddy river, would become a vital nexus of commerce. When it did become that, it courted the world to enshrine its status as a global metropolis with the Columbian Exposition and its great White City, a vast display of knowledgephysical sciences, social sciences, and the arts. Chicago grew as the science of the city was being established, via the schools of sociology and economics emerging at the University of Chicago (a world-class institution created from scratch with Rockefeller money), the urban planning of Daniel Burnham, and the works of the architects and engineers who pioneered the form that gives us the urban landscape of the present day: the skyscraper. All this is plotted out along a rationally strict grid of streets that makes navigation as simple as basic math: with just the x-y coordinates, a first-time visitor can easily get anywhere in the city from anywhere else.

But it is also a beautiful city. Its flat prairieland topography and simple grid became a blank slate for architects, civil engineers, and park designers, who borrowed grand ideas like the International Style from the great cities whose ranks Chicago wished to join, while developing its own homegrown image with the Chicago School and the Prairie School. Downtown features one of the richest collections of architectural masterpieces in the world, ranging from the lyricism of Louis Sullivan to the elegant severity of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe via the warm Brutalism of Bertrand Goldberg; and from the engineering brilliance of Fazlur Khan to the art deco dreaming of Daniel Burnham Jr. and Hubert Burnham, the sons of the architect who defined American urban planning. It is bounded by another rational form, the Loopthe circle formed by the citys elevated train system, the El, which whisks people to and from its architectural canyons out into the neighborhoods that contain their own beauty: the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted and Jens Jensen, or the boulevards of Burnham.

Chicago has been labored over: the line that most defines it, from the poem that still defines it, Carl Sandburgs Chicago, is the City of the Big Shoulders. It has been raised out of the swamp by some of the greatest engineering works mankind has conceived. Connecting the Chicago River to the Mississippi through a canal made it possible for the city to exist; reversing the river and raising its buildings out of the muck, and building tunnels far out into the lake to pull in fresh water, allowed it to grow. Its miles of alleysthe most in any city in Americakeep it impressively clean in comparison to its primary urban rival, New York City. It calls itself the City That Works, and for all the ways in which it doesnt, the way it was willed into existence with physical brawn that became physical beauty is apparent throughout.

But for all the work, control, and knowledge, Chicago is and has always been a troubled city. Control and knowledge allowed politicians and businesses to segregate the city along racial lines with tools developed in its universities, so severely that it remains one of the most segregated in the country. It is violent, and world-famous for its violence. Al Capone, the media-friendly gangster who ruled over its Prohibition years, remains its best-known cultural export. Its most famous depiction in the media is probably the images captured by television cameras during the police riot of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, showing officers attacking demonstrators (and sometimes journalists), and its all-powerful but sometimes inarticulate mayor, Richard Daley, declaiming that the police were there to preserve disorder; or the National Guard patrolling its streets after the West Side riots that same summer following the assassination of Martin Luther Kingwho was hit in the head with a rock during a Chicago march two years before.