After The Fire: "A better, safer, more orderly Chicago"

October 8, 2011 marks the 140^th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, which burned more than three square miles of the city over three days in 1871.  The true cause of the fire still remains a mystery, but the devastation affected hundreds of thousands of people and homes.  In Chapter 4 of Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution, Robert H. Kargon examines the transformation of a handful of families settled along a marsh to the second largest city in the United States at the time due to its technological and social advances. Below is an excerpt from Kargon’s essay.

 

Just as Manchester was the most exciting city of the 1840s, Chicago was the most exhilarating of the second Industrial Revolution. From a population of a dozen families in 1832, it grew…to over half a million souls in 1880. The decade that followed witnessed an astonishing doubling of that population…The growth was made possible by technical change: by railway engineers who made Chicago one of the nation’s great railway hubs; by civil and sanitary engineers who built roads, reversed river flows, and created high buildings; and by inventors and entrepreneurs who provided employment, drawing the population from the countryside. Eventually, wholly new technical specialties—for example, gas, fire-safety, and electrical engineers—would be created to meet the needs of the metropolis….

Construction using new techniques of civil engineering was omnipresent, to the extent that walking in the street offered its own kind of danger. Grade-level railway crossings claimed hundreds of lives each year...Falling debris and holes in the ground claimed numerous other victims. Fear of fire—a demon of crowded urban spaces—was exacerbated by the memory of the Great Fire of 1871. The fire marshal at the World’s Columbian Exposition was always on heightened alert, and even so, almost seventy-five fires occurred at the fair before it closed, and ultimately fire destroyed its remnants….

 The churn of events spawned new civic associations with interlocking directorates such as the Citizen’s Association, the Law and Order League, and, above all, the Commercial Club, founded in December 1877…At monthly meetings, often with invited speakers, the business elite could discuss and plan for a better, safer, more orderly Chicago. They looked to a combination of force, educational and social improvement, and technological solutions. [T]opics of discussion included “the military as protectors of property, local and national”; “our sewerage: defects and possible remedies”;…“nuisances: smoke, steam whistles, and bad streets”;…“the need for a school of industrial training”; and “cheap and good” worker housing. Over the years the Commercial Club was instrumental in founding the Chicago Manual Training School; in donating Fort Sheridan to the U.S. Army (after the Haymarket riots) and the site of the Second Regiment Armory to the state of Illinois; in pushing for the drainage canal; and in planning, promoting, and carrying out the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.