Destroyed by its Great Fire, Chicago quickly rebuilt, constructing the world's first skyscraper, becoming the fastest-growing city in human history, and hosting the 1893 World's Fair (Columbian Exposition) that changed America.
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Heading into the last quarter of the 1800s, no city on earth was better positioned for commercial dominance than this one. The capital of the Midwest had just fueled the Union’s victory in the Civil War, and its high concentration of industries situated along its many rail lines, vast lakefront, and re-engineered river was attracting thousands of new arrivals every month. But in their rush to expand as quickly as possible, its builders had inadvertently made conditions just right for disaster.
This is part two of the making of modern Chicago, once the fastest-growing city in history.
As we learned in Part 1, Chicago was the world’s largest market for lumber. Not only did it supply its rapidly increasing population with boards and planks for their homes, but it also stored huge quantities of wood awaiting shipment to towns popping up all over the western prairies.
After an extremely dry summer, on an October night in 1871, a strong wind blew into Chicago from the west. Mystery still surrounds exactly what happened next, but somehow a fire started in a barn and quickly spread to other structures.
The wooden city went up like a tinderbox. To escape, thousands of terrified residents waded into the lake and stayed there all night. Over 17,000 buildings and 73 miles of streets were suddenly gone. Incredibly, only about 300 people perished, but over 100,000 were instantly homeless-a third of the city’s population. It was one of the worst fire disasters in modern history.
The same windstorm fueled major fires all around the Great Lakes, most tragically in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a town engulfed so suddenly that 2,500 died and 1.5 million acres of surrounding forest burned. Cut off from the rest of the world when its telegraph lines were charred, and eclipsed by the magnitude of property loss in Chicago, the little-known Peshtigo fire is still the deadliest blaze in American history.
I visited with the Chicago History Museum’s Director of Exhibitions to learn more.
The start of the skyscraper age has transformed not only this city, but our entire planet. Today, Chicago still ranks among the tallest and densest skylines in the world.
Amidst of this swirl of activity, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, also known as the World’s Fair, in 1893. Built on over 600 acres of former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park, the fairgrounds drew 27.5 million visitors over 6 months at a time when the population of the entire country was just over 60 million. Its exhibits projected American optimism, boosted Chicago’s image as the country’s industrial capital, and had a profound cultural influence: especially in architecture and the arts.
Just 20 years after the fire, Chicago had rebuilt to make its debut on the biggest stage.
Erik Larson documented the feverish preparations for opening day in the book, The Devil in the White City, which tells the true story of the prominent architect in charge of realizing the fair’s grand vision.
“To build the fair, Daniel Burnham had confronted a legion of obstacles, any one of which could have - should have - stopped it long before Opening Day. Some wept at its beauty…Whole villages had been imported from Egypt, Algeria, Dahomey, and other far-flung locales, along with their inhabitants. The Street in Cairo exhibit alone employed nearly two hundred Egyptians…Everything about the fair was exotic and, above all, immense. A single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, all at the same time.”
At the time of the fire in the early 1870s, the city had a population of about 300,000…but by the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Chicago had grown to a city of over a million residents-it had surpassed Philadelphia as the second largest city in the country. At that point in time no city in the history of the world had gotten big so quickly as Chicago. It actually became the fourth largest city by population in the entire world. By the end of the 1890s you had London, New York, Paris, Chicago. Those were the four largest global cities with Tokyo right behind Chicago at number five.