ancient cities

124 Chicago, Illinois
Steel were killed by police. One response to the
plight of working-class Chicagoans was Hull House,
the most famous of the nation’s settlement houses.
Established in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen
Gates Starr, it served the cultural and material
needs of the poor, particularly immigrants.
Not all of Chicago’s conflicts were based in
work. Beginning in the 1910s, large numbers of
southern African Americans began the “Great
Migration” to northern urban centers; Chicago was
a prime destination. White Chicagoans saw Black
migrants as unwelcome neighbors and competitors
for scarce jobs. Although prior to the twentieth century
the city’s small Black population lived intermingled
among Whites, soon African Americans
found few housing opportunities outside the jealously
guarded boundaries of the South Side ghetto.
Blacks who violated the strict segregation of housing,
such as banker Jesse Binga, were threatened
with violence and sometimes attacked. In July 1919,
hostilities between Whites and Blacks exploded into
a race riot that killed 38 Chicagoans.
Despite its internal conflicts, Chicago’s boosters
marketed the city to the world as a paragon. Most
famously, in 1893 the city hosted the World’s
Columbian Exposition, a celebration of American
progress, in the South Side’s Jackson Park. Daniel
Burnham, the fair’s director, divided the grounds
into two parts: the ornate, neoclassically styled
“White City” and the Midway. The temporary
structures of the White City displayed the achievements
of American civilization, while the exotic and
seedy Midway showcased the world’s indigenous
people and the Ferris Wheel, invented as the fair’s
answer to the Eiffel Tower. Through planning the
fair, Burnham developed the foundation of the City
Beautiful movement and the modern profession of
city planning. Burnham went on to write plans for
several American and international cities, including
Chicago in 1909. The Burnham Plan, while never
fully executed, remains the cornerstone of the city’s
redevelopment efforts in the twenty-first century.
The Chicago Schools
Chicago’s contributions to the world extended
beyond manufactured goods. It also exported ideas
and practices developed locally. Many of Chicago’s
contributions to American intellectual life, particularly
in the analysis of cities, were based at the
University of Chicago, founded in Hyde Park in
1892. Under the leadership of Robert Park and
Ernest Burgess, the university’s sociology department
pioneered what came to be called the “Chicago
School of Sociology.” Treating the city as their personal
research laboratory, the department’s faculty
and graduate students developed an ecological
model of urban life. Cities could be divided into
distinct “natural areas” with characteristics that
sustained themselves over time, even as their populations
shifted. Especially influential was Burgess’s
schematic of the city as a series of concentric circles,
with the downtown “Loop” at the center, and surrounding
zones differentiated by class and function.
For much of the twentieth century, American
urbanists could not untangle themselves from the
Chicago School’s basic assumptions. The Chicago
School of Economics, although focused on the free
market rather than cities, was similarly significant.
Chicago’s built environment is testimony to the
innovative practices and designs of the first and
second Chicago Schools of Architecture. From the
late nineteenth century onward, Chicago architects
experimented with skyscraper design. The downtown
Loop is dotted with dozens of their landmark
buildings. The structure of Dankmar Adler’s Auditorium
Building (1888), for example, stands upon
a raft that allows it to float on the Loop’s marshy
ground. William LeBaron Jenney pushed Chicago
architects away from designing load-bearing walls
toward using iron and steel construction. Their
post–World War II successors designed buildings
that derived their beauty from structure rather than
ornament. The Prairie School of architecture, with
its emphasis on residential building, originated in
Chicago with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd
Wright and radiated around the world.
World War II and the Postwar Period
Chicago’s demographics held steady through the
Great Depression, but significant changes occurred
during and after World War II. Hundreds of thousands
of Americans, many of them southern African
Americans, migrated to the city, drawn by manufacturing
jobs created by the war effort. The city’s
housing supply was grossly inadequate for the
needs of the new residents, forcing people to live in
makeshift cubicles or subdivided apartments, or to
double and triple up with family and strangers.
When the end of war production made building
materials available again, population concentrations