SKY-SCRAPERS IN THE PRAIRIE




THE CITY

OF SUPERLATIVES

Chicagoans like to claim that their city has the biggest and greatest of just about everything. Chicago is the second largest city, in the United States; it is also the tenth biggest in the world. It is important not to say this in Chicago. The point to bear in mind about Chicago while talking to Chicagoans is that, no matter what its own size, it has the biggest every­thing in the world. Other places in America have the biggest something, but Chicago has the biggest everything. You may be convinced after all that most Chicago things are bigger than anywhere else; it is unfortunate that they are never the things that one wanted to be big enough. There is, for example, the Merchandise Mart, which claims to be the world's largest commercial building, with seven and a half miles of corridors and its own police force.

In their claims to the biggest and greatest, Chicagoans in a remarkable number of ways are right Although it is no longer the nation's largest meat-packing centre—Omaha, Nebraska, now claims this distinction, Chicago is the nation's busiest air, rail and truck centre, and, since the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the world's greatest inland seaport. Chicago also has the world's largest grain exchange (the Chicago Board of Trade), the world's 'largest hotel (the Conrad Hilton with 2,600 rooms), and the world's largest convention and trade-show facilities. Chicagoans resent any implication that their home is in any sense the "second city" in the US, as New Yorkers have been known to call it. They believe Chicago is really an American city (while" "New York is not America") and point with pride to, among other things, the number of red-blooded American authors—including Theodore Dreiser," Frank Norris,12 Upton Sinclair'3 and Carl Sandburg14—who have called Chicago home.

SKY-SCRAPERS IN THE PRAIRIE

When you arrive in Chicago, you may find it hard to believe that this busy, noisy, modern metropolis with its towering sky-scrapers was until well into the 19th century a muddy onion swamp. But by 1871 this unprom­ising site had become a city of 300,000, the metropolitan centre of the American Midwest. Then, on October 8 of that year, disaster struck. It all began in the barn of a certain Mrs. O'Leary on West De Koven Street where, as the legend goes, a cow kicked over a kerosene lantern, starting a fire that quickly swept the city. The blaze destroyed more than 17,000 buildings that left third of the city's people homeless. Yet in one sense this tragedy was responsible for Chicago's main contribution to the devel­opment of modern architecture. The fire levelled the entire business dis­trict, and the city's engineers and architects •. had to rebuild from the ground up. Armed with a series of technological innovations—most notably steel framework and the hydraulic, lift—they set to work and in the last decades of the 19th century the sky-scraper was born..William-Le Barren Jenny, one of the construction engineers, used this new method when he received the commission to build the Chicago office of the Home Insurance Com­pany. It was ten stories high, much taller than any building ever before erected.

The building was the first "sky-scraper", a term now so common for a high building that few people realize that, to begin with, a "sky­scraper" was a triangular sail used high on the mast of sailing vessels be­fore steamships came into use.15 Quickly a new Chicago arose of brick and stone. Within a year the business district was restored along the crescent formed by Lake Michigan in the city's west. Here lies America's second-ranking canyon of finance, La Salle Street, where the Board of Trade Building towers above a forest of sky-scrapers. Each sky-scraper is stamped by a specific commodity: the Wrigley equals chewing-gum, the "Chicago Tribune" and the "Daily News" mean newspapers, the Continental Illinois—banking, the Chicago Temple—offices of reputed firms, the Merchandise Mart—wholesale dry goods, the imposing Marshal Field—department store de luxe, and so on. Each building stands as if a huge monument to a trust. While you ride through Chicago you have an opportunity to see a little of the city. The streets are usually crowded with traffic at whatever hour you arrive. Over your head thunders the local elevated train, which runs on a platform. If your route takes you near the shore of Lake Michigan, you will see a broad boulevard along the water-front with eight lanes of fast-moving traffic. Beautiful, tall office buildings and hotels make a spectacular picture against the blue waters of the lake. If your route lay further back from the lake, you would see narrow, crowded streets lined with rows and rows of red-brick houses.

Vegetable sellers may push little carts through the streets and call out \the names of things for safe in any one of a number of languages. \ One of Chicago's many nicknames is the "Windy City", and despite me US Weather Bureau, which lists Chicago as only the nation's 19th windiest, it richly deserves this nickname—as you will soon agree if you a\e caught on a Chicago street corner when an icy January gale screams oflf Lake Michigan. Wind is not the only extreme characteristic of the lo^al weather. Chicago is noted for its subzero (Fahrenheit) temperatures in winter and 90°-plus temperatures in summer. And don't be misled if you arrive in winter and it seems unreasonably warm. Chicago weather changes quickly.



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