January 22, 2026 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, most people know the story of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Fewer know what happened next. After flames destroyed the heart of the city and left more than 100,000 people homeless, Chicago didn’t collapse. It rebuilt faster and bigger than anyone thought possible. Businesses reopened while the rubble was still smoking. New buildings rose within months. And in just a few decades, the city transformed itself into a global center of commerce, architecture, and innovation.
Chicago historian Tim Samuelson, the city’s first official cultural historian, tells the largely forgotten story of how Chicago’s location, grit, and can-do spirit made one of the greatest urban recoveries in American history possible, and how that recovery gave birth to the modern skyscraper and the Chicago we know today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habb and this is our American stories,
and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past,
and this one next, well is his story. Well part
of a story that you know, the Great Chicago Fire
of eighteen seventy one, but the more interesting story, which
is the Great Chicago recovery. Experts agree on where that
(00:31):
fire started back in eighteen seventy one, a little under
two miles from downtown Chicago, just to the southwest, but
how it started remains an open question. And so we
bring you Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian of the City
of Chicago, to tell us about this area and dive
into the mythology of how the Chicago Fire got started.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It was an area of small shacks and cottages of
largely Irish immigrants. The fire itself began in the barn
of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. For the scale of missus
O'Leary and her existence in the neighborhood, she was an
(01:15):
entrepreneurial businesswoman. There was more than one cow in the barn,
and she had a modest but substantial business. And of course,
the thing that's amazing is that for years people told
this story about her at night milking the cow, the
(01:35):
cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn a fire,
and then high winds and dry conditions go and burn
down a significant part of the city. Well, if you
have a dairy business, you don't milk your cows at night.
In fact, usually at the time the fire started, and
we're talking about, oh, maybe about a quarter to nine
(01:59):
in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because
you have to get up early to milk those cows.
And again there's multiple cows in the barn, so it
makes for kind of an interesting ironic thing that poor
missus O'Leary gets fingered. But where did the fire start?
(02:21):
You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what
didn't burn in the Great Chicago Fire The O'Leary's house.
It made it through just fine. But the fire took
off on a path that would go to the northeast,
jumps the Chicago River, headed right for downtown Chicago, which
(02:42):
was a fairly built up metropolis by eighteen seventy one,
with substantial buildings built out of stone at brick and
iron fronts. Many people talk about downtown Chicago being largely
wood buildings. That's another myth that kind of needs to
get solved. The buildings of Chicago were of size and
(03:05):
substantial architectural character and quality comparable to other cities of
that era. But when you have the conditions of dry conditions,
high winds, those stone walls will crumble, a dignified front
made out of cast iron would melt like butter. And
(03:27):
it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another.
It was the case of such an intense heat that
things would just spontaneously combust.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Let's talk a little bit about Chicago and what caused
the fire in terms of Chicago's growth, because in eighteen
forty Chicago was basically a small Midwestern town. I wouldn't
even call the city. Talk about the growth, the meteoric
growth from eighteen forty to eighteen seventy that set the
(03:59):
condition under which your fire like this could have even happened.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Let's go back to let's say the eighteen thirties or
the eighteen forties. What was here not much. In fact,
if you were here in eighteen thirty, people argue about
how many, but it might be fifty to one hundred people.
The buildings are just little shacks along the meandering little
river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly
(04:26):
located swampy backwater because as a country is at that
point starting to grow west, Chicago was the strategic location.
Located on the chain of the Great Lakes, it connects
to the waterways of the east, and everything and everyone
(04:47):
heading west would funnel through Chicago. So Chicago is the
perfect place for anyone or anything to get anywhere. So
you go from a mudhole in eight eighteen thirty with
just a handful of people, You start to get a
few thousands of people in the eighteen forties, modest little buildings.
(05:08):
By eighteen seventy you have a major metropolis of over
three hundred thousand people. It becomes a headquarters of commerce
and manufacturing. It was a place that when you had
the combination of the waterways meeting the rails, you could
bring raw materials in, transform them into something else with
(05:30):
a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere
in not only the country, but in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Let's talk about the night of the fire. How long
did it rage, how much of the city to consume,
and what did the fires spare.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
The evening of the fire on October eighth eighteen seventy
one was in the center of a really tough drought.
Things were really dry, so the fire does break out
in the barn of the O'Leary family. There is some
bungling on the part of how the fire was reported
(06:09):
that delayed firefighters and getting to the fire to extinguish it. However,
the conditions were such that with the wood buildings that
surrounded the O'Leary barn, the high winds, and the dry conditions,
it probably can be said that the fire was almost
unstoppable from the start. The fire races through the wood
(06:36):
buildings of this immigrant neighborhood less than two miles southwest
of downtown Chicago, and then carries through in kind of
a wedge. And well, the fire didn't destroy the whole city,
but it took out its whole central business district heart.
The imposing stone, iron and brick buildings of down Chicago
(07:01):
were totally consumed. There were wood details in downtown Chicago
in terms of ornamental mansard roofs, wood paving blocks, but
for the most part the buildings were fairly substantial, but
the interiors are largely made out of wood. The total
heat totally combusts them. So the fire starts let's say
(07:26):
a quarter to eight in the evening, and you have
by one o'clock in the morning, it is burning downtown Chicago,
and there is the courthouse right in the central Square
that is basically in flames. And then it races across
(07:47):
the main part of the Chicago River, burns out a
significant part of the north side of Chicago, burning out
to almost the triangular wedge that would be on the
north side almost near it's Fort Avenue in Clark Street today.
But all the city didn't burn. The South side of Chicago,
(08:10):
that was a significant part of the city, was hardly
touched at all. The West side of Chicago, which was
also a significant part of Chicago, was hardly touched at
all except for that wedge that burned from the start
of the fire at the O'Leary Barn. And also there
were areas of the north side and the farther reaches
(08:33):
of the North side into the West that didn't burn
at all. Chicago was able to recover fairly quickly after
the fire because the one thing that the fire could
not destroy was Chicago's perfect location that made the city
thrive to begin with, and you could get anything you
wanted to rebuild the city by the same waterways, the
(08:57):
same rail lines coming into the sea that could still
deliver the goods for the city to thrive. And there
were substantial parts of the city that were untouched by
the fire, where the businesses that once had their offices
in downtown Chicago could take temporary quarters. So you had
(09:20):
businessmen who had, you know, elegant offices in downtown Chicago.
The ruins were still smoking, and they were making arrangements
to get quarters in old boarding houses south of downtown
Chicago and re establish their business and get to work
rebuilding the destroyed city. Didn't take long.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Didn't take long. Indeed, when we come back, we'll find
out how this all happened. We continue with Tim Samuelson
here on our American story, and we continue here with
(10:10):
our American stories and the story of the Great Chicago
Fire and more importantly, the Great Chicago Recovery. When we're
talking to cultural historian and the guy who knows just
about all there is to know about Chicago, Tim Samuelson,
let's talk about the damage caused by the fire and
the extraordinary recovery. We had one hundred thousand people were homeless,
(10:31):
seventeen thousand buildings were destroyed, and three hundred people were killed.
Tim how did the people of Chicago their spirit play
into this city's recovery.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I can let you in on a little secret about
Chicago that's not often talked about, and it's something that
I think is a matter of pride, is that, for
all of its growth and prosperity, Chicago is still a tough,
little can do midwestern town in spirit. And so people
who came to Chicago came here with the idea of
making a buck. The people who came to Chicago in
(11:05):
its early growth were the outsiders who didn't fit in
to old established societies. So Chicago quickly became a place
that was like undaunted by any kind of challenge that
you could imagine. They could build anything, and there was
the incentive to do it. There was nobody to tell
you not to try a new way of doing things.
(11:27):
And what wound up happening is these new way of
doing things that sometimes the people out east kind of
laughed and sneered at, wound up changing the standard way
people did things. So this is an innovative hub. So
now you've got the central part of the city, a
smoking ruin a large part of the North Side. People homeless,
(11:51):
people just rolled up their sleeves and got together and
worked to build things as quickly as possible. One of
the first buildings built in the downtown area that downtown
was still smoking in rubble. It's William Kerfoot, who was
a real estate man, builds a wooden shack, which she
(12:12):
called the first building in the burned district. And he
had a sign on it hand painted that said all
gone but wife, children and energy. That's the Chicago spirit.
And it wasn't long before, even into early eighteen seventy two,
and just months after the fire, new buildings were rising
(12:36):
that replaced the old ones. Ironically, the size and the
scale of those buildings wasn't that much different from the
ones that were there before. But then there's an unusual phenomena.
Now people came for the new opportunities. After the fire,
(12:56):
Chicago grew in a scale like it had never before.
The downtown area, which was largely confined into a small
geographic area defined by the features that gave Chicago growth.
The lake on one side, the River on two sides,
(13:16):
rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of
room for development of new office space. Many cities can
grow sideways. Chicago couldn't do that. The downtown after the
fire was built up with all these elegant four and
(13:37):
five story buildings. They didn't have elevators for the most part,
but Chicago was proud of these wonderful Second Empire Stone
Front Chicago was reborn. They would talk glowingly of these
new buildings that arose in eighteen seventy two, eighteen seventy three.
There was even a big depression, and they kept on building.
(14:00):
But by the eighteen eighties, these same buildings that Chicago
was so proud of as the symbol of an all
new city were too small for all the businesses that
wanted to be there. These same buildings were being knocked
down within fifteen years. Fifteen year old buildings were being
called old and obsolete, and these innovative Chicagoans rated the
(14:25):
toolbox of the Industrial Revolution. Goaded by the real estate
people and the landowners to make buildings taller. In taking
things like metal framing, perfecting elevators into these amazing high
speed vehicles of vertical traffic, Chicago creates the skyscraper. The
(14:47):
first skyscrapers arise in the mid eighteen eighties on the
site of buildings that only fifteen years before people were
staying were so wonderful and mod So the fire actually
set in motion a series of chain reactions that made
Chicago not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and
(15:13):
over again to make it the city that it is today.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And indeed, the population in eighteen seventy one was three
hundred thousand. It jumped to five hundred thousand in eighteen eighty,
and by eighteen ninety it had catapulted past the one
million mark, a triple increase from the Great Chicago Fire.
That's it's unimaginable today tim that something like this could
be done.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Nobody could believe the growth of the city, and the
old cities of the East shook their heads in disbelief.
In fact, they would kind of look how to disparage
the city and some kind of and looked at things
like its architecture is some kind of raw, crude kind
of work. It was often a simplified architecture that was
(15:59):
very direct, an expression of material. This is the birth
of modern architecture. It was happening here, the birth of
the skyscraper happened here. It didn't happen out east, where
cities could grow sideways and in population. Chicago not only
grew in terms of people arriving in Chicago after the fire,
(16:21):
but it began in the eighteen eighties to aggressively annex
adjoining towns, making that part of Chicago itself. So you
have this behemoth of a city in terms of population
and growing geographic size by eighteen ninety and much to
(16:43):
the surprise and perhaps anger of the old established cities
of the East, when it was decided to have a
World's Exposition on the event of the four hundredth anniversary
of Columbus landing in the Americas, cities out east thought
they had it buttoned up. Who got it? Chicago and
(17:06):
the World's Columbian Exposition showed Chicago not only as a
city that had suddenly grown up in the place of
smokestacks and stockyards, but a city of culture achievement that
was there before the world.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Indeed, the Chicago School of Architecture and so much more
in art and music. I want to read one thing
to you a final point and get your reaction. Is
from British novelist and journalist Mary Anne Hardy, and she
was an international writer who wrote about the recovery. We
expected to find traces of ugliness and deformity everywhere, Crippled
(17:40):
buildings and lame, limping streets running along forlorn, crooked conditions,
waiting for a time to restore their vigor and build
up their beauty anew but phoenix like the city has
risen from the ashes. Grander and state leaders than ever
talk about that.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Absolutely true that Chicago had reinvented itself, and it's unusual
to have the center of a large metropolis suddenly built
a new from scratch, all at once. A typical downtown
of an American city would consist of buildings of different
(18:21):
scale and quality from a long timeline of their history.
Here was something that not only is rising from the ashes,
all at once new and modern, but the matter of pride,
and if we're trying to show the world that it
was indestructible, that there was a quality to these buildings.
(18:44):
And so you looked at it. It wasn't just someplace
built out of necessity or makeshift coarters. These were elegant,
modern buildings, and it occupied the whole of downtown and
also of the areas that we're in the path of
the fire.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
And you've been listening to Tim Samuelson, and he's the
cultural historian of the city of Chicago, and he's right
about the quality of the buildings, but all of that,
it all represented the quality of the people and the
quality of those old Midwestern values. The story of the
Great Chicago Recovery here are now American story.
This is Lee Habb and this is our American stories,
and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past,
and this one next, well is his story. Well part
of a story that you know, the Great Chicago Fire
of eighteen seventy one, but the more interesting story, which
is the Great Chicago recovery. Experts agree on where that
(00:31):
fire started back in eighteen seventy one, a little under
two miles from downtown Chicago, just to the southwest, but
how it started remains an open question. And so we
bring you Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian of the City
of Chicago, to tell us about this area and dive
into the mythology of how the Chicago Fire got started.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It was an area of small shacks and cottages of
largely Irish immigrants. The fire itself began in the barn
of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. For the scale of missus
O'Leary and her existence in the neighborhood, she was an
(01:15):
entrepreneurial businesswoman. There was more than one cow in the barn,
and she had a modest but substantial business. And of course,
the thing that's amazing is that for years people told
this story about her at night milking the cow, the
(01:35):
cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn a fire,
and then high winds and dry conditions go and burn
down a significant part of the city. Well, if you
have a dairy business, you don't milk your cows at night.
In fact, usually at the time the fire started, and
we're talking about, oh, maybe about a quarter to nine
(01:59):
in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because
you have to get up early to milk those cows.
And again there's multiple cows in the barn, so it
makes for kind of an interesting ironic thing that poor
missus O'Leary gets fingered. But where did the fire start?
(02:21):
You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what
didn't burn in the Great Chicago Fire The O'Leary's house.
It made it through just fine. But the fire took
off on a path that would go to the northeast,
jumps the Chicago River, headed right for downtown Chicago, which
(02:42):
was a fairly built up metropolis by eighteen seventy one,
with substantial buildings built out of stone at brick and
iron fronts. Many people talk about downtown Chicago being largely
wood buildings. That's another myth that kind of needs to
get solved. The buildings of Chicago were of size and
(03:05):
substantial architectural character and quality comparable to other cities of
that era. But when you have the conditions of dry conditions,
high winds, those stone walls will crumble, a dignified front
made out of cast iron would melt like butter. And
(03:27):
it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another.
It was the case of such an intense heat that
things would just spontaneously combust.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Let's talk a little bit about Chicago and what caused
the fire in terms of Chicago's growth, because in eighteen
forty Chicago was basically a small Midwestern town. I wouldn't
even call the city. Talk about the growth, the meteoric
growth from eighteen forty to eighteen seventy that set the
(03:59):
condition under which your fire like this could have even happened.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Let's go back to let's say the eighteen thirties or
the eighteen forties. What was here not much. In fact,
if you were here in eighteen thirty, people argue about
how many, but it might be fifty to one hundred people.
The buildings are just little shacks along the meandering little
river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly
(04:26):
located swampy backwater because as a country is at that
point starting to grow west, Chicago was the strategic location.
Located on the chain of the Great Lakes, it connects
to the waterways of the east, and everything and everyone
(04:47):
heading west would funnel through Chicago. So Chicago is the
perfect place for anyone or anything to get anywhere. So
you go from a mudhole in eight eighteen thirty with
just a handful of people, You start to get a
few thousands of people in the eighteen forties, modest little buildings.
(05:08):
By eighteen seventy you have a major metropolis of over
three hundred thousand people. It becomes a headquarters of commerce
and manufacturing. It was a place that when you had
the combination of the waterways meeting the rails, you could
bring raw materials in, transform them into something else with
(05:30):
a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere
in not only the country, but in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Let's talk about the night of the fire. How long
did it rage, how much of the city to consume,
and what did the fires spare.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
The evening of the fire on October eighth eighteen seventy
one was in the center of a really tough drought.
Things were really dry, so the fire does break out
in the barn of the O'Leary family. There is some
bungling on the part of how the fire was reported
(06:09):
that delayed firefighters and getting to the fire to extinguish it. However,
the conditions were such that with the wood buildings that
surrounded the O'Leary barn, the high winds, and the dry conditions,
it probably can be said that the fire was almost
unstoppable from the start. The fire races through the wood
(06:36):
buildings of this immigrant neighborhood less than two miles southwest
of downtown Chicago, and then carries through in kind of
a wedge. And well, the fire didn't destroy the whole city,
but it took out its whole central business district heart.
The imposing stone, iron and brick buildings of down Chicago
(07:01):
were totally consumed. There were wood details in downtown Chicago
in terms of ornamental mansard roofs, wood paving blocks, but
for the most part the buildings were fairly substantial, but
the interiors are largely made out of wood. The total
heat totally combusts them. So the fire starts let's say
(07:26):
a quarter to eight in the evening, and you have
by one o'clock in the morning, it is burning downtown Chicago,
and there is the courthouse right in the central Square
that is basically in flames. And then it races across
(07:47):
the main part of the Chicago River, burns out a
significant part of the north side of Chicago, burning out
to almost the triangular wedge that would be on the
north side almost near it's Fort Avenue in Clark Street today.
But all the city didn't burn. The South side of Chicago,
(08:10):
that was a significant part of the city, was hardly
touched at all. The West side of Chicago, which was
also a significant part of Chicago, was hardly touched at
all except for that wedge that burned from the start
of the fire at the O'Leary Barn. And also there
were areas of the north side and the farther reaches
(08:33):
of the North side into the West that didn't burn
at all. Chicago was able to recover fairly quickly after
the fire because the one thing that the fire could
not destroy was Chicago's perfect location that made the city
thrive to begin with, and you could get anything you
wanted to rebuild the city by the same waterways, the
(08:57):
same rail lines coming into the sea that could still
deliver the goods for the city to thrive. And there
were substantial parts of the city that were untouched by
the fire, where the businesses that once had their offices
in downtown Chicago could take temporary quarters. So you had
(09:20):
businessmen who had, you know, elegant offices in downtown Chicago.
The ruins were still smoking, and they were making arrangements
to get quarters in old boarding houses south of downtown
Chicago and re establish their business and get to work
rebuilding the destroyed city. Didn't take long.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Didn't take long. Indeed, when we come back, we'll find
out how this all happened. We continue with Tim Samuelson
here on our American story, and we continue here with
(10:10):
our American stories and the story of the Great Chicago
Fire and more importantly, the Great Chicago Recovery. When we're
talking to cultural historian and the guy who knows just
about all there is to know about Chicago, Tim Samuelson,
let's talk about the damage caused by the fire and
the extraordinary recovery. We had one hundred thousand people were homeless,
(10:31):
seventeen thousand buildings were destroyed, and three hundred people were killed.
Tim how did the people of Chicago their spirit play
into this city's recovery.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I can let you in on a little secret about
Chicago that's not often talked about, and it's something that
I think is a matter of pride, is that, for
all of its growth and prosperity, Chicago is still a tough,
little can do midwestern town in spirit. And so people
who came to Chicago came here with the idea of
making a buck. The people who came to Chicago in
(11:05):
its early growth were the outsiders who didn't fit in
to old established societies. So Chicago quickly became a place
that was like undaunted by any kind of challenge that
you could imagine. They could build anything, and there was
the incentive to do it. There was nobody to tell
you not to try a new way of doing things.
(11:27):
And what wound up happening is these new way of
doing things that sometimes the people out east kind of
laughed and sneered at, wound up changing the standard way
people did things. So this is an innovative hub. So
now you've got the central part of the city, a
smoking ruin a large part of the North Side. People homeless,
(11:51):
people just rolled up their sleeves and got together and
worked to build things as quickly as possible. One of
the first buildings built in the downtown area that downtown
was still smoking in rubble. It's William Kerfoot, who was
a real estate man, builds a wooden shack, which she
(12:12):
called the first building in the burned district. And he
had a sign on it hand painted that said all
gone but wife, children and energy. That's the Chicago spirit.
And it wasn't long before, even into early eighteen seventy two,
and just months after the fire, new buildings were rising
(12:36):
that replaced the old ones. Ironically, the size and the
scale of those buildings wasn't that much different from the
ones that were there before. But then there's an unusual phenomena.
Now people came for the new opportunities. After the fire,
(12:56):
Chicago grew in a scale like it had never before.
The downtown area, which was largely confined into a small
geographic area defined by the features that gave Chicago growth.
The lake on one side, the River on two sides,
(13:16):
rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of
room for development of new office space. Many cities can
grow sideways. Chicago couldn't do that. The downtown after the
fire was built up with all these elegant four and
(13:37):
five story buildings. They didn't have elevators for the most part,
but Chicago was proud of these wonderful Second Empire Stone
Front Chicago was reborn. They would talk glowingly of these
new buildings that arose in eighteen seventy two, eighteen seventy three.
There was even a big depression, and they kept on building.
(14:00):
But by the eighteen eighties, these same buildings that Chicago
was so proud of as the symbol of an all
new city were too small for all the businesses that
wanted to be there. These same buildings were being knocked
down within fifteen years. Fifteen year old buildings were being
called old and obsolete, and these innovative Chicagoans rated the
(14:25):
toolbox of the Industrial Revolution. Goaded by the real estate
people and the landowners to make buildings taller. In taking
things like metal framing, perfecting elevators into these amazing high
speed vehicles of vertical traffic, Chicago creates the skyscraper. The
(14:47):
first skyscrapers arise in the mid eighteen eighties on the
site of buildings that only fifteen years before people were
staying were so wonderful and mod So the fire actually
set in motion a series of chain reactions that made
Chicago not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and
(15:13):
over again to make it the city that it is today.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And indeed, the population in eighteen seventy one was three
hundred thousand. It jumped to five hundred thousand in eighteen eighty,
and by eighteen ninety it had catapulted past the one
million mark, a triple increase from the Great Chicago Fire.
That's it's unimaginable today tim that something like this could
be done.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Nobody could believe the growth of the city, and the
old cities of the East shook their heads in disbelief.
In fact, they would kind of look how to disparage
the city and some kind of and looked at things
like its architecture is some kind of raw, crude kind
of work. It was often a simplified architecture that was
(15:59):
very direct, an expression of material. This is the birth
of modern architecture. It was happening here, the birth of
the skyscraper happened here. It didn't happen out east, where
cities could grow sideways and in population. Chicago not only
grew in terms of people arriving in Chicago after the fire,
(16:21):
but it began in the eighteen eighties to aggressively annex
adjoining towns, making that part of Chicago itself. So you
have this behemoth of a city in terms of population
and growing geographic size by eighteen ninety and much to
(16:43):
the surprise and perhaps anger of the old established cities
of the East, when it was decided to have a
World's Exposition on the event of the four hundredth anniversary
of Columbus landing in the Americas, cities out east thought
they had it buttoned up. Who got it? Chicago and
(17:06):
the World's Columbian Exposition showed Chicago not only as a
city that had suddenly grown up in the place of
smokestacks and stockyards, but a city of culture achievement that
was there before the world.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Indeed, the Chicago School of Architecture and so much more
in art and music. I want to read one thing
to you a final point and get your reaction. Is
from British novelist and journalist Mary Anne Hardy, and she
was an international writer who wrote about the recovery. We
expected to find traces of ugliness and deformity everywhere, Crippled
(17:40):
buildings and lame, limping streets running along forlorn, crooked conditions,
waiting for a time to restore their vigor and build
up their beauty anew but phoenix like the city has
risen from the ashes. Grander and state leaders than ever
talk about that.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Absolutely true that Chicago had reinvented itself, and it's unusual
to have the center of a large metropolis suddenly built
a new from scratch, all at once. A typical downtown
of an American city would consist of buildings of different
(18:21):
scale and quality from a long timeline of their history.
Here was something that not only is rising from the ashes,
all at once new and modern, but the matter of pride,
and if we're trying to show the world that it
was indestructible, that there was a quality to these buildings.
(18:44):
And so you looked at it. It wasn't just someplace
built out of necessity or makeshift coarters. These were elegant,
modern buildings, and it occupied the whole of downtown and
also of the areas that we're in the path of
the fire.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
And you've been listening to Tim Samuelson, and he's the
cultural historian of the city of Chicago, and he's right
about the quality of the buildings, but all of that,
it all represented the quality of the people and the
quality of those old Midwestern values. The story of the
Great Chicago Recovery here are now American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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