October 9, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, this largely lost story is rekindled by Chicago historian Tim Samuelson, the first cultural historian of Chicago.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past,
and this one next, well is history. 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. And we're telling this story to
you today because on this day in history, in eighteen
(00:32):
seventy one, the Great Chicago Fires started. Experts agree on
where that fire started, 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
(00:54):
the Chicago Fire got started.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It was an area of small shacks and 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 entrepreneurial businesswoman.
(01:19):
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
cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn a fire,
(01:41):
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 core to nine
in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because
(02:06):
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?
You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what
(02:26):
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
was a fairly built up metropolis by eighteen seventy one,
(02:48):
with substantial buildings built out of stone, a 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
substantial architectural character and quality comparable to other cities of
(03:14):
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
it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another.
It was the case of such an intense heat that
(03:36):
things would just spontaneously combust.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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's set the
(04:01):
conditions under which your fire like this could even happen.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
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 this meandering little
river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly
(04:28):
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 that connects
to the waterways of the East, and everything and everyone
(04:48):
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 eighteen thirty with just
a handful of people, You start to get a few
thousands of people in the eighteen forties, modest little buildings.
(05:09):
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
(05:32):
a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere
in not only the country, but in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
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 (05:49):
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 that
(06:11):
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
(06:37):
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
(07:03):
were totally consumed. There were wood the tails 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
(07:27):
say 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
(07:47):
races across 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 what's Fort Avenue in
Clark Street today. But all the city didn't burn. The
(08:10):
South side of Chicago, 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
(08:33):
the farther reaches 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
(08:57):
same waterways, the same rail lines coming into the city
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
(09:20):
you had 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 (09:44):
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
(10:11):
our American stories and the story of the Great Chicago
Fire and more importantly, the Great Chicago Recovery. And 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 (10:42):
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.
(11:28):
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 was 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,
(12:57):
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,
(13:17):
rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of
room for development of new office spas 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.
(14:01):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:48):
first skyscrapers arise in the mid eighteen eighties on the
site of buildings that only fifteen years before people were saying,
we're so wonderful in modern So the fire actually set
in motion a series of chain reactions that made Chicago
(15:08):
not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and 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 (15:36):
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, some kind of raw, crude kind of work.
It was often a simplified architecture that was very direct
(16:01):
in 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, but it began
(16:23):
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 the surprise and
(16:45):
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 Columbuses landing
in the America. Because cities out east thought they had
it buttoned up, who got it? Chicago and the World's
(17:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
World 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,
(17:40):
Crippled 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):
It's 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
(18:21):
different 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 were trying to show the world that
it was indestructible, that there was a quality to these buildings,
(18:45):
and so you looked at it. It wasn't just someplace
built out of necessity or makeshift cors. These were elegant,
modern buildings and it occupied the whole of downtown and
also of the area areas that were 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 Fire, which started on this day in history
in eighteen seventy one. Here on our American stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past,
and this one next, well is history. 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. And we're telling this story to
you today because on this day in history, in eighteen
(00:32):
seventy one, the Great Chicago Fires started. Experts agree on
where that fire started, 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
(00:54):
the Chicago Fire got started.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It was an area of small shacks and 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 entrepreneurial businesswoman.
(01:19):
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
cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn a fire,
(01:41):
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 core to nine
in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because
(02:06):
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?
You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what
(02:26):
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
was a fairly built up metropolis by eighteen seventy one,
(02:48):
with substantial buildings built out of stone, a 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
substantial architectural character and quality comparable to other cities of
(03:14):
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
it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another.
It was the case of such an intense heat that
(03:36):
things would just spontaneously combust.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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's set the
(04:01):
conditions under which your fire like this could even happen.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
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 this meandering little
river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly
(04:28):
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 that connects
to the waterways of the East, and everything and everyone
(04:48):
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 eighteen thirty with just
a handful of people, You start to get a few
thousands of people in the eighteen forties, modest little buildings.
(05:09):
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
(05:32):
a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere
in not only the country, but in the world.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
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 (05:49):
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 that
(06:11):
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
(06:37):
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
(07:03):
were totally consumed. There were wood the tails 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
(07:27):
say 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
(07:47):
races across 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 what's Fort Avenue in
Clark Street today. But all the city didn't burn. The
(08:10):
South side of Chicago, 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
(08:33):
the farther reaches 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
(08:57):
same waterways, the same rail lines coming into the city
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
(09:20):
you had 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 (09:44):
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
(10:11):
our American stories and the story of the Great Chicago
Fire and more importantly, the Great Chicago Recovery. And 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 (10:42):
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.
(11:28):
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 was 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,
(12:57):
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,
(13:17):
rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of
room for development of new office spas 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.
(14:01):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:48):
first skyscrapers arise in the mid eighteen eighties on the
site of buildings that only fifteen years before people were saying,
we're so wonderful in modern So the fire actually set
in motion a series of chain reactions that made Chicago
(15:08):
not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and 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 (15:36):
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, some kind of raw, crude kind of work.
It was often a simplified architecture that was very direct
(16:01):
in 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, but it began
(16:23):
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 the surprise and
(16:45):
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 Columbuses landing
in the America. Because cities out east thought they had
it buttoned up, who got it? Chicago and the World's
(17:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
World 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,
(17:40):
Crippled 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):
It's 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
(18:21):
different 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 were trying to show the world that
it was indestructible, that there was a quality to these buildings,
(18:45):
and so you looked at it. It wasn't just someplace
built out of necessity or makeshift cors. These were elegant,
modern buildings and it occupied the whole of downtown and
also of the area areas that were 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 Fire, which started on this day in history
in eighteen seventy one. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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