The period 1856-57 must have been truly hectic for Boyington, for only two months after he had received the commission for the design of the new First Universalist Church, he had a third church on Wabash under construction with the laying of the cornerstone for the new Wabash Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church on July 13, 1857, at the northwest corner of Wabash and Harrison.  (Boyington, therefore, had three major churches and Chicago’s premiere residential project, all of which were located within a three-block long strip of Wabash, in various stages of design and construction at the same time.)  The First Methodist Church at the southeast corner of Washington and Clark, had been bookended by the former First Presbyterian Church directly across Clark Street to the west and the former First Universalist Church immediately to its east.  Whereas its former neighbors were free to sell their property and move to greener pastures, the First Methodist Church was bound by its acceptance of the original donation of its lot that specified that if the church decided to move, the property would revert to the estate of the donor. Therefore, there was no financial incentive for the Methodists to leave the Courthouse Square area.  

Regardless of this limitation, however, mission work had to be provided to the expanding residential area to the south, and once again, as with their original move to the Courthouse area, the Methodists had actually been at the forefront of the second migration of Chicago’s congregations.  In 1848, five years before McCormick purchased the Wabash Street lot for the South Church, Orrington Lunt, a member of First Methodist, had bought the northwest corner of State and Harrison and offered it to the congregation as a site for a future mission church in the area.  The church’s board took possession of the lot in the spring of 1851, bought a portion of the old abandoned Second Presbyterian Church on Randolph, and had it moved to the new site.  On August 24, 1851, the State Street Methodist Episcopal Church was formally organized, quickly becoming a fixture in the surrounding neighborhood.

Jason Gurley, Metropolitan Hall, northwest corner of Randolph and La Salle, 1855.  Printer’s Row is in the right foreground. (Gilbert)

With the construction of the Universalist and the two Presbyterian churches only a block away on Wabash, as this Methodist congregation outgrew its outmoded framed building and began to dream of a new edifice, it was quite obvious that a move to the emerging new “Church Row” along Wabash was a foregone conclusion.  In the spring of 1857 a new pastor, the Rev. William M. D. Ryan was appointed to the church with the expressed charge of moving the congregation to a new building on Wabash.  The Methodists appear to have taken their cue from the Presbyterians in how to afford such an expansion by taking advantage of the substantial increase in the value of their real estate on the southeast corner of Washington and Clark.  While the congregation was prohibited by the original gift of the property from moving from the location, the agreement had placed no limits on where within the site the actual church sanctuary had to be placed.  In one, if not the earliest, examples of using the air rights of a property in Chicago, the congregational leaders decided to tear down the existing building across from the Courthouse (which had been severely compromised with the corresponding raising of the street levels that had left the floor of its sanctuary five feet below the level of the sidewalks) and erected a new three-story building.  

Edward Burling was commissioned to design the building, the First Methodist Episcopal Church Block that from the Athens limestone exterior actually appeared to be a four-story business building in which the ground floor contained eight stores and the second floor had a number of rental offices.  While he continued to place windows in the apparent third and fourth floors, Burling had actually placed the church’s two-story, 33’ high sanctuary on the third floor which was designed as one of the city’s first amphitheater-seating church plans that had a capacity of 1000. While apparently inspired by Van Osdel’s design of the new Courthouse with its large, assembly spaces located on the top floor, Burling’s more immediate precedent for this design more than likely had been Metropolitan Hall designed by Jason Gurley in 1854.  Located diagonally across the Courthouse Square at the northwest corner of Randolph and La Salle, Gurley had placed the building’s two-story auditorium at the third floor but had more appropriately detailed its windows as two-story high arches instead of how Burling had detailed the sanctuary windows in the exterior of the Methodist Block.

The annual rental income from the offices and stores amounted to approximately $15,000, some of which was applied to the support of the struggling State Street congregation. The northwest corner of Wabash and Harrison was purchased and on April 1, 1857, the name of the congregation was formally changed to the “Wabash Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church.”  Boyington was once again engaged to design the building, for which he produced another totally different composition.  He kept the Gothic language and axial front elevation of the Universalist design, but apparently was asked by the congregation to replace the single steeple motif with one which incorporated a pair of symmetric corner towers, which rose nowhere to the height of their neighbors’ ambitious needles.  The building was completed at a cost of $65,000 and dedicated on July 15, 1858.

The last of the antebellum churches to be erected in the new Wabash Protestant district was Trinity Episcopal Church on the southside of Jackson, between Wabash and Michigan, commenced in August 1860.  The congregation had occupied a building on Madison near Clark since 1844.  The new building, designed by T. V. Wadskier was somewhat unique in that the congregation chose not to have side aisle windows in the 65’ by 125’ deep sanctuary, more than likely to reduce distractions from the outside.  The congregation was known for its choir and musical programs, so the purposeful lack of windows in the walls may have been in response to make the sanctuary more of a performance hall.  In place of windows, Wadskier located a series of eight skylights in the ceiling on both sides of its ridge beam to introduce daylight into the interior.  “The effect is pleasing, notwithstanding the degree of solemnity which is produced.”  During the evening, the space was amply lit with gaslights.

Therefore, within a period of less than three years, the Van Osdel-designed Washington Street Church Row had surrendered its primacy as Chicago’s religious district to the newly developed strip of Boyington-designed churches strung along Wabash.  And what proved to be point where the old Washington Street Church Row pivoted to become the new Wabash strip of churches?  The Second Presbyterian Church, which had also set the trend for the Gothic language used in some of the new churches.  Instead of running east-west or parallel with the river’s Main Branch, as it had along Washington, the new religious strip ran north-south along Wabash, or parallel with the lake.  Even more significant from an urbanistic view, however, was the fact that the new line of churches also ran parallel to how the railroads from the East entered the city.  Trains to and from the East had to skirt the bottom of Lake Michigan; hence these railroads came into Chicago from the south, not from the west as did the canal that connected the Chicago River to the Mississippi, nor from the east as did lake traffic.  The commercial future of Chicago, the railroad hub, no longer lay along the east-west axis of the river, but to the south.  Therefore, how the city would rotate to a north-south orientation to meet the Eastern railroads would decide the future pattern of its urban fabric and also would determine who would benefit financially from controlling the inevitable real estate development to the south.  Somewhat surprisingly then, it was the city’s wealthy residents, along with their churches, and not its industry or commercial interests who were the first to rotate the city’s orientation to the south.  Therefore, while the new church precinct had relatively easily realigned itself within Chicago’s newly emerging north/south urban grid of the railroad, the city’s retail strip still ran east-west along Lake Street, parallel to the river.  This district had been recently bolstered, in fact, by a series of investments by the area’s owners in a new type of construction that was taking the country by storm: the cast iron-fronted building.  While Boyington was getting the commissions for the Wabash Street churches, Van Osdel had moved on to bringing the new technology to Chicago.  Maybe Van Osdel simply did not have the time to design these major churches while also teaching himself how to manipulate the new construction technique that had just been developed in his hometown of New York City. 

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Jevni and Almini. Chicago Illustrated. Chicago, 1966.

Reminiscences of Chicago During the Civil War,  Chicago: Lakeside, 1914.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Meanwhile, McCormick’s attack from the rear had forced the First Presbyterian Church to take stock of its predicament.  Even though their new building designed by Van Osdel was only six years old (having been dedicated in September 1849), the surrounding neighborhood had significantly changed during this relatively short period.  While its membership had already far exceeded the seating capacity of their new building, many of its members had joined the residential flight from the encroachments of the city’s growing business district and had moved precisely to the vicinity of McCormick’s South Church.  Why would those who had Presbyterian leanings that had moved into the new neighborhood make the long trek north on Sunday mornings when the South Church was right around the corner?

In addition, the recently completed Courthouse across the street had not improved, but actually aggravated the congregation’s deteriorating neighborhood situation.  Although Van Osdel’s design had unquestionably enhanced the visual quality of the church’s surrounding environment, the newly enlarged visage of the Courthouse on the Courthouse Square became a lightning rod for civil protest and violence during the turbulent times that preceded the start of the Civil War.  For instance, on the morning of Sunday, April 22, 1855, the congregation found loaded cannons, of all things, across the street from their building, aimed at the two northern approaches to the Courthouse Square.  Mayor Boone, a member of the Know-Nothing Party who had won the last election on an anti-immigrant platform, had instigated a fight with the city’s growing German community.  Intended as a direct reproach to the Germans who had arrived with their traditional Sunday beer-centered social customs, Boone ordered the selective enforcement of a long-ignored city ordinance that prohibited the operations of saloons on Sundays.  The mayor made it perfectly clear that this was to apply only to those establishments that dispensed the foreign beverage, but not to saloons that sold “American” whiskey.  The first Sunday that the ordinance was enforced saw the arrest of over two hundred Germans in violation, with the case set to be heard on the morning of Saturday, April 21 by Justice of the Peace Henry L. Rucker, whose office was located across from the Courthouse.

In defense of their comrades, a column of some three hundred Germans marched into the Square to the rhythm of a fife and drum prior to the hearing.  Having proceeded to vent their anger at the judge and the mayor, the crowd withdrew to the northeast corner of the Square and blocked the intersection of Clark and Randolph (which was directly opposite the steps of the First Presbyterian Church).  The situation worsened during the afternoon as people, many of whom were now armed and were either sympathetic to the plight of the Germans or simply looking for adventure, added to the ranks of the mob that had in the meantime retreated across the Clark Street bridge to the North side to regroup,  By 3:00 P.M. the rabble had once again worked up the nerve to make an attack, and proceeded once again to the Courthouse.

Meanwhile, the mayor had been informed of the throng’s intent and began marshaling his forces.  As the mob started across the bridge, the mayor had the bridge’s tender swing it open, thereby helplessly isolating more than half of the horde above the river’s waters.  The time gained by this maneuver permitted the police to position themselves in the best strategic locations before the Mayor ordered the tender to close the bridge.  In the ensuing melee, people on both sides were wounded, and the crowd was once again forced back off the bridge.  Taking no chances, the mayor had brought in cannons during the evening that were positioned to cover the approaches to the square, should the Germans try to break through police lines in the coming light.  Hence, the First Presbyterian Church, like all of the churches in Church Row, found itself in the midst of the “lager beer riots,” that it must be admitted, was not the ideal setting in which to conduct a Bible study.

The effects of Chesbrough’s proposal, then under discussion, to raise the grade of the city’s streets also had to be taken into account by the Presbyterians.  The raising of the streets around the Courthouse Square by an additional five feet had also negatively impacted the Courthouse.  In addition to reducing the available daylight to the basement, it also had the overall effect of shortening the courthouse’s silhouette.  These issues, in addition to the continued increase in the city’s population, brought to Van Osdel the commission in 1858 to add a 25’ high fourth floor and a grand cupola over the center of the building that housed an observation balcony accessed by an iron staircase.  Washington and Clark Streets were slated to be raised at least between eight to ten feet in the near future.  Not only would this block out the sun and air to the important spaces in the basement of the First Presbyterian’s church, but even more devastating would be the shortening effect this would have on the all-important steeple.  A ten-foot increase in the grade meant a ten-foot shortening on the church’s tower. 

Raising the Presbyterian’s building to the new grade was apparently not an option at the time, for while raising a five-story brick hotel was one thing, keeping a heavy, 163’ tall masonry and wood tower plumb while being jacked ten feet in the air was a feat no one was ready to attempt, or at least pay for.  The biggest incentive to relocate, however, was undoubtedly provided by the huge increase in commercial activity throughout the business district at this time.  As business and industry supplanted the church’s surrounding residential neighborhood, the quality of the everyday environment about the church had deteriorated.  A local observer commented that it simply was not conducive to developing the appropriate frame of mind for worship when one had to “wind one’s way to the sanctuary through barricades of petroleum, molasses, salt, tea, and fish barrels, empty soap boxes, stacks of heavy hardware and such.”  This may have been the case, but the increase in business activity had also caused a corresponding increase in the value of the congregation’s property.

As construction of the South Church finally started during the summer of 1855 on McCormick’s lot with the help of McCormick’s money, the New Schoolers apparently felt pressured to respond in kind and in July, the Westminster Presbyterian Church (NS) was formally organized with the intent to construct a church on the lot in the North Division that had been purchased two years earlier.  Not having the resources of a McCormick, however, had put the New Schoolers at a distinct disadvantage.  Worse still, the First Presbyterian congregation had overextended itself six years earlier when it finally succumbed to the building fever in Church Row: an extravagance for which the congregation was still paying.  The church’s Session took a calculated look at the converging forces on the congregation, and in the fall decided to sell their relatively new edifice and use the windfall from their lot’s recently-inflated value to help finance a major building campaign in direct response to McCormick’s challenge.  The large profit gained from the sale of the church’s lot at the southwest corner of Clark and Washington would be used for four items: first, to pay off the remaining debt the congregation still owed on the building it was about to sell; second, to build a much larger building closer to the S. Michigan/Wabash residential district; third, to finance a building for the new Westminster congregation on the north side; and lastly, to help fund the purchase of a lot and construction of a church for the Third Presbyterian (NS) Church that had been sputtering in the West Division since its organization in 1847.

The congregation had little trouble in finding a buyer for such a piece of prime real estate and in November 1855 purchased a lot on Wabash between Van Buren and Tyler, immediately to the north of McCormick’s South Church, to offer as clear a choice as possible to the area’s Presbyterians.  Following the lead of Terrace Row, the congregation hired Boyington, and not Van Osdel, to design their new church.  Boyington’s prior design experience enabled him to respond to the stylistic desires of his diverse clientele, as was evident in his early Chicago projects.  Rather than repeating the “Italianate” language of Michigan Terrace, he produced what was referred to as a “Norman Style” design in Athens marble that utilized a vertical accent with round-headed windows.  The design included two magnificent towers that faced the lake.  The south tower was planned to be much taller than the north one, an asymmetrical composition undoubtedly inspired by the new building of the church’s cousin congregation: Renwick’s trendsetting Second Presbyterian Church, that also fronted Wabash Street, just six blocks farther north.  Once again, however, the congregation’s ambition far exceeded their resources, so that the towers would have to wait for better times, since the cost of the project sans towers was $115,000.  The new First Presbyterian Church was dedicated on October 15, 1857, concluding the congregation’s retreat from the city’s business district.

With the precedent of a protestant congregation abandoning the Courthouse Square for the quiet confines of Wabash thus established, it didn’t take long for the remaining churches to follow suit.  In contrast to the Roman Catholic tradition of “the parish,” the Protestant churches were not necessarily tied to a geographic area, therefore, they were relatively free to pick up and move with their members. In October 1855, the First Universalist Church had welcomed a new pastor, the Rev. Samuel B. Mason.  He was so popular that the congregation quickly outgrew its small building on Washington, only a half block east of the former First Presbyterian Church.  The Universalists followed to the letter the pattern set by their former neighbors.  In 1856, they sold their property and used the profit to purchase the northwest corner of Wabash and Van Buren, just a half block north of where the new First Presbyterian Church was under construction and used the remaining money to build their own Boyington-designed building.  The congregation who had started Chicago’s steeple chase in 1844, used this opportunity to regain its short-lived prestige by erecting a 175′ high tower of stone and timber, five feet higher than the Baptists’ three-year old steeple.  Boyington’s stylistic abilities were apparently put to the test by the congregation who, while wanting the more traditional single, central tower characteristic of Chicago’s churches, also liked the Gothic imagery of Renwick’s Second Presbyterian Church.  Hence, Boyington incorporated pointed arched-windows in the rock-faced exterior of Lemont limestone. As the Universalist’s building was to be smaller than the new First Presbyterian Church, not only did it cost half as much ($60,000) and was dedicated five months earlier on May 7, 1857, but the Universalists did not have to wait more than two years for their tower.  The newcomer, Boyington, had quickly surpassed Van Osdel’s long-held reputation of having designed Chicago’s tallest buildings, a reputation he would maintain for the next thirty-five years of his career.

The deleterious effects of the rapid increase in business activity were not limited solely to the Courthouse Square, however, but were spread along the entire main branch of the river.  Another church that moved in response to these changes was St. James Episcopal, that had remained at the corner of Wabash between Illinois and Michigan (now Hubbard) Streets on the north side of the Main Branch since it had been erected in 1835.  The congregation voted in 1856 to relocate five blocks farther north to the corner of Wabash and Huron, rather conveniently to the block immediately across Erie from William Ogden’s estate.  Edward Burling was commissioned to design a more accurate Gothic Revival design than had been the original building.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Dedmon, Emmett. Fabulous Chicago: A Great City’s History and People. Canada: McClelland and Stewart, Ltd, 1981.

Jevni and Almini. Chicago Illustrated. Chicago, 1966.

Sloan, Tom L. B., The Architecture of W.W. Boyington, Northwestern University, M.Arts, 1962.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

The centerpiece of this new neighborhood was Terrace Row located on Michigan Avenue, facing the lake, between Jackson and Van Buren, designed by a recently arrived addition to the city’s growing architectural community, William W. Boyington.  He had come to Chicago in November 1853, abandoning a flourishing practice in Massachusetts at the age of thirty-five in order to cast his lot with Chicago’s burgeoning construction boom.  In addition to the customary background in carpentry and construction, Boyington apparently had also received some architectural training in New York City that had helped to point him toward the design side of the profession, in which he had easily excelled in his native Massachusetts.  He had become quite facile in producing buildings in a variety of historical styles that he would prove in Chicago as he quickly accrued a series of projects, making his workload comparable to that of Van Osdel’s within two years of his arrival.  The commission for such a high profile project as Terrace Row gave Boyington the opportunity to exhibit his talents to the city’s elite, a number of whom were committed to move into the project upon its completion.

In contrast to Chicago’s traditional single-family house, these families had opted to experiment with an idea that was very much in vogue in New York City at the time: the attached row house.  The project was intended to comprise of fourteen attached four-story walk-ups.  Boyington avoided the inherent monotony of similar projects by breaking the composition into a central pavilion of two five-story units that was flanked with corner pavilions that also comprised of two five-story apartments.  Athens marble and a bracketed cornice lent an appropriate air of sophistication to the building that afforded its residents an unobstructed view of the lake (and, eventually, the puffing IC trains).  Such a grandiose project and investment by some of Chicago’s leading families seemed not only to guarantee the success of the surrounding area’s residential development, but also served to acquaint these people with Boyington’s talent that would quickly net a series of projects for him in the immediate neighborhood.

As Boyington started the construction of Terrace Row, one of America’s leading comedic entertainers, James H. McVicker, had returned to Chicago to build the best theater house in the west.  McVicker had made his theatrical debut on John B. Rice’s stage on March 2, 1848, where he joined the stock company, eventually becoming the manager of Rice’s rebuilt theater following the fire in 1850.  A few years later he went on tour, first to the east coast where he established his reputation that eventually thrust him across the ocean to play to European houses in 1855.  The following year he returned to the states and established a theater in St. Louis, only to be drawn back to Chicago in March 1857.  McVicker chose a site south of Rice’s theater, on Madison between Dearborn and State Streets and spared no cost in erecting a design by Boyington that had a final price of $85,000 (by comparison, Rice had spent $11,000 to rebuild his theater).  Boyington planned a freestanding (there were alleys on all three sides) three-story structure of red brick and stone trim.  The first floor contained stores while the upper two floors contained offices and clubrooms that fronted on the street.  Boyington completed the elevation with flanking corner pavilions that rose an extra story above the roofline.  Entrance to the theater was gained through a central lobby, 30′ wide and 40′ deep, from which stairs led to the auditorium that could seat 2500 theatergoers.  Upon entering the theater, theatergoers were greeted by a poignant painting on the stage curtain of Farnum’s Rock Island Bridge over the Mississippi River  The doors opened on November 5, 1857, with a performance of the comedy “Honeymoon” to what quickly became a Chicago landmark. (McVicker was so successful with the new theater that John Rice was forced to eventually admit defeat and tear his theater down in 1860 and replaced it with a business block.)

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Gilbert, Paul T., and Charles L. Bryson. Chicago and Its Makers. Chicago: F. Mendelsohn, 1929.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago-v. I/II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Sloan, Tom L. B., The Architecture of W.W. Boyington, Northwestern University, M.Arts, 1962.

Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy. Architecture in Old Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Despite the two cholera outbreaks, Chicago’s population, now being fed by the direct railroad links from the East, continued to grow at its breakneck pace.  When the first Michigan Southern train pulled into town in 1852, the city’s population had been 38,733.  With both the Michigan Southern and Michigan Central bringing people directly to Chicago, 1853 saw an additional 22,000 newcomers swell the ranks of the city to 60,662 (one of every three persons on the streets that year had just moved into town).  By 1857, the population had swelled to 93,000 and as the city’s population continued to grow, construction of new housing had moved farther and farther away from the noise, dirt, and hustle and bustle of the river’s commercial district. The population explosion fueled by the railroads had wrought both a massive reconfiguration of Chicago’s residential pattern and a parallel increase in commercial activity to the center of town, that also vied for new space upon which to locate.  Property values in the business district soared.  The increased hustle and bustle of business, with its accompanying noise, filth, and crime, had a considerably negative impact on the residential atmosphere of Chicago’s original residential neighborhoods in the South District, especially those adjacent to “Church Row.”  

As the polluted river was often viewed by many to be one of the major sources of the city’s health problems, the recent cholera outbreaks only provided extra incentive to move out, away from the river as far as possible. A favorite location was farther south on Michigan Avenue, facing the lake for the obvious immediate view, and possibly, the healthier breeze off the lake.  Those who either were not quick enough to snap up a lakefront property, or could not afford the price of one, settled for being close to the lake and its elite residents by moving to Wabash Street.

As mentioned earlier, the First Presbyterian Church was the last congregation in Church Row to have replaced their original building, having started construction in the fall of 1848.  The Second Presbyterian Church had responded in kind with the construction of an even larger edifice outside the confines of Church Row in the following year.  Although this congregation had split from the First in 1842 because they did not share Rev. Bascom’s strident abolitionism, they still had at least one thing in common with the mother congregation: they were both “New School” Presbyterians.  The Presbyterian Church in the U. S. in 1837 had split over doctrinal issues into two branches:  the “New School” (NS) that disagreed with those who stood firm for a more orthodox doctrine, who continued as the “Old School” (OS) Presbyterians. One of the major differences was on the issue of slavery, to wit: in 1845 the Old School reaffirmed its position of non-interference in the issue of the day, beating back a proposal by abolitionists within the church to return to the church’s earlier anti-slavery stance of 1818.

It had been New School Presbyterians who had been at the forefront of Chicago’s settlement, and it wasn’t until May 1848, that the number of Old School believers had reached the critical mass needed to call a pastor.  This group found the Rev. R. H. Richardson willing to serve, and gathered in the Rush Medical building on May 28, to hear his first sermon.  Three days later, Cyrus McCormick, a pious soul and staunch Old School Presbyterian, had returned to Chicago for his first view of the new factory that Gray had erected during his absence.  On August 26, in the thick of the first harvest season as the primary manufacturer of his machine and embroiled in the legal battle with Gray and Ogden, McCormick characteristically still made time to participate as one of the twenty-six charter members who organized the North Presbyterian (OS) Church of Chicago.  They immediately commenced building a one-story wood frame church with Gothic trappings (including a “pepper box” steeple) at the northeast corner of N. Clark and Michigan (now Hubbard) Streets. The North Presbyterian Church was finished in November 1848 and Richardson was formally installed as its pastor on November 19.

The fortunes of the new church so closely paralleled those of the McCormick clan that by 1852, the congregation began construction of a larger building at the southwest corner of Illinois and Wolcott (State) Streets.  McCormick, meanwhile, having won international distinction with his reaper at the 1851 World’s Exposition in London, ascended so quickly to the top echelon of Chicago’s power elite that he began to quietly formulate his “Great Church Enterprise.”  McCormick firmly believed that the Presbyterian Church (OS) and the Democratic Party, with members in both northern and southern states, were primarily responsible for holding the Union together in the face of the slavery issue.  Believing that the emerging NorthWest would cast the deciding voice over the issue, McCormick devised a plan to strengthen, with his own money if need be, the teaching of orthodox Old School Presbyterianism throughout the NorthWest, and thereby, had hoped to preserve the status quo in the country.

In response to the success enjoyed by the Old School congregation in the North Division, the two New School congregations in the South District purchased a lot in 1853 on the north side of Ohio, between State and Dearborn, with an eye towards the eventual formation of a NS congregation in the midst of the OS stronghold.  McCormick’s reaction was characteristically combative: he purchased a lot on the south side intending to donate it for the start of an OS congregation in the South Division where the New School had reigned since 1833, when Jeremiah Porter had first set foot in Chicago.  McCormick had an ulterior motive, however, in the purchase of the south side lot.  By 1854, he had become dissatisfied with Rev. Richardson’s preaching and quietly organized a movement to form a second Old School congregation in which he could have more direct influence on its doctrinal direction. Understandably, McCormick did not wish to publicly embarrass the pastor and thereby split the congregation, nor did he care to burn his own bridges. With apparent altruism, therefore, McCormick, along with brother Leander, sister Mary, and other North Church members, presented a petition to the church’s Session on November 12, 1854, to organize an Old School church in the South Division for which he offered to donate a lot as the site of the new church if the petition was approved.

The Session approved the plan on November 24, and the congregation was formally organized as the South Presbyterian Church on December 19.  McCormick supplied liberal financial support in getting the new congregation started, including the donation of the lot and half of the money needed to construct the church building, a one-story frame edifice that could seat 400 people.  The lot that McCormick supplied for the South Presbyterian Church was nowhere near the existing Church Row, however, but rather a full six blocks farther south at the southwest corner of Tyler (Congress) and Wabash.  Rather than directly confronting the two NS Presbyterian churches on their home turf along the Washington Street corridor, McCormick’s real estate savvy had recognized the changing residential pattern of Chicago’s upper class, and he simply leapfrogged over the existing churches and planted his new church in the midst of the city’s emerging elite residential section along Michigan and Wabash, that up to then did not have a Presbyterian church within walking distance.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Hutchinson, William T. Cyrus Hall McCormick- Harvest: 1856-1884, New York: The Century Co., 1930.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– v.I, II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Another possible cause for the cholera problem was thought to have been the insufficient burial of dead bodies in the city cemeteries.  Two cemeteries, one in the North and one in the South, had been established by the city in 1835.  The north cemetery had originally been located near Chicago Avenue, east of Clark Street, but as the city grew outwards, it was relocated in 1842 to a plot of 80 swampy acres along the lakefront centered around North Avenue that at the time was thought to have been sufficiently removed from the city limits for health concerns.  This was divided into a Protestant burial ground in the northern half, and the southern portion that contained a Catholic cemetery (that had been originally purchased in 1843 by Rev. de St. Palais), a Jewish cemetery, a general city cemetery, and a potter’s field.  The south cemetery had been originally located near the lakeshore at 23^rd Street. Following the 1852 reappearance of cholera, a group of nine business leaders, including J. Young Scammon, Norman B. Judd, and Ebenezer Peck, sensing the opportunity in this type of real estate investment, purchased 183 acres at what is now 67^th and S. Cottage Grove Avenue and incorporated the non-sectarian Oak Woods Cemetery on February 12, 1853.

In 1857, Dr. John H. Rauch had been brought to Chicago in 1857 from Iowa to be a professor at the Rush Medical College, of which Ogden was its primary benefactor and the president of its Board of Trustees. Beginning in the Fall of 1858, Rauck had embarked on an unceasing campaign railing against the health hazards posed by the City Cemetery, that was reinforced with a petition to Common Council signed by “prominent citizens who resided on the north side.” That November, Common Council appointed a special commission to study the cemetery issue.  Ogden wasted precious little time in duplicating his partner Scammon’s new cemetery on the northside.  He partnered with John H. Kinzie in obtaining 350 acres at what is today the southwest corner of Ravenswood and Peterson, planning to build the city’s second private cemetery, Rosehill Cemetery. In less than three months after Council had appointed the Cemetery Commission, Ogden formally incorporated Rosehill Cemetery on February 11, 1859.  Four days later the commission recommended to Council that burials in the current City Cemetery be halted and negotiations with the Rosehill trustees take place to coordinate the transfer of burials.  On March 8, Council approved the commission’s recommendation, Ogden by that time had already managed to have the country’s leading botanist, William Saunders of Philadelphia, whom he had chosen to design the cemetery’s landscape, travel to Chicago to inspect the land so he could start designing a plan for its new function.  The cemetery was consecrated on July 28, 1859, thus the entire process from Dr. Rauck’s initial speeches to the cemetery’s consecration took less than nine months: a prime example of the “efficiency” with which Ogden ran his business operations. Curiously, Ogden had offered the presidency of the cemetery to local attorney, Thomas Barbour Bryan, who was known to be interested in improving the city’s cemeteries ever since his son had died in 1855 but had graciously declined Ogden’s offer.

Bryan had been born in Alexandria, VA, had studied law at Harvard, and upon graduation had migrated to the burgeoning metropolis of Cincinnati to establish his law practice.  He recognized the investment potential that Chicago offered, however, and moved to Chicago in 1852, establishing the firm of Bryan & Hatch, and began to expand his investments into real estate and banking.  Following the 1854 cholera epidemic, over 2000 bodies had been temporary disinterred in 1855 in the hope that this might impede the return of the disease.  One of these bodies had been Bryan’s recently deceased son, who was aghast that his son’s body had been disturbed. Following the emotional upset caused by the disinterment of his son’s body, Bryan began to appreciate the need for a better burial option than what the city currently offered.  Coincidently at this point in time, Cincinnati, Bryan’s former residence, was making news with the announcement that it was undertaking a complete redesign of its non-sectarian cemetery, Spring Grove.

Cincinnati had established its reputation as the horticultural center of the West with its many landscaped estates in suburban Clifton, Nicholas Longworth’s famous Catawba grape vineyard on Mt. Adams that would become Eden Park in 1869, and the publication of the magazine Western Horticultural Review.  A group of Cincinnati’s business leaders had established Spring Grove Cemetery in 1845 that was the largest cemetery in the world at this time.  In the same year that Bryan had left Cincinnati, Prussian immigrant landscape architect Adolph Strauch, who had learned his art under the gardeners at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace and would soon become America’s leading landscape designer following the premature death of Alexander Jackson Downing in 1852, had moved into town and established his practice.  Two years later, in late 1854 he had been contracted to redesign the grounds of Spring Grove.  He would transform it into a veritable Garden of Eden and America’s premiere cemetery employing his theory of a “landscape lawn plan,” and in the process change the nature of American cemeteries from one of fenced in plots sporting a crushing number of monuments and statues, to an open, parklike arboretum that minimized the number of monuments placed within the landscape. Strauch had been brought to Chicago by the Board of Oak Woods Cemetery on the southside to design its landscape in time for the first burial to take place in 1860.

While Bryan was accessing his options regarding a new cemetery in Chicago, he had also bought a tract of land of over 1000 acres to the west of Chicago in an area that at the time was known as Cottage Hill, whose name would be changed in 1869 to Elmhurst.  Choosing not to live in the city proper, but to commute to this suburban location via Ogden’s G&CU, Bryan set out to replicate the landscaped estates he had seen in Cincinnati, naming his estate “Bird’s Nest.”  The following year, his good friend, painter George P. A. Healy purchased some of Bryan’s property and moved in next door.  Healy, who had been born and raised in Boston, had travelled to London and Paris at the age of twenty-one in 1834 to study painting, where, over the course of the next two decades, he had become quite famous at portrait painting, Louis-Phillippe, then the King of France, being among his subjects and admirers.  He had been brought to Chicago in the fall of 1855 through the invitation of Ogden who had made his acquaintance in Paris during his visit to the World’s Fair while on his European excursion. Promising a bright future with a number of commissions, Ogden had invited him to stay over the winter of 1855-6 at Ogden Grove, hoping to entice a renowned artist to grace the streets and salons of Chicago.

With the precedent of Spring Grove and other major cemeteries back in the east, Bryan, sensing the possible profit to be had from this type of real estate business, purchased sometime between late 1858 and early 1860, some 86 acres in the North Division, centered around what is today’s intersection of Clark Street and Irving Park Road. In early 1860, he invited Healy, Ogden, Ogden’s brother-in-law and partner, Edwin Sheldon (Sheldon had married William’s sister Francis in 1846, and was a partner, along with Mahlon Ogden, in Ogden, Jones, and Co. in 1850), and Sidney Sawyer to join him in incorporating Graceland Cemetery on June 27, 1860, in what would become Chicago’s premiere cemetery.  During his initial planning of Graceland, Bryan had engaged the services of Swain Nelson, a Swedish immigrant landscape gardener who had moved to Chicago in 1852, to assist with the necessary preliminary road and grading issues. Once the cemetery was formally incorporated, the Board followed Ogden’s precedent in Rosehill and commissioned William Saunders to also design Graceland’s overall plan, placing Nelson in charge of overseeing its actual construction. Now, all that was left to do was to have Common Council actually enforce the ban on new burials in the City Cemetery and the demand for burial plots in the new cemeteries would skyrocket.  The ever-faithful Ezra McCagg, Ogden’s partner and brother-in-law, was sent out to innocently start a petition campaign to have the city stop burials in the City Cemetery and to dedicate it as a city park.  Unfortunately, with the start of the Civil War this issue was pushed to the backburner.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Cropsey, Eugene H. Crosby’s Opera House: Symbol of Chicago’s Cultural Awakening. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999.

Harpster, Jack. A Biography of William B. Ogden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2009.

Funigiello, Philip J.,  Florence Lathrop Page,  Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994. 

Tishler, William H., Midwestern Landscape Architecture, Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000.

Vernon, Christopher, Graceland Cemetery: A Design History, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2011.

Wille, Lois. Forever Open, Clear, and Free; The Struggle For Chicago’s Lakefront. Chicago: Regnery, 1972.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Owners of existing buildings that were in good repair and in no need of rebuilding, however, faced an altogether different prospect: how were they to modify their building in response to the eventual change in street height?  This issue was compounded by the fact that by 1857, the city’s building inventory had grown to include a much greater number of larger, multistory buildings than just the few large hotels, like the Tremont House.  With the improvement in the economy starting in 1848 and fueled by the population explosion made possible with the coming of the railroads, the types of businesses had begun to diversify and correspondingly increase in size.  The demand for office space by professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and bankers, once sufficiently provided by a small room or two in one of the hotels, had so increased in Chicago by 1855 that a new typology of building, the four-story office block had started to make its appearance on the city’s streets.

These were quickly replacing the original two-story wood frame buildings that the city’s founders had erected and, correspondingly, were changing the scale of the city’s urban fabric.  In order to be fireproof, these buildings were constructed with masonry bearing walls, either in stone, brick, or brick with a stone veneer.  The ground or street floor would be designed to accommodate a number of rental stores that would benefit from large windows for display purposes.  The building’s entrance to the upper floors needed to be celebrated, usually with a pediment or portico. An owner wanting to spend as little money as possible would encourage his architect/builder to simply design a four-story masonry box (a flat-roofed palazzo) and treat the windows as simple, repetitive openings with a arched-head, such as Theodore V. Wadskier employed in the Major Block at the southeast corner of Madison and La Salle. Wadskier had been born in St. Croix in the Danish West Indies and educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.  He came to the U.S. in 1850, first practicing in Philadelphia, before moving to Chicago in 1857.  

If the client or the architect had any artistic pretensions, the architect could manipulate the windows in a number of different ways to achieve a visually richer effect.  One such technique was to group two windows with a separating column, such as was done in the Marine Bank and Fire Insurance Building erected by Ogden and Scammon at the northeast corner of Lake and La Salle.  

This building was also one of the first exterior uses of Chicago’s local Lemont limestone that would soon accrue the appellation of “Athenian Marble.” A different window detail involved treating the windows as if they were the openings within a continuous arcade.  If the pier that supported each arch was extended down into the next story, unbroken by the floor below, such as in Speed’s Block on the east side of Dearborn, just north of Madison, the façade would be given a distinct vertical emphasis, making it look taller than it actually was.  These were the typical design solutions one finds in Chicago’s early “business blocks.”

Later in 1857, the inherent solution to the problem of raising the elevation of the streets upon which these buildings fronted was to be seen occurring at the northeast corner of Dearborn and Randolph.  J. D. Jennings had contracted James Brown from Boston to literally lift his store up to the new level.  This was done with screw jacks that temporarily raised the building off its foundation.  The requisite stone retaining wall was then built at the edge of the street, a new basement was excavated under the floating building, a new foundation wall was constructed up to the underside of the building, and the jacks slowly lowered until the store rested comfortably at its new grade. If a building could be lifted, there was also nothing stopping an owner from simply moving it to another site and then selling the old site for a tidy profit:

“I have seen even three-story buildings travel down the street… seldom drawn by more than one horse.  Often the entire width of a street is blocked by a house that is out for a walk,,, Moving the house does not necessarily mean that those living in it must move out.  I have seen houses on the move while the families living in them continued with their daily tasks, keeping fire in the stove, eating their meals as usual, and at night quietly going to bed to wake up the next morning on some other street.  Once a house passed my window while a tavern business in it went on as usual.”

The Chicagoan whose name first comes to mind when the raising of the city’s buildings is mentioned is George Mortimer Pullman, one the city’s ablest businessmen, who is better known in American history as one of the developers of the railroad “sleeping car.”  Pullman was born near Buffalo, NY, where his father had a building-moving business, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the construction of the Erie Canal.  The elder Pullman had even patented a device for transporting buildings on wheels.  Young George took to the business, gaining a reputation as a troubleshooter who would personally resolve problems as quickly as they arose, and upon the death of his father in 1853, took over the business just in time to take advantage of the state’s widening of the canal in 1853-4.  In January 1859, the wife of the owner of Chicago’s Matteson House had visited Pullman’s hometown of Albion, NY, and through the course of polite conversation had mentioned Chicago’s “high grade” program and her husband’s problem in finding a contractor willing to attempt to raise such a large, heavy building.  

Like everything else he ever attempted, the twenty-eight-year-old Pullman wasted no time in travelling to Chicago, where he was eventually successful in getting the contract to raise, what at that time would have been the largest building in the city ever attempted to be elevated.  The five-story, all-brick Matteson House stood at the northwest corner of Dearborn and Randolph.  It took Pullman’s crew 800 screw jacks and only ten days to raise it the necessary five feet to meet the planned elevation of the intersection.  The quick and professional manner in which he executed the task established his reputation and launched his career as the city’s premiere building raising contractor.

In less than a year later, Pullman was one of three contractors employed to attempt another first: the raising of an entire block all at the same time: the buildings that were on the north side of Lake Street, that ran the entire 320’ distance between Clark and La Salle.  Characteristically, Pullman took charge of the most complex of the three contracts, the raising of the five-story, all-masonry Marine Bank.  Pullman’s biographer Liston Leyendecker succinctly recorded the entire process:

“After signing the contract to elevate a structure, workmen dug near the existing foundation and cut holes into it in order to place heavy timbers or blocks under the building.  Next, they set screw jacks in place and adjusted them.  The size of the jacks depended on the job; for instance, those used to raise the block that included the Marine bank ran three inches in diameter and had a three-eighth-inch thread.  Once the screw jacks were set, Albert (Pullman’s older brother), equipped with a whistle, would join the roustabouts beneath the building, while George would stand in the street, whistle in mouth.  When Albert whistled and George answered, each laborer followed a prearranged sequence (six hundred men turning six thousand screw jacks):  He gave each of his screw jacks a quarter turn, returned to his original position, and repeated the procedure.  New timbers replaced old each day as the buildings rode.  Meanwhile, other employees built up the foundation to the floor sill or installed temporary supports until the masons installed permanent footings at completion… (they) lifted the block four feet and eight inches in five days.”

The month following the completion of this job, April 1860, saw the same three contractors hired to raise the row of eight, four-story brick buildings that were across the street on the south side of Lake Street.  And then finally, in January 1861, it was time for the queen of all of Chicago’s hotels, the Tremont House, to be raised the six feet required for it to meet the new level planned for Dearborn.  Although George was out-of-town on business, brother Albert was quite capable on his own to complete the job on March 17, 1861, less than four weeks from the firing on Fort Sumter.

The only real problem with this process was that if there was an existing building at either side of the new building, it and its accompanying sidewalk would be at the lower, existing street elevation.  Stairs would have to be built between the old and new sidewalks to allow pedestrians to negotiate the city’s streets.  As the years progressed, and more buildings were constructed to the new height:

“uncertainty over the height of the streets led to a notorious capriciousness among Chicago sidewalks.  Builders with varying ideas about the height of the new grade constructed their walks at different levels.  Frequently it was necessary to walk from one sidewalk level to another several times in a single block, a hazard not without problems for the hoopskirted women.  It was with justification that periodic signs warned the pedestrian to “Use Your Intellect.”  In a small visitor’s guide, aptly titled “Tricks and Traps of Chicago,” feminine tourists were cautioned about “sidewalk oglers” who loitered near these sidewalk stairs hoping to catch the sight of a lady’s limb.  The author gave a hint of some keen scrutiny on his own part by saying that “it was the remark of observant travelers that in no American city do the ladies present more divine charms of limb than those of Chicago.”  He attributed this on the basis of “strictly scientific principles,” to the fact that Chicago ladies had so much exercise in going up and down the steps in the sidewalks.”

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Dedmon, Emmett. Fabulous Chicago: A Great City’s History and People. Canada: McClelland and Stewart, Ltd, 1981.

Harpster, Jack. A Biography of William B. Ogden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2009.

Leyendecker, Liston Edgington, Palace Car Prince: A Biography of George Mortimer Pullman, Niwot, CO: Univ. of Colorado, 1992.

Wille, Lois. Forever Open, Clear, and Free; The Struggle For Chicago’s Lakefront. Chicago: Regnery, 1972.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Against this backdrop, drastic times called for drastic measures.  On February 14, 1855, the state legislature incorporated a municipal Board of Sewerage to address the issue.  It was to be comprised of three commissioners, one elected from each of the city’s three divisions.  Former Mayor Ogden (having returned reinvigorated from his recent European sabbatical where he had studied how the Europeans had addressed the problems Chicago was facing) represented the North Division and characteristically took control over the new Board’s actions.  In the following month, the March municipal election saw Dr. Levi D. Boone elected mayor, further attesting to the overall level of concern of the general public.  One of the first acts of the new board was to encourage Common Council to pass an ordinance that established an official elevation of street grade.  Such a survey of the elevations of the city’s streets had been conducted in 1854, probably in anticipation of some future attempt to address the sewer problem.  This utilized as its point of reference the official elevation of the low water level of the river that the Canal commissioners had set back in 1847.  In March 1855, Council passed an ordinance that finally established a legal elevation for the existing grades of the city’s streets.  Then at the urging of Dr. (now mayor) Boone, Ogden’s Board of Sewage appointed Ellis S. Chesbrough in December 1855, as the city’s chief engineer, charged with the responsibility to develop a plan to address the city’s sewage crisis. Chesbrough had been the Chief engineer for Boston and was known for his design of the Boston water system, only one of the two municipal systems then in existence in the U. S. (the other being New York’s that had been designed by John Jervis prior to his start with the Michigan Southern).  

Chesbrough immediately perceived the solution to Chicago’s situation to be the raising of the city’s streets to an elevation that would permit sufficient slope in the sewers to utilize gravity to provide drainage to the river; hence, he became an advocate of “high grade” from the start of his employment.  On December 31, 1855, he presented his report and plans to the Board for its action.  The two important proposals of his report were:

1. to design a system of sewers that had a sufficient slope toward the river for gravity drainage.  This would obviously necessitate the raising of some of the city streets in concert with the slope of the sewers in order that the sewers remained underground.  Chesbrough wanted to establish the crown of the South Division, the intersection of State and Madison, at an elevation of 14′ above datum, with the streets sloping toward the river at 6″ per block.

2. a recommendation to drain the main interceptor sewers of the system into the closest outlet, be it the river or the lake, rather than design the system so that the main sewers carried all the city’s sewage directly to the lake.  This was a straightforward recognition that the latter plan had a higher total cost than the former.  To minimize the effect of the sewers on the city’s drinking water, however, Chesbrough proposed to route all the North Division’s sewers to the river; none emptied directly into the lake where the current would pull the effluent past the new Water Works’ inlet.

The Board of Sewerage had two reservations regarding Chesbrough’s “high grade” proposal: first, they feared that not enough fill was available to raise all of the city’s streets to the level that Chesbrough specified.  Second, there was general concern about the impact of such a scheme on the city’s buildings, for undoubtedly, many buildings would need to have their front doors raised because the sidewalks at the new street level would intersect the existing ground floors at midheight or higher.  The cost to their owners of retrofitting these buildings to the new grade was viewed as politically unacceptable, so the Board forwarded to Council a compromise lower elevation that not only required less fill, but whose impact on most of the existing buildings could be ameliorated within the run of the stairs that led to their first floors.  This lower elevation was adopted by Council in the Spring of 1856, and sustained by Judge Caton on May 26, when he refused to grant an injunction to a group of effected landowners who were demanding to be reimbursed by the city for the damage that their property would sustain from the planned raising of the streets.

Chesbrough wasted little time in starting construction of the plan, and by the end of 1856, over six miles of sewers had been built before the onset of winter. In order to study the best that European cities had to offer at the time, Council sent Chesbrough to Europe during the winter of 1856-57. Upon his return, he again sought approval of the “high grade” elevation, citing two new factors: first, experience with the new sewers was revealing that the bottom of the basements of new buildings designed to meet the new street elevations could be dug below existing grade as much as one and a half to two feet deeper than had ever been thought possible.  This unexpected new source of fill dirt could provide some reassurance to those who worried that there was not sufficient fill to build the streets to the “high grade.”  Second, the 1856 compromise height brought the elevation of the streets immediately adjacent to the river to a height that permitted the construction of basements only from five and a half to six feet high, which obviously was not of much commercial value to their owners.The campaign during the spring of 1857 to raise the elevation of the streets above the level of the 1856 compromise pitted many of the city’s various special interests against one another.  The mayoral election in March 1857, saw “Anti-Nebraska” Republican “Long John” Wentworth victorious and his first official act was to appoint a Board of Engineers to address the street grade issue.  On April 9, 1857, the Chicago Tribune came out against the “High Grade” proposal with an editorial that summed up the opposition’s arguments: 

“What effect is this new grade going to have on buildings already erected in this city?  The streets and sidewalks must be raised some seven feet above the natural surface level.  In other words, every house now built must be raised about the height of the Mayor (Long John) above its present foundation, or be entered through doors cut in its second story… We should say that $2,000,000 would be a low estimate of the damage that would be done to present structures!… It will be a costly job to raise all the streets and sidewalks of Chicago six to eight feet within the space to be drained by sewers–a space of more than 1,200 acres.  Where are the millions of cubic yards of earth to come from to fill them up to the second stories of the present buildings?  And how many millions of dollars is it going to cost the tax payers?  What sort of ‘up and down’ sidewalk will the establishment of the ‘new thirteen or fourteen feet grade’ create during the next twenty years?  Because it is all bosh to say that a uniform system of level sidewalks, corresponding with the proposed grade can be established short of many years.”

Owners who had just completed new buildings during the past year were also crying foul, because, in good faith, they had set their buildings at the 1856 level, yet they, too, would have to incur the cost of this new increase.  Even the owners of Lake Street’s businesses, who had supported the previous year’s rise in the level of the streets, were now protesting the idea of any further increase of height.  The change in grade the year before had had little impact on their area because it was, for all practical purposes, already at that elevation.  The proposed increase in 1857, however, was going to have an effect even on their buildings.

Against the obvious cost of the construction of the new streets and the corresponding price of making the existing building stock respond to the rise in street level, Council had to weigh the advantages of a viable sewer system, space to run water and gas mains, and the as-of-yet appreciated commercial value of usable basements in all buildings in the business district.  In truth, however, there was no other choice for Council but to put the future health of all of Chicago’s citizens ahead of the short-term concerns of the property owners who were going to be impacted by Chesbrough’s “High Grade.”  On May 4, 1857, Common Council, encouraged by Mayor Wentworth, reluctantly approved a plan that was to wreak havoc on the downtown’s streets and sidewalks for the next decade, but eventually would prove to be Chicago’s saving grace.  Literally, the entire city was about to be “pulled up by its own bootstraps.”Chesbrough’s plan was quite straightforward: new buildings would start construction with the erection of a stone retaining wall (at the time called curbwalls) at the outer edge of the sidewalk to hold back the extra dirt needed to bring the street up to the new elevation. The city was willing to let owners build beyond their lotline, the inside edge of the sidewalks, in order to reduce the amount of fill it needed to pay for to raise the street levels.  The owner of the building would then be permitted to use the space under the sidewalk between the curbwall and the building’s foundation as an extension of his basement.  Temporary sidewalks would be placed over this space until the street was brought up to the new level.  This design also helped to clean up the city’s streets as it eliminated the area under the old wooden sidewalks that tended to avoid any clean-up and had, consequently, harbored a build-up of offending pollutants.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch, 1942.

Harpster, Jack. A Biography of William B. Ogden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2009.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago-v. I/II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

The cholera epidemic of 1849 was followed by a severe outbreak of typhoid fever in 1850.  With work on the planking of the roads addressing the sewage problem, the public began agitating for an improvement in the supply of drinking water:

“At first, water was pumped in from the lakeshore, to be stored in a cistern and then piped through hollow logs.  In rough weather the water would be muddy.  Neighborhood wells were often contaminated.  Many houses purchased their potable water by bucket or barrel from water-carts.” 

That was, until 1842, when a private company, the Chicago Hydraulic Company, began pumping lake water from an intake at the foot of Lake Street, located a mere 320′ into the lake, into a reservoir from which it was distributed through a crude system of wooden supply pipes to roughly 20% of the population, all located in the South Division.  More importantly, the intake in the lake was only two blocks downstream from the mouth of the Chicago River, the city’s primary sewer.

Public concern over a potential repeat cholera outbreak eventually forced the state legislature on February 15, 1851, to incorporate the Chicago City Hydraulic Company, a public corporation with the charge of improving the city’s water supply.  Also created was a Board of Water Commissioners, led by the G&CU’s Superintendent John B. Turner, who immediately hired his Chief Engineer, William McAlpine, as the board’s engineer. (In the mist of this furor, Turner would be thrown into the presidency of the G&CU following Ogden’s resignation on June 2.)  In September 1851, McAlpine presented a plan for a new water system for the city, sized to take it to the year 1875, in which he estimated that the population would reach 162,000 (Chicago passed this mark in 1864).  The plan called for a new pumping station and inlet to be located north (upstream) of the mouth of the river at the foot of Chicago Avenue, to minimize any potential contamination from the river via the lake’s southerly current.  Three new reservoirs, one in each division, would also be built in order to ensure a continuous supply.  

The municipal election on March 2, 1852, therefore, was a referendum on two issues that intimately involved the city’s relationship with its greatest natural resource: the lake.  In addition to the Illinois Central’s proposed solution to the erosion of the lakefront, the voters were also being asked to support the proposed water works.  Of the 4,445 votes, only 513 were against the plans.  Confronted by the threat of a public-supported competitor, however, the owners of the private Chicago Hydraulic Company threatened an injunction against this scheme unless their interests and long-term debt were bought out by the city.  The argument between the two companies was dwarfed, however, by the return of an even greater outbreak of cholera in 1852 when 630 people died from the disease.  That summer during the height of the epidemic, the city settled the water company issue out of court and a wooden crib 20’ by 40’ was sunk 600’ from the shore into the lake, from which a wooden inlet carried the water to a 25’ deep well dug inland.  Construction of a new pumping station, in which was erected a steam-powered pump above the well, and water tower began soon after.  Both structures were completed in the summer of 1853, with the first supply of water being delivered in February 1854.  The three-stage tower was a brick structure with a height of 136.’  In plan it was a square with sides of 14′ at the base, telescoping to 11′ in the top stage.  The interior of the tower was divided by a wall into two chases, one occupied by the system’s iron standpipe, the other by the steam engine’s chimney.  The heavy structure was erected on a foundation of a bed of sand, placed 6′ below grade.  Typical of Chicago’s early towers, the structure eventually settled 14″ out of plumb. Andreas recorded that it was brought back into vertical “by an ingenious method.”

As excavation on the pumphouse got under way, the company also bought the land for the three reservoirs.  The South Division’s was located along the southern frontage of Adams Street, between La Salle and Clark that was purchased from Philip F. W. Peck for $8,750 in June 1852.  The circular brick structure was completed in November 1854, with a height sufficient to hold the top of the stored water at an elevation 75′ above grade.  On November 22, the reservoir was filled to a depth of 28,’ just 10′ short of the top.  An inspection the following morning revealed that the masonry tank had sustained a series of cracks as the weight of the contained water had forced the reservoir to settle at different intervals over its foundation.  The tank was immediately emptied, and a series of repairs were studied.  The tank was eventually reinforced with iron braces and rods to allow it to be used during the upcoming winter, and further strengthened the following June so that it could at least hold a depth of 18,’ less than half of its planned capacity.  The other two reservoirs in the North and West Divisions were completed in 1858.

These early attempts at improving Chicago’s extremely unhealthy physical conditions were too few and too late, however, to prevent the massive onslaught of the 1854 cholera epidemic.  On June 29, as the new water tower and its corresponding system was being fine-tuned and construction on the South Division’s water reservoir was moving toward completion, a train pulled into town that contained a number of Norwegian immigrants bound for Wisconsin.  Unfortunately, the disease was rampant among this group, six having already died on the train en route.  In spite of appropriate quarantine precautions, within a week of the scourge’s arrival, the mortality rate in Chicago due to cholera skyrocketed to 60 persons a day.  The city’s streets were especially clogged with hearses on July 8 and 9, leading to a general exodus from the city on the following Sunday.  Many retreated to Milwaukee in hope of escaping from the pestilence.  The final body count in 1854 reached 1,424, two percent of the total population, giving Chicago the unenviable record of having the highest death rate due to cholera in the country that year.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Heise, Kenan and Michael Edgerton, Chicago: Center for Enterprise. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1982.

Masters, Edgar Lee. The Tale of Chicago. New York: Putnam, 1933.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

All was not as serene down below along the streets of Chicago as depicted in this bird’s eye view, however, as construction on the cathedral drew to a close during the autumn of 1854.  The city had just finished burying the last of the 1424 victims of Chicago’s worst cholera epidemic, and finally, it seemed, that city leaders were going to launch a serious campaign to address the root causes of Chicago’s unsanitary environment. Not that the reasons were very hard to discern, for even with the scientific knowledge of 1854, the average resident of Chicago knew ‘that something was rotten’ in Chicago:

“To any intelligent person going about our city, who understands the physical conditions of health, and the causes which, with mathematical certainty generate disease, the wonder is not that we have had cholera in our midst for two seasons in succession, and that the common diseases of the country are fatally prevalent during the summer months, but that a worse plague does not take up a permanent residence with us.  Many of the populous localities are noisesome quagmires, the gutters running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses in supreme disgust. Even some portions of the planked streets, say, for instance, Lake between Clark and La Salle, are scarcely in better sanitary condition than those which are not planked.  The gutters at the crossings are clogged up, leaving standing pools of an indescribable liquid, there to salute the noses of passers by.  There being no chance to drain them properly, the water accumulates underneath the planking, into which flows all manner of filth, and during the hot weather of the last few weeks, the whole reeking mass of abominations has steamed up through every opening, and the miasma thus elaborated has been wafted into the neighboring shops and dwellings, to poison their inmates…. The evil, though great and increasing, is yet susceptible of a remedy.  The only condition of health and decency, is a regular, thorough system of drainage.  Such a system is feasible, and must be adopted if the “Garden City” is to be habitable… “

In 1849, an earlier cholera epidemic had claimed over 300 victims.  Since the city’s founding water had been obtained from the lake, the river, backyard wells, or watercart vendors.  House drains still emptied onto the streets that, in all honesty, were nothing more than open surface sewers.  The few street gutters that actually were in place tried to slope to the river in an attempt to utilize gravity to empty them.  Most streets were not paved, however, so the accumulated sewage and animal waste, imperceptibly but inevitably disappeared into the mud of the street.  In addition, many of the city’s streets were not even lit until construction began in October 1849, following the subsidence of the cholera plague, on a gas lighting system by the Chicago Gas Light and Coke Company, whose Board of Directors included George Smith, Mark Skinner, and Thomas Dyer.  The gasworks were located on the south side of Monroe near Market Street, ostensibly to have a wharf on the South Branch to unload the great quantities of coal it would require.  Night illumination began on September 4, 1850, with the Gem of the Prairie reporting that “the City Hall with its thirty-six burners, is the brightest of all, night being transformed into mimic day.”

At the height of the cholera outbreak in 1849, Chicago’s population was 23,047.  During the five intervening years the population had almost tripled to 65,872, but nothing had fundamentally changed either in Chicago’s system of supplying drinking water or in its method of removing human and animal waste (if the population had tripled, surely the number of horses on the city’s streets had also correspondingly increased).  As the city continued to grow, the physical reality of the flatness of Chicago’s geography, at first an embarrassing nuisance, was quickly becoming a existential threat to the town’s survival.  Meanwhile, the city’s factories and packing houses, that had located adjacent to the river for easy access to water, were also using the river to drain their refuse.  

“In the spring and early summer it was impossible to keep the young fish out of the reservoir, and it was no uncommon thing to find the unwelcome fry sporting in one’s washbowl, or dead and stuck in the faucets.  And besides they would find their way into the hot-water reservoir, where they would get stewed up into a very nauseous fish chowder.”

Therefore, the core environmental problem facing Chicago’s leaders was two-fold:

            1. the condition of Chicago’s streets, sidewalks, and ‘sewers’ was abominable, and

            2. the river, the city’s main sewer, flowed directly into the lake, the source of the city’s drinkable water, where the southerly current of the lake carried the contamination the short distance of two blocks from the mouth of the river to the inlet of the city’s only water company located at the foot of Lake Street.  Chicago, bounded by Lake Michigan and defined by the Chicago River and its branches, was caught in a vicious circle that had to be broken, for, indeed, there was “water, water, everywhere, but not a [decent] drop to drink.”

Chicago’s primary problem was its geography.  The South Division, west of State Street was, for all practical purposes flat, being only 3-4 feet above the surface of the river.  There was no natural drainage of the land because there was little slope toward the river.  The indigenous soil structure had only compounded this problem. With no surface slope, any liquid, be it rain, snow melt, or human or animal waste, had no place to go but down, that is, until it reached the hardpan, that prevented any further absorption.  The end result was that Chicago’s unpaved streets and sidewalks had but one method of drainage: evaporation; with the result that the city’s streets and walks were virtual swamps during the spring thaw and rainy season or following a prolonged rainfall, having the same effect on all who tried to negotiate them, be they human or animal:

“I said we had no pavements in 1848.  The streets were simply thrown up as country roads.  In the spring for weeks, portions of them would be unpassable.  I have at different times seen empty wagons and drays stuck on Lake and Water Streets on every block between Wabash and the river.  Of course there was little or no business doing, for the people of the city could not get about much, and the people of the country could not get in to do it.  As the clerks had nothing to do, they would exercise their wits by putting boards from dry goods boxes in the holes where the last dray was dug out, with significant signs, as ‘No Bottom Here,’ ‘The Shortest Road to China.’  Sometimes one board would be nailed across another, and an old hat and coat be fixed on it, with the notice ‘On His Way to the Lower Regions.'”

The first serious attempt to improve the drainage of the streets had occurred in 1846 when Common Council voted to dig Lake and Randolph Streets deeper in an attempt to remove some of the offending muck, as well as to impart an encouraging slope towards the river.  Rudimentary sluices were formed at the sides of the streets into which it was hoped the houses could empty their sewage.  To permit pedestrian passage above these canals of filth, wooden sidewalks over the ditches were constructed, that, unfortunately, only began to compound the problem:

“Under sagging wooden sidewalks lived “millions of rats” which at night regarded the streets as “their domain”; and “old boots, shoes, spoiled meat and fish, the garbage of the kitchens, dead dogs, cats, and rats” befouled the places where man must walk.  Even when attempts to clean the streets were made, the refuse was not always carried away but simply pushed aside.  And not always were sidewalks cleared, although from the ‘thirties hindrances to a traveler’s progress were forbidden… Nature’s obstructions to free and safe movement seemed bad enough, but to encounter overenthusiastic merchants hawking their goods in the manner of “Chatham street” on some of the main avenues was more than some citizens could bear.  And the wandering cow perpetuated a rural atmosphere striking incongruous amidst the signs of urban sophistication.  To wade ankle deep in mud and water so that he felt as if he were crossing “a Rubicon” was the lot of the pedestrian during wet weather in parts of the town where streets were unpaved.  And where sidewalks were laid, teamsters frequently monopolized them to avoid “the sticky and Styx-like” roadways.”

This “attempt to make a second Venice” of Chicago’s streets, fortunately, was wisely stopped by an injunction filed by those who saw the folly inherent in digging Chicago deeper into its morass; the channelized streets were quickly refilled.

During the winter of 1848-49, cholera had been making its way up the Mississippi River valley from New Orleans, its spread thought to have been initiated by the arrival of recent immigrants.  Under the threat of the inevitable arrival of the disease in Chicago, municipal leaders tried to clean up the city to minimize the odds of an epidemic by experimenting with a new paving technique purported to have been successful in New York City and Canada: the plank road.  In essence, the wooden sidewalks would be increased in scale to cover the entire street.  On January 22, 1849, Common Council ordered that Lake Street, the town’s central shopping district, be planked from State Street west to the river.  With the high point of State Street running north-south and Madison Street running east-west, a series of graded elevations was set so that the streets would drain into the lake towards the east, into the river on the north and west, and to an undetermined location in the south.  In addition to Lake Street, the other major east/west roads in the business district, S. Water and Randolph Streets, were planked that year in the following manner: the streets were cut to a level 18″ below the adjoining lots so that the houses could easily empty their sewage into the road, then timber rails were placed on the ground with 3″ thick planks laid on top of these. 

The end result was that these streets were still open sewers, and as such, were nothing more than a larger version of the city’s infamous wood sidewalks, that only worsened the septic character of Chicago’s streets: 

“Under these planks the water was standing on the surface over three-fourths of the city, and as the sewers from the houses were emptied under them, a frightful odor was emitted in summer, causing fevers and other diseases, foreign to the climate…^“

Unfortunately, the planking did not prevent the onset of cholera in 1849, which arrived on April 29, when the John Drew, a boat carrying immigrants from New Orleans, docked in town.  During the height of the epidemic, July 25-August 28, the disease infected over 1000 people, of which 314 eventually succumbed.  The following year someone pointed out the problem in making the streets act as sewers so that the north/south streets were planked in a different manner.  Rather than excavate the streets so that adjacent lots would naturally drain onto the street, sewers with a triangular cross-section made of oak planks were laid in the middle of Wells, La Salle, Clark, and State Streets that ran from Randolph to the river.  The planking was placed on the street surface without any major change in the existing elevation.

At first, the technique appeared to work, so during the next two years over ten miles of streets in the South Division had the wooden boards applied to their surface.  But exposed to the yearly cyclical nature of Chicago’s climate, the wood began to rot while at the same time it was being worn down by the constant contact of heavily loaded wagon wheels and teams of horses.  Before long, the planked streets became waiting booby-traps as the rotting boards would snap without warning with a resulting one-two punch: first, the broken plank would rise into the air, often slapping a horse in the face; then on the way down, the falling missile would crash into the muck below, splashing any innocent bystander with the ungodly effluent.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Norton, New York, 1991.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,  1942.

Heise, Kenan and Michael Edgerton, Chicago: Center for Enterprise. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1982.

Lewis, Lloyd and Henry Justin Smith. Chicago: The History of its Reputation.  New York: Blue Ribbon, 1929.

Mayer, Harold  M., and Richard C. Wade. Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis. Chicago: University   of Chicago Press, 1969.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

No sooner had the Baptist’s started construction on the city’s tallest steeple, then did the Roman Catholics (who, ironically had started the race ten years ago with St. Mary’s Cathedral) announce their intention to end the race once and for all with the erection of a new Cathedral that was to sport a central tower of gargantuan proportions, topping off at a record 245.’ The site for the new church, however, was not in nor even near the vicinity of Church Row, but at what was then the fringe of Chicago’s northern limits: the block bounded by Wolcott (State), Superior, Chicago, and Cass (Wabash) that had been given to the Diocese by Ogden and Newberry in 1840 in exchange for the Council votes in favor of the Clark Street bridge. The Catholic population in the Northern District had steadily increased ever since a small, framed church, the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, was erected at the corner of Rush and Superior in 1849 by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Kinsella.  By 1853, the congregation had grown so fast that Kinsella pursued the construction of a new permanent building.  Bishop Van de Velde not only concurred with Kinsella’s request but decided that the new building should become the Cathedral for Chicago, replacing St. Mary’s upon its completion.  The design of Holy Name Cathedral, what was to be Chicago’s largest church and second most expensive building after the newly completed Courthouse, however, was not entrusted to Van Osdel, the architect of all the Protestant churches, but to two young, relatively newcomers (who were more than likely Catholic) in Chicago’s architectural community, Edward Burling and Frederick Baumann.

Burling was a native-born carpenter/architect who had moved to Chicago from Newburgh, New York, in 1843 at the age of 24.  Like Van Osdel, he had been trained as a carpenter and quickly became a contractor upon his arrival.  His first experience with a serious architectural project had been as the construction superintendent of Van Osdel’s new Tremont House in 1850.  Enticed by the demand of the building boom in the early 1850s, Burling followed Van Osdel’s example and tried his hand at designing buildings, believing he had “an inborn taste for architecture.”  In 1852, he formed a partnership with Frederick Baumann, a twenty-six-year-old German architect/builder who had arrived in Chicago only two years earlier.  The contrast between the professional backgrounds of these two could not have been more divergent.  Whereas Burling’s was typical for America’s first generation of homegrown, self-taught architects, Baumann had not only formally studied European architecture and building at the Royal Academy in Berlin but had grown up in the sophisticated architectural culture of Prussia that at the time admired the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel.  Upon his arrival as an immigrant in Chicago in 1850, he procured a position in Van Osdel’s office at the time the Courthouse project, Chicago’s most important building, was getting started (which may help explain some of the building’s “academically-correct” detailing and its resemblance to Sant’ Andrea).  Two years later, with the completion of the Courthouse project approaching, he left Van Osdel to join forces with Burling in the design of the cathedral.

The Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on August 3, 1853, less than a month after the Baptists had done likewise.  Burling & Baumann chose to ignore the recently completed all-stone designs of Renwick’s Second Presbyterian Church and Van Osdel’s Courthouse in favor of the more conventional brick for the Gothic Revival exterior of the church’s rather square, very long 84′ by 190′ body.  They did not, however, choose to use Chicago’s locally produced brown brick, but instead, imported brick from Milwaukee that was renowned for its “cream” color. This gave the Cathedral of the Holy Name, that was completed in the fall of 1854 (except for the overly-ambitious tower that was never completed) and dedicated that Christmas, a distinctive light color that would have softened the building’s already out-of-scale, monumental presence in the city’s skyline.  Nowhere was this more evident than in a serene crayon drawing published in New York by the Smith Brothers that attempted to record how Chicago appeared in 1856.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,  1942.

Industrial Chicago-vol. 1: The Building Interests. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1891.

Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy. Architecture in Old Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Zukowsky, John, Chicago Architecture 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis, Munich, 1987.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)