Plan Of Chicago Research Articles

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City by Carl Smith

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City by Carl Smith

Carl Smith. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 167 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-226-76471-9, $22.00 (cloth).

Carl Smith. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 167 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-226-76471-9, $22.00 (cloth). - Volume 9 Issue 1

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City by Carl Smith

Book Reviews 159 more problematic section of her study is her discussion of the role played by women religious in settlement-related work, largely because the chapter devoted primarily to their efforts is not well integrated into the rest of the study. This weakness notwithstanding, More thanNeighbors deepens our understanding of the setdement impulse and the ways in which it manifested itself outside of the traditional definition of a setdement. Skok also nicely illustrates the ways in which settlement-house and charitable activities empowered women and increased their agency both within and outside of the traditional parish structure. Although her focus is on Chicago, Skok's study suggests avenues of inquiry for other cities with large Catholic populations. Patricia Mooney-Melvin Loyola University Chicago Carl Smith. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 183. Bibliographical essay. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Cloth, $22.00. To many observers of nineteenth-century American urban life, Chicago was an incomprehensible setting of rich, poor, pollution, and grandeur amid the fastest urban growth inAmerican history. The scene was difficult to define partly because it had virtually no past. Indeed, it is interesting that early in this fascinating book Carl Smith reminds us that it is no coincidence that with its Board of Trade Chicagoans invented the idea of buying and selling the future itself. Chicago could do nothing but look ahead, because unlike the great cities inEurope of the time?or even those on America's Eastern Seaboard?it had no spatial-social history to hold itback The book's story begins with Daniel Burnham, the architect-director of America's unsurpassed world's fair, the Chicago Colombian Exhibition of 1893. Influenced by Haussman's nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris, Bumham's 1909 Plan ofChicago still stands as the most influential urban planning document in American history?addressing a multitude of problems including pollution, massive overcrowding, labor conflicts, inadequate infrastructure, and population growth. Chicago, as Burnham and his planning collaborators believed, was choking on its own success; the plan was to be the way out and the way forward. Urban planning was not new to Chicago when Burnham took up the idea, but it had arrived by way of ad hoc initiatives such as reversing 160 Michigan Historical Review the Chicago River, creating a park here and there, building the great Union Stock Yard, and so forth. Indeed, these projects were less about civic life than about making money?something Chicagoans were extremely good at. Quality of life was not an identifiable engine of change. Even the leveling of a good part of the city by the Great Fire of 1873, as it turns out, was a lost opportunity to rethink of the city as something other than a place tomake money. The Plan ofChicago was the invention of Burnham and his Chicago Commercial Club, a powerful and elite group of white, Protestant, and Republican businessmen of a progressive spirit?who forced the political establishment to take a new, and we might say "modern," approach. These men argued that with proper planning Chicago was destined to become both the world's largest city and the Paris of America. In the end the plan resulted in vast changes?many of them centering on the concept of grand connecting thoroughfares and boulevards (e.g., Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive), a new architectural format, a vast shoreline parkway that reclaimed the lakefront for public access, the centralizing of a confusing system of railway termini, a system of concentric outer parks and roadways, new homes for culture and the arts, and restructuring the Chicago River and the Lake Michigan harbor. The plan included a multitude of lesser infrastructure changes, from water systems to an emphasis on neighborhood schools. To succeed the Burnham group had to fight (and win) a spatial contest with the United States Army Corps of Engineers over how to use the lakefront: parks and beaches won out over the federal plan for docks and commerce. The plan was not entirely original, but itwas comprehensive and had the support of the rich and powerful. So much of itwas implemented that it is difficult to...

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (review)

In 2005, an electronic counterpart of Encyclopedia of featured two interpretive digital essays, on water and other by Carl Smith on 1909 of Chicago (see James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., Encyclopedia of [2004]; Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman, Electronic Encyclopedia of [2005]; and Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago). latter essay has now been published separately as volume under review here. illustrations available online in encyclopedia version are far superior; two texts are nearly identical. Smith, professor at Northwestern University, has long experience in both scholarly and web publishing; he curated two exhibitions online about fire of 1871 and 1886 Haymarket tragedy, and he also authored and American Literary Imagination 1880-1920 (1984) and Urban Disorder and Shape of Belief: Great Fire, Haymarket Bomb, and Model Town of Pullman (1995). Smith's treatment of plan of contributes further to his accessible historical work. plan's lead author, architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912), collaborated with Commercial Club of to produce in 1909 of most fascinating and significant documents in history of urban planning (p. xv). Smith places this document in context while noting that [as] useful as it may to understand Plan of as part of long heritage of planning, it is perhaps more revealing to try and see it in terms of its particular time and place, as contribution to continuing discussion of what turn-of-the-century urban America was and might be (p. 13). Smith then distills some key contributions of plan: importance of thinking about infrastructure in regional terms; belief that a beautiful would function more effectively than an unappealing one for all classes of people; and the formation of new kind of alliance . . . between businessmen and commercial architect [to make] comprehensive changes in structure of major city (pp. 15, 71). Smith is careful to point out

More than Neighbors: Catholic Settlements and Day Nurseries in Chicago, 1893-1930 by Deborah A. Skok

158 Michigan Historical Review Deborah A. Skok. More thanNeighbors: Catholic Settlements andDay Nurseries in Chicago, 1893-1930. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. 241. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $38.00. The National Federation of Settlements (NFS) defined the parameters of the settlement-house population by making a sharp distinction between religious-related setdement activity and "approved" settlement-house operations. This decision by the premier organization of the settlement-house movement, to exclude virtually all religious related settlements from its membership, has complicated historical understanding of the range of setdement activity in the United States during the early twentieth century. Scholars have followed the orientation set forth by NFS and, as a result, litde has been written about the settlement initiatives of two groups in particular: African American and Catholic communities. In Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in theAmerican Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (1993), Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn challenged this traditional understanding of the settlement-house movement by expanding the definition to include religious work in the black community and revealed a vibrant settlement-house experience. Deborah Skok's volume, More than Neighbors, further expands our understanding by describing and analyzing settlement-related activities performed under the auspices of the Catholic Church in Chicago. Skok uses Chicago as a case study to examine the Catholic setdement house movement. According to Skok, Catholic settlements offered an opportunity for Catholic laywomen, including middle-class and working class paid workers as well as volunteers, to interact with populations in need while simultaneously providing an arena for these Catholic women to play more active public roles. Although some of these women focused their efforts on their parish neighborhoods, others moved beyond the local arena and emerged as leaders in Chicago's larger political and charitable communities. Additionally, Skok argues, the settlement experience facilitated the adjustment of urban Catholics to the social, economic, and cultural changes that were shaping turn-of-the-century cities. In this volume, Skok examines the movement of Catholic women into charity work, explores the variety of specific setdement and settlement-style organizations, and reflects on the role played by Catholic settlements in parishes and the larger urban community. She is at her best when she discusses the movement of Catholic laywomen into charitable activities and, later, settlement work and the challenges they faced in parishes dominated by priests who held the reins of power. The Book Reviews 159 more problematic section of her study is her discussion of the role played by women religious in settlement-related work, largely because the chapter devoted primarily to their efforts is not well integrated into the rest of the study. This weakness notwithstanding, More thanNeighbors deepens our understanding of the setdement impulse and the ways in which it manifested itself outside of the traditional definition of a setdement. Skok also nicely illustrates the ways in which settlement-house and charitable activities empowered women and increased their agency both within and outside of the traditional parish structure. Although her focus is on Chicago, Skok's study suggests avenues of inquiry for other cities with large Catholic populations. Patricia Mooney-Melvin Loyola University Chicago Carl Smith. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 183. Bibliographical essay. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Cloth, $22.00. To many observers of nineteenth-century American urban life, Chicago was an incomprehensible setting of rich, poor, pollution, and grandeur amid the fastest urban growth inAmerican history. The scene was difficult to define partly because it had virtually no past. Indeed, it is interesting that early in this fascinating book Carl Smith reminds us that it is no coincidence that with its Board of Trade Chicagoans invented the idea of buying and selling the future itself. Chicago could do nothing but look ahead, because unlike the great cities inEurope of the time?or even those on America's Eastern Seaboard?it had no spatial-social history to hold itback The book's story begins with Daniel Burnham, the architect-director of America's unsurpassed world's fair, the Chicago Colombian Exhibition of 1893. Influenced by Haussman's nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris, Bumham's 1909 Plan...

Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 183pp. 68 illustrations. $22.00 hbk/$12.00 pbk (2007).

Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 183pp. 68 illustrations. $22.00 hbk/$12.00 pbk (2007).

Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 183pp. 68 illustrations. $22.00

Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvii + 183pp. 68 illustrations. $22.00

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the remaking of the American city

Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of co-authored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. His concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago's stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation's second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan's creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect's belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, this insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography

Editor's Note Introduction by David Buisseret 1: Mapping the Chinese City: The Image and the Reality Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt 2: Mapping the City: Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance Naomi Miller 3: Urbs and Civitas in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain Richard L. Kagan 4: Military Architecture and Cartography in the Design of the Early Modern City Martha Pollak 5: Modeling Cities in Early Modern Europe David Buisseret 6: The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives Gerald A. Danzer Contributors Index

Modernism, Modernity and English Art

House). George Wagner's essay is also concerned mostly with written text. But it is much more successful. He turns to male architectural fantasies in 1950s and 1960s North America to focus on masculine fantasies of seduction and control in the city and the home. This essay ranges from a consideration of Daniel Burnham's plan of Chicago of 1908 to the representations of the bachelor pad, especially as portrayed in Playboy magazine. Wagner relates his essay to the theme of the book by arguing that documenting spaces of oppression is a necessary part of imagining spaces of liberation and he sees the domestic as having become 'the most intense and gendered site of commodity consumption in the mechanical and electronic era of privatization'. He sees the articles on architecture in Playboy as providing instant escape from the feminization of the suburban domestic realm in to a compensatory urban, single, rich and male world of bachelor houses and penthouse apartments, equipped with every fetish of modern technology. But his thesis that 'public speculation of the ideal and utopian within architecture, both domestic and urban, can be read not so much as proposals for the alteration of reality as vehicles of transcendence, desire, and escape' (p. 185) seems to duck some of the most crucial aspects of representation itself. Rather than see representation as a mode of refiguring a crudely untheoreticized 'reality' from which it remains distinct, it may be useful to see representation as part of social relations enacted in specifically visual form and, therefore, as partly constitutive of social discourses of oppression and control.

A City Beautiful plan for Canada's capital: Edward Bennett and the 1915 plan for Ottawa and Hull

The 1915 Report of the Federal Plan Commission on a General Plan for the Cities of Ottawa and Hull was one of Canada's first comprehensive plans. It was prepared by Edward Bennett, a leading City Beautiful architect, who combined both technical and aesthetic planning. Bennett employed some of the most advanced techniques of the day, similar to the 1909 Plan of Chicago. The 1915 Ottawa-Hull plan is almost unknown today, since it was shelved shortly after it was released. The plan was dogged by a fire in the Parliament Buildings, a European war, poor implementation provisions and reaction against its City Beautiful urban design recommendations. Nevertheless, many of its technical recommendations were implemented by the National Capital Commission over forty years later.

The urban text

By adapting Freud's notion of floating attention to urban systems, Mario Gandelsonas applies a process of visual drift to the plan of Chicago. He uses mechanical eye of the computer in a de-layering process to read the plan of the city and to discover the system of urban notions that are specific to the American grid. Gandelsonas explores the spatial relationships between physical and abstract realities in the Chicago River area, the One-Mile Grid and its subdivisions. By highlighting the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of the grid, the moments where its regularity falters, he establishes a narrative of Chicago's urban text. In separate essays Catherine Ingraham, Joan Copiec and John Whiteman explore the philosophical psychoanalytic, and urbanistic dimension of this provocative analysis.

Review: The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 by Robert Bruegmann, Sally Chappell, John Zukowsky; P. B. Wight: Architect, Contractor and Critic, 1838-1925 by Sarah Bradford Landau, John Zukowsky; Architecture in Context: 360 North Michigan Avenue by John Zukowsky

Book Review| October 01 1981 Review: The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 by Robert Bruegmann, Sally Chappell, John Zukowsky; P. B. Wight: Architect, Contractor and Critic, 1838-1925 by Sarah Bradford Landau, John Zukowsky; Architecture in Context: 360 North Michigan Avenue by John Zukowsky The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979Robert BruegmannSally ChappellJohn ZukowskyP. B. Wight: Architect, Contractor and Critic, 1838-1925Sarah Bradford LandauJohn ZukowskyArchitecture in Context: 360 North Michigan AvenueJohn Zukowsky Ann Lorenz van Zanten Ann Lorenz van Zanten Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1981) 40 (3): 255–256. https://doi.org/10.2307/989715 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ann Lorenz van Zanten; Review: The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 by Robert Bruegmann, Sally Chappell, John Zukowsky; P. B. Wight: Architect, Contractor and Critic, 1838-1925 by Sarah Bradford Landau, John Zukowsky; Architecture in Context: 360 North Michigan Avenue by John Zukowsky. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 October 1981; 40 (3): 255–256. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/989715 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1981 The Society of Architectural Historians Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Burnham'sPlanand Moody'sManualCity Planning as Progressive Reform

Abstract Using Walter D. Moody's Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago (1911) as an early classic in the history of American planning promotional literature, this article explores the relations of Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan for Chicago, as translated by Moody into a more democratic medium, with the intellectual concerns of progressive reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. Special emphasis is given to the emerging profession of the civic promoter and his impact on urban planning. Moody's manual provides the primary documentation for this study; the book's key ideas (e.g., belief in mass education, the efficiency movement, the efficacy of public relations in implementing public planning, the influence of the urban environment upon human behavior), as well as its deficiencies and legacies, are analyzed within the context of the intellectual history of the American city planning movement and in the history of the reform movement known as progressivism.

The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 and Chicago Architects: Selections from the Burnham Library

The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 and Chicago Architects: Selections from the Burnham Library

The Urban Vision: Selected Interpretations of the Modern American City.

This paperbound anthology is one of a series of low-cost books on the social, political, and intellectual history of the United States published under the general editorship of Irvin G. Wyllie of the University of Wisconsin. Judging from the Tager-Goist volume, I would say that all of them were primarily designed for students and are thus to be regarded as texts rather than original contributions of concern to specialists. I do not say this in disparagement: the two editors of The Urban Vision have put together an uncommonly good collection of writings on the American city and have added useful though highly condensed historical introductions to each of the six major sections. These separate introductory passages are further supplemented by a general introduction tracing the rise of the modern industrial city from the mid-19th century to the present. The author of this essay, Professor Tager of the University of Massachusetts, quite rightly makes the point that technology was the crucial factor in this development, but that is the last we hear of the matter in the text except for the article by Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford on the planning of through highways (the first proposal, by the way, for our present interstate highway system). The character of the various selections in the book suggests that the editors belong to the sociological wing of urban historians and analysts, since the emphasis throughout is on sociopolitical reform, planning, social criticism, and analysis rather than on the city as an economic-technical-architectural entity. They chose the selections as representative of the changing attitudes toward the city from the turn of the century on, ranging from the progressive era's hopeful spirit of amelioration by means of reform and planning to the often bitter and pessimistic analyses of the sociological probers who came to prominence after World War II. Many of the writings are drawn from celebrated works that every student of the urban milieu ought to know-Charles Beard's American City Government; Burnham and Bennett's Plan of Chicago; Louis Wirth's Urbanism as a Way of Life; pieces by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the chief American apostles of the Garden City; Thomas Adam's preface to the Regional Survey of New York; the main conclusions of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; the attacks on planning and urban renewal by Nathan Glazer and Herbert Gans; Jean Gottmann's Megalopolis; and Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The Comprehensive Plan of Chicago Prepared by the City of Chicago Department of Development and Planning, December 1966

(1967). The Comprehensive Plan of Chicago Prepared by the City of Chicago Department of Development and Planning, December 1966. Journal of the American Institute of Planners: Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 353-359.

The Plan of Chicago: Its Fiftieth Anniversary

Abstract Fifty years ago the first comprehensive plan for a great American city was published. The plan was prepared chiefly by Daniel H. Burnham, who was encouraged and backed financially by the Commercial Club-a group of Chicago's business elite. Far-seeing yet practical, the Plan of Chicago, to use Burnham's famous words, “had magic to stir men's blood.” Given to the city as a gift and adopted almost immediately as the official General Plan of Chicago, it effectively guided public improvements for many years. The preparation of this plan, the outstanding effort to win citizen support, and the impressive list of accomplishments based on the plan, surely constitute one of the brightest chapters in American planning history.

The Source of New Deal Reformism: A Note

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionThe Source of New Deal Reformism: A NoteDaniel R. FusfeldDaniel R. Fusfeld Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 65, Number 3Apr., 1955 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291005 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1955 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Planning Schools (3)

the United States varied threads of planning thought and action have developed from many and often unsuspected quarters in the past fifty years. The present stress and strain within the planning profession can hardly be understood or charitably viewed without some acquaintance with the widening circle of interested participants in city and regional planning, and particularly with the sources of the original civic impetus towards facing the mounting problems of our cities and regions. The first professional courses in city planning at Harvard coincided historically with the publication of Burnham's famous plan of Chicago of 1909. This early training reflected also the then dominant architectural approach to these problems. These men, though since derided by many as advocates of a ' city beautiful/ were truly pioneers in developing the idea of the city as a total organism whose ills required the unselfish attention of the citizen who could place the interest of the community above his own. This tendency to decry some of the achievements of these pioneers reflects a delayed awareness of the physical problems among social and political scientists who were in their own way vigorously attacking the squalor and mismanagement of our cities.