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(Chicago ca. 1820s)

Profit, of course, was the motivation in 1830 for the placement of a settlement at the foot of Lake Michigan and the mouth of the Chicago River. A canal linking the eastern-flowing river to the westward-flowing system was the obvious intention.

(Lahontan Map 1703)

A muddy portage twelve miles inland along a ridge was long known to the Native Americans living there to be the dividing line separating the eastern-flowing watershed into the lake to the westward-flowing Des Plaines River system onto the Mississippi called a sub-continental divide.

(Louis Jolliet ca. 1673)

However, it was the more “civilized” Louis Jolliet of France that has always been given the credit of discovery in the history books from his and Fr. Jacques Marquette’s expedition in 1673.

DuSable

(John Baptiste Point du Sable ca. 1800)

Recognized as the founder of Chicago, Hispaniola immigrant (though the island was later carved into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, had lived with his Potawatomi wife at the mouth of the river as a trader until about 1800.

Canal

(I & M Canal map 1830)

Though du Sable has been credited as founding the city, and was definitely the first non-Native American settler, it was actually the Illinois and Michigan Canal Company that probably deserves the credit. That it was a capitalist “for-profit” company looking for a healthy dividend is most likely the more “American” concept, anyway.

Mapping

(National Land Ordinance 1785)

The new Continental Congress had created the 1785 “National Land Ordinance” mapping the undulating valleys and streams west of the Ohio River into six and one-mile-square grids of townships and mile-divided section line roads forever barring slavery.

(Fort Dearborn ca. 1803)

Ten years later, a confederation of the sixteen existing Indian tribes granted the United States six miles along the conjunction of what became the Chicago River and the lake. By 1803, a stockade fort, the equivalent to the European castle, was built on a site at what is now the Michigan Avenue Bridge to protect river traffic and the portage.

Platting

(Plan of Calleva Atrebatum ca. 2000s)

In platting new American towns in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, it was the straight lines of the streets, alleys and main squares of Roman colonies that fit between the earlier marked section lines. The meandering lanes and topographical diversions of English towns were thought to be too European for the new land.

(Trail of Tears 1830)

Not coincidental to “The Indian Removal Act” of 1830, appropriating Indian lands east of the Mississippi River, the federal government desired to take the land surrounding the Chicago River for their trade.

(Chicago World's Fair 1893)

Little did those first settlers know that the newly-named town of “Chicago” would become the nation’s fastest growing city, and like ancient Rome, a leading center for engineering and innovation as well as a global capital.

1830s

(Thompson Plat 1830)

The August 4th, 1830 plat of the “Town of Chicago” drawn up by James Thompson and hired by the Canal Company, used its insistent checkerboard to define the shape of Chicago’s future right-angled blocks. Thankfully, the lack of hills made this system workable to this day.

(Chicago ca. 1833)

When it was incorporated in 1833, the “Town” of Chicago’s 800-mile distance from New York City might well have been a million miles away as everything from its politics to its trade was free from the influence of the East Coast.

Innovation

(Balloon Framing ca. 1830s)

Everything was new including the methods of building. Called “Chicago Construction,” the radical new “Balloon Framing” (light wood framing) used multiple wooden 2 x 4s as structural supports to tie together all levels instead of the traditional thick wooden columns for each floor (timber framing).

(Wood Framing ca. 2021)

This new invention simplified construction and reduced the use of hard-to-find labor as each 2 x 4 could be handled by one person. The sale of these 2 x 4s also ushered in the era of “mass-production.”

(In a concurrent development, the sale of millions of nails to tie these boards together began “mass-marketing,” as well.)

Cabins

(Early map of the Chicago River 1833)

The first plat was limited to the area around the river for the meager 200 people at the start of the settlement. The land was cleared for dirt or plank-floored log cabins, barns and outhouses. By the next year, there were 3,000 people in the area, marking the astonishing growth yet to come.

(Wolf Point. along Chicago River 1832)

One of the log cabins existing since about 1826 had been built by settlers, Mark and Monique Beaubien, and was called the Eagle Exchange Tavern. It was a rudimentary building at what was Lake and Market (now South Wacker Drive) Streets on the Thompson map.

(Early Platting ca. 1833)

But all pre-plat housing had to conform to the new grid leading to the rearrangement of the easily movable one-story cabins. And since the Beaubien cabin was sitting in the middle of the street, it was one of them.

Marshland

(Catalogue 1891)

Because the settlement had been built on marshland barely four feet higher than Lake Michigan, putrid ponds formed on streets in the center of town. The residential structures then implemented the “raised basement” to keep the main living floor from flooding after every rain. That raised basement has informed all architecture in Chicago well into the 21st century.

("Indian" Trails ca. 1900)

As the marshy flat plain contained plenty of swampy areas, the Native-Americans first here (among them, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadmi nations) had walked their way down rises on naturally occurring ridges elevated a few feet up from the lake-level land on less muddy pathways to the river.

(Medieval High Street Photograph 2019)

Similar to England’s “High Streets” in that they were literal escapes lifted up from the mud, the Native-Americans’ angled pathways were incorporated into the later squared blocks instituted in the city to become the only breaks in Chicago’s board game regularity.

(Chicago's Angled Streets ca. 2023)

So, along with other non-orthogonal streets and avenues seen on maps of the city like “Clark,” “Broadway,” “Archer,” “Milwaukee” and “Lincoln,” the Native-American pathways can still be felt under today’s asphalt.

Shape of Blocks

(Updated Thompson Plat ca. 1884)

When Chicago’s square or rectangular block with bisecting alley was a concept as old as the ancient Roman colony but it also provides one more benefit: because the square shape of those blocks creates bigger parkways of grass and trees at the front between the street and the public sidewalk, it also leaves more room for bigger root systems and consequently taller trees.

(Chicago Map ca. 1835)

In the original Thompson plat, the plots of the square and rectangular blocks for the 200 White residents were further divided into residential sites whose dimensions were typically 125 x 25-feet adjacent to each other inside the blocks with commercial activity at the edge fronting the 66-80-foot streets and intersections. Both zones were bisected with 16-20-foot alleys.

(Wright's Map of Chicago 1834)

This lot dimension directed all architecture of the city from then on. Even though some lot sizes vary, larger buildings are also the products of this arrangement. Builders assembled the sites of mostly 25 x 125-feet to make every larger building in Chicago a multiple of these dimensions.

Soon, the township limits reached north to Chicago Avenue, south to 12th Street and west to Halsted.

Streets and Alleys

For the wealthier areas later in the Nineteenth century, the narrow alleys became the brick or wood-block paved service roads for stables and grooms.

(Alley Near Congress and Halsted ca. 1910)

But in the poor areas, they were unpaved, muddy thoroughfares for the miserable clapboard tenements fronting them. Along the brick-paved streetfront were new buildings of sturdier construction housing multiple, slightly higher-class families.

(City Limits 1839)

On March 4th, 1837, the State of Illinois named it the “City” of Chicago containing a little over 4,000 people. The borders had been extended to North Avenue, 22nd Street on the south and Wood Street to the west.

Public Ground

(Map Drawn by Illinois and Michigan Canal Company 1836)

The Illinois and Michigan Canal Company had been marketing its governmentally-granted land in 1836 when it drew up parcels along the lakefront. Though it only controlled real estate north of Madison to the river, its marketing arm “guaranteed” that the land bordering Michigan Avenue would be, “PUBLIC GROUND – A Common to remain forever Open, Clear, & free of any buildings, or Other Obstructions Whatever.”

Ogden

(William B. Ogden 1855)

New York-born William Butler Ogden had moved to the “western” town of Chicago in 1836 to support his real-estate interests here with the construction of a railroad from New York. He also utilized his previous New York State political career by helping draft a new charter in January of 1837 in turning the town of Chicago into a city whereby he became its first mayor.

(William B. Ogden 1868)

After Ogden’s one-year term as mayor of the new city, he ran for Alderman in two wards and used his political experience to raise taxes for the building of new roads, wooden sidewalks and center-pivot bridges.

Today

(Balloon Framing ca. 2024)

Credit for inventing Balloon-Framing jumped from American Colonial times to the 1830s Chicago lumberman, G.W. Snow or builder, Augustine Taylor. Though its origin would never be resolved, Chicago adopted this innovation in its history.

(Manhattan Grid 1811)

While still subdivided into saleable real estate sites, Chicago residential blocks are some of the most shaded of any modern city. The Manhattan arrangement of 1811 that platted the island into long horizontal blocks created no publicly-owned alleys and therefore no service areas.

(Chicago Parkway ca. 2024)

A political by-product in Chicago, though, was the monetary bonanza for its famed patronage system. Though the local alderman would have controlled garbage pick-up contracts no matter where the trucks would operate, the bigger trees on the publicly owned parkway also gave more extensive branch pruning control to the city. As the alderman awarded those contracts, so too were they the beneficiaries of the votes.

(Rear alleyway ca. 1950)

The publicly owned alleys still accommodate garages, service yards and garbage bins in the rear of each house and business. They allow for noisy trucks to remove refuse or deliver goods to the restaurants during the day.

For the most part and unlike most of the big cities in America, the above-ground utility poles and their strings of wires march down those rear alleys without cluttering the front streets.

(Chicago alley ca. 2018)

Since most garages open to the alley, the rear door of the townhouse or rowhouse has become a secondary entrance. An etiquette of sorts for long-time Chicago drivers then developed to “toot” their car horn at each obstructed mouth warning sidewalk pedestrians of the oncoming automobile.

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