The Great Chicago Fire, and the Even Greater Recovery

MUSIC On where that fire started back in 1871, a little under two miles from downtown Chicago just to the southwest.

But how it started remains an open question. And so we bring you Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian of the city of Chicago, to tell us about this area and dive into the mythology of how the Chicago fire got started. It was an area of small shacks and cottages of largely Irish immigrants. The fire itself began in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. For the scale of Mrs. O'Leary and her existence in the neighborhood, she was an entrepreneurial businesswoman. There was more than one cow in the barn, and she had a modest but substantial business. And of course the thing that's amazing is that for years people told the story about her at night milking the cow, the cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn afire, and then high winds and dry conditions go and burn down a significant part of the city. Well, if you have a dairy business, you don't milk your cows at night. In fact, usually at the time the fire started, and we're talking about, oh, maybe about a quarter to nine in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because you have to get up early to milk those cows. And again, there's multiple cows in the barn.

So it makes for kind of an interesting ironic thing that poor Mrs. O'Leary gets fingered. But where did the fire start? You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what didn't burn in the great Chicago fire?

The O'Leary's house. It made it through just fine. But the fire took off on a path that would go to the Northeast, jumps the Chicago River, headed right for downtown Chicago, which was a fairly built-up metropolis by 1871 with substantial buildings built out of stone, brick, and iron fronts. Many people talk about downtown Chicago being largely wood buildings.

That's another myth that kind of needs to get solved. The buildings of Chicago were of size and substantial architectural character and quality, comparable to other cities of that era. But when you have the conditions of dry conditions, high winds, those stone walls will crumble. A dignified front made out of cast iron would melt like butter. And it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another.

It was the case of such an intense heat that things would just spontaneously combust. Let's talk a little bit about Chicago and what caused the fire in terms of Chicago's growth. Because in 1840, Chicago was basically a small Midwestern town.

I wouldn't even call the city. Talk about the growth, the meteoric growth from 1840 to 1870 that set the conditions under which a fire like this could have even happened. Let's go back to, let's say, the 1830s or the 1840s. What was here?

Not much. In fact, if you were here in 1830, people argue about how many, but it might be 50 to 100 people. The buildings are just little shacks along this meandering little river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly located swampy backwater because as a country is at that point starting to grow west, Chicago was the strategic location located on the chain of the Great Lakes. It could connect to the waterways of the east. And everything and everyone heading west would funnel through Chicago.

So Chicago is the perfect place for anyone or anything to get anywhere. So you go from a mud hole in 1830 with just a handful of people. You start to get a few thousands of people in the 1840s, modest little buildings. By 1870, you have a major metropolis of over 300,000 people. It becomes a headquarters of commerce and manufacturing.

It was a place that when you had the combination of the waterways meeting the rails, you could bring raw materials in, transform them into something else with a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere in not only the country, but in the world. Let's talk about the night of the fire. How long did it rage?

How much of the city did consume? And what did the fire spare? The evening of the fire on October 8, 1871 was in the center of a really tough drought.

Things were really dry. So the fire does break out in the barn of the O'Leary family. There is some bungling on the part of how the fire was reported that delayed firefighters in getting to the fire to extinguish it. However, the conditions were such that with the wood buildings that surrounded the O'Leary barn, the high winds and the dry conditions, it probably can be said that the fire was almost unstoppable from the start. The fire races through the wood buildings of this immigrant neighborhood less than two miles southwest of downtown Chicago, and then carries through in kind of a wedge. And while the fire didn't destroy the whole city, but it took out its whole central business district heart. The imposing stone, iron and brick buildings of down Chicago were totally consumed. There were wood details in downtown Chicago in terms of ornamental mansard roofs, wood paving blocks. But for the most part, the buildings were fairly substantial.

But the interiors are largely made out of wood. The total heat totally combusts. So the fire starts, let's say, a quarter to eight in the evening. And you have by one o'clock in the morning, it is burning downtown Chicago. And there is the courthouse right in the central square that is basically in flames. And then it races across the main part of the Chicago River, burns out a significant part of the north side of Chicago, burning out to almost a triangular wedge that would be on the north side almost near what's Fort Madison Avenue and Clark Street today. But all the city didn't burn. The south side of Chicago that was a significant part of the city was hardly touched at all. The west side of Chicago, which was also a significant part of Chicago, was hardly touched at all except for that wedge that burned from the start of the fire at the O'Leary barn. And also there were areas of the north side and the farther reaches of the north side into the west that didn't burn at all. Chicago was able to recover fairly quickly after the fire because the one thing that the fire could not destroy was Chicago's perfect location that made the city thrive to begin with. And you could get anything you wanted to rebuild the city by the same waterways, the same rail lines coming into the city that could still deliver the goods for the city to thrive. And there were substantial parts of the city that were untouched by the fire where the businesses that once had their offices in downtown Chicago could take temporary quarters.

So you had businessmen who had, you know, elegant offices in downtown Chicago. The ruins were still smoking and they were making arrangements to get quarters in old boarding houses south of downtown Chicago and re-establish their business and get to work rebuilding the destroyed city. Didn't take long.

Didn't take long indeed. When we come back we'll find out how this all happened. We continue with Tim Samuelson here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories and the story of the Great Chicago Fire and more importantly the Great Chicago Recovery. And we're talking to cultural historian and the guy who knows just about all there is to know about Chicago, Tim Samuelson. Let's talk about the damage caused by the fire and the extraordinary recovery.

We had 100,000 people who were homeless, 17,000 buildings were destroyed, and 300 people were killed. Tim, how did the people of Chicago, their spirit, play into this city's recovery? I can let you in on a little secret about Chicago that's not often talked about and it's something that I think is a matter of pride is that for all of its growth and prosperity, Chicago is still a tough little can-do Midwestern town in spirit. And so people who came to Chicago came here with the idea of making a buck.

The people who came to Chicago in its early growth were the outsiders who didn't fit in to old established societies. So Chicago quickly became a place that was like undaunted by any kind of challenge that you could imagine. They could build anything and there was the incentive to do it. There was nobody to tell you not to try a new way of doing things. And what wound up happening is these new way of doing things, that sometimes the people out east kind of laughed and sneered at, wound up changing the standard way people did things.

So this was an innovative hub. So now you've got the central part of the city, a smoking ruin, a large part of the north side, people homeless, people just rolled up their sleeves and got together and worked to build things as quickly as possible. One of the first buildings built in the downtown area, and the downtown was still smoking in the rubble, is William Kerfoot, who was a real estate man, builds a wooden shack, which he called the first building in the burned district. And he had a sign on it, hand painted, that said, all gone but wife, children, and energy.

That's the Chicago spirit. And it wasn't long before, even into early 1872, and just months after the fire, new buildings were rising that replaced the old ones. Ironically, the size and the scale of those buildings wasn't that much different from the ones that were there before.

But then there's an unusual phenomenon. Now people came up for the new opportunities after the fire. Chicago grew in a scale like it had never before. The downtown area, which was largely confined into a small geographic area, defined by the features that gave Chicago growth. The lake on one side, the river on two sides, rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of room for development of new office space. Many cities can grow sideways.

Chicago couldn't do that. The downtown, after the fire, was built up with all these elegant four- and five-story buildings. They didn't have elevators for the most part. But Chicago was proud of these wonderful Second Empire stone fronts. Chicago was reborn. They would talk glowingly of these new buildings that arose in 1872, 1873. There was even a big depression and they kept on building. But by the 1880s, these same buildings that Chicago was so proud of as a symbol of an all-new city were too small for all the businesses that wanted to be there. These same buildings were being knocked down within 15 years.

15-year-old buildings were being called old and obsolete. And these innovative Chicagoans raided the toolbox of the Industrial Revolution, goaded by the real estate people and the landowners to make buildings taller. In taking things like metal framing, perfecting elevators into these amazing high-speed vehicles of vertical traffic, Chicago creates the skyscraper. The first skyscrapers arise in the mid-1880s on the site of buildings that only, you know, 15 years before people were saying were so wonderful and modern. So the fire actually set in motion a series of chain reactions that made Chicago not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and over again to make it the city that it is today. And indeed, the population in 1871 was 300,000. It jumped to 500,000 in 1880. And by 1890, it had catapulted past the one million mark a triple increase from the Great Chicago Fire.

It's unimaginable today, Tim, that something like this could be done. Nobody could believe the growth of the city. And the old cities of the East shook their heads in disbelief. In fact, they would kind of look how to disparage the city in some kind of, and looked at things like its architecture as some kind of raw, crude kind of work. It was often a simplified architecture that was very direct, an expression of material. This is the birth of modern architecture. It was happening here, the birth of a skyscraper happened here. It didn't happen out east where cities could grow sideways. And in population, Chicago not only grew in terms of people arriving in Chicago after the fire, but it began in the 1880s to aggressively annex adjoining towns, making that part of Chicago itself. So you have this behemoth of a city in terms of population and growing geographic size by 1890. And much to the surprise and perhaps anger of the old established cities of the East, when it was decided to have a world exposition on the event of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the Americas, cities out east thought they had it buttoned up.

Who got it? Chicago. And the World's Columbian Exposition showed Chicago not only as a city that had suddenly grown up in the place of smokestacks and stockyards, but a city of culture and achievement that was there before the world.

Indeed, the Chicago School of Architecture and so much more in art and music. I want to read one thing to you, a final point, and get your reaction. It is from British novelist and journalist Mary Ann Hardy, and she was an international writer who wrote about the recovery. We expected to find traces of ugliness and deformity everywhere, crippled buildings and lame limping streets, running along forlorn, crooked conditions, waiting for a time to restore their vigor and build up their beauty anew. But phoenix-like, the city has risen from the ashes grander and statelier than ever.

Talk about that. It's absolutely true that Chicago had reinvented itself, and it's unusual to have the center of a large metropolis suddenly built anew from scratch all at once. A typical downtown of an American city would consist of buildings of different scale and quality from a long timeline of their history. Here was something that not only is rising from the ashes all at once, new and modern, but the matter of pride. And they were trying to show the world that it was indestructible that there was a quality to these buildings. And so you looked at it, it wasn't just someplace built out of necessity or makeshift quarters. These were elegant, modern buildings, and it occupied the whole of downtown and also of the areas that were in the path of the fire. And you've been listening to Tim Samuelson, and he's the cultural historian of the city of Chicago, and he's right about the quality of the buildings, but all of that, it all represented the quality of the people and the quality of those old Midwestern values. The story of the great Chicago recovery here on Our American Stories.