Chicago: Boomtown to Modern Marvel

Chicago is the crown jewel of the post-industrial United States with a metropolitan population of 9.5 million. It triumphed over nature to become a boomtown and railroad hub. Now, its economy is considered the most balanced and resilient on earth. This is the building of Chicago, a modern marvel at the crossroads of America.
Part 2    • Chicago: The World's Fastest Growing ...  

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Thanks to Paul Durica and the Chicago History Museum https://www.chicagohistory.org/

Main clip sources: WTTW Chicago's local PBS station    / @wttw  

This futuristic urban river canyon reflects a staggering amount of resources, capital, and innovation. It’s also America’s railroad hub and the central node in America’s extensive system of navigable freshwater ways. Its roads lead to most corners of the continent, and its runways send direct flights to over 200 destinations–all of this supports one of the planet’s most productive regions for growing crops and extracting raw materials. The opportunities available in and around this prairie boomtown have attracted hungry young workers for nearly two centuries. In fact, so many arrived daily that it sustained the highest population growth rate on earth for several consecutive decades in the late 1800s.

Its story began when a Haitian-born fur trader [Jean Baptiste DeSalle] and his wife [Kitihawa], a member of the local indigenous Potawatomi tribe, established an outpost here in 1779.

It remained a sleepy frontier village for decades until Chicago’s first locomotive, the Pioneer, made its inaugural trip out to nearby Des Plaines in 1848.

I learned about this pivotal moment firsthand when I visited the Chicago History Museum for a trip back in time with Paul Durica.

These products were listed in mail-order catalogs, an industry invented and based in Chicago. The conveniences of online shopping can be traced directly back to Montgomery Ward and Sears–businesses that were only possible because the railroad reliably delivered.

By the beginning of the 20th century. Chicago had close to 40 different railroad lines running through it. Most cities today will have like maybe one Union Station or a central terminal–but by the early 1900s, Chicago had six different ones.

Chicago was also responsible for the rapid growth of the vast prairies that stretched westward to the Rocky Mountains. A Chicagoan had invented the mechanical reaper, freeing wheat farmers from the backbreaking, inefficient work of harvesting their crops by hand. And when they shipped their wheat into the city, 12 massive grain elevators stored it before it was sent across the lake to Buffalo, or downriver and onto oceanliners waiting in New Orleans.

But even with this bounty, prairie farmers couldn’t build much of anything, because their lands had few trees to harvest. Good thing there were expansive forests in Wisconsin and Michigan north of Chicago, and soon it became the world’s largest lumber market.

“The Union Stockyard in many ways is the kind of natural culmination of how the city's been growing and developing because it's all about centralization and expanding markets.

Hundreds of millions of calories were passing through the processing plants and storage facilities of Chicago every single day, feeding the ravenous Union Army in its hard-fought victory in the Civil War.

“Chicago is situated magnificently for trade, but it’s a pestilential swamp–it’s a horrible place for a city. It’s an absolute hellhole… Children were playing with maggots as if they were little pets.”

Before long, Cholera had crept up the Mississippi to extinguish 60 Chicagoans a day during the warm summer months.

To find a solution, Chicago brought in Ellis Chesbrough, one of America’s brightest sanitation engineers. He designed gravity-fed sewers to flush the waste into the river, and then deepened the river by dredging it and using the fill to raise Chicago’s ground level 10 feet. Lifting all the existing buildings safely required widespread adoption of a new system: George Pullman’s jack.

“So, how could you reverse the flow? Well, you must realize that the land form drops off. You get down to the city of Joliet and you’re 40 feet below Lake Michigan. The idea was to link up the south branch of the Chicago River with the Des Plaines river and to break through that subcontinental divide.

When they had finally finished the Chicago Shipping and Sanitation Canal, and were ready to let the water in, they still weren’t positive it would even work. After a few tense moments, amazingly, the water began to flow slowly downhill.

0:00 Welcome to Chicago
1:20 A Sleepy Frontier Town
2:04 Railroads Help Industry Takes Off
3:10 Prarie Boomtown
5:00 Union Stockyards
6:24 The Battle Against Cholera
7:10 Chicago's Innovative Water System
9:02 Reversing the River
11:12 Outro: Part 1 of 4