Chicago’s early boosters, realtors, and urban planners mapped their city as a series of concentric circles. In 1924, sociologist Ernest Burgess extrapolated from these maps to project a model for America’s urban and suburban growth. Despite the persuasive power of Burgess’s zonal model, his own students’ grounded, unpublished work offers a countermodel of more diverse and contested suburbanization, including suburban vice, industry, retail, and class variations. Their alternative maps reinsert human power dynamics into what Chicago’s urban ecologists had promoted as inevitable and homogeneous suburbanization.
Henry Ericsson with Lewis E. Myers, Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson ( Chicago: A Kroch & Sons, 1942 ), 45.
2.
Ibid., 45.
3.
See comments about Jackson Park circa 1890, quoted in Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York: Crown , 2003), 95.
4.
See, e.g., The [Chicago] Land Owner 4, no. 9 (September 1872): 147.
5.
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Urban Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 56-58.
6.
Perry R. Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920 ( Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 5. For the Thompson Plat, see Robert A. Holland, Chicago in Maps 1612-2002 (New York: Rizzoli Press, 2005), 52-53.
7.
Edward Benton Talcott, Chicago, with the Several Additions . . . Will Be Offered for Sale . . . (New York: Peter A. Meisner, 1836), reprinted in Holland, Chicago in Maps, 64.
8.
Ann Durkin Keating, Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2005 ), 35.
9.
Louis Schick, Chicago and Its Environs: A Handbook for the Traveler ( Chicago: L. Schick, 1891), 419.
10.
Jason B. Runnion, Out of Town: Being a Descriptive, Historical, and Statistical Account of the Suburban Towns and Residences of Chicago ( Chicago: Western News Co., reprinted from a series in the Chicago Sunday Times, 1869), 18.
11.
Map Showing the Boulevard and Park System and Twelve Miles of Lake Frontage of the City of Chicago (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1884).
12.
See Butler Lowry Real Estate, Lots in Adjoining Blocks for Sale on East Terms (Chicago, ca. 1888), pamphlet in the Newberry Library; as well as Samuel Eberly Gross, "Second under the Linden," bilingual advertisement in the German newspaper Fackel (August 11, 1889), reprinted in Hartmut Keil and John Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 137.
13.
Map Showing the Burnt District in Chicago, 3rd ed. (St Louis: R. P. Studley , 1871), reprinted in The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, 1996), http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/ruin/pic0563.html .
14.
Everett Chamberlin , Chicago and Its Suburbs ( Chicago: T. A. Hungerford, 1874). Also see Keating, Chicagoland, 14-17.
15.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Journal of Urban History for pointing out the Sidney map of Philadelphia and to Becky Nicolaides for the information that early booster maps of Los Angeles do often contain circles, centered on "downtown L.A.," though often recentered on specific subdivisions for sale.
16.
See, e.g., Edwin Rose, Black Hawk War Map ( Manuscript, 1832); D.B. Cooke, D. B. Cooke’s Great Western Railway Guide (Chicago: D. B. Cooke, 1855); and G. Woolworth Colton, Map Showing the Location of Galena and Chicago Union Railroad with Its Branches and Connections in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota (G. Woolworth Colton, 1862); all reprinted in Holland, Chicago in Maps, 56, 78-79, 74-75.
17.
Millard and Decker, LAWNDALE: Property for Sale in This Beautiful Suburb (Chicago: Lakeside, 1875; pamphlet in Canadian Centre d’Architecture), back cover. Advertisement for Auburn Park, Chicago Sunday Tribune (April 14, 1889), 1.
18.
When I presented an early version of this article at the Urban History Association conference in Phoenix, Arizona (October 2006), the audience spontaneously engaged in this very debate.
19.
The Land Owner 4, no. 9 (September 1872): 147.
20.
Ibid., 147.
21.
The Parks and Property Interests of the City of Chicago ( Chicago: Western News Co., 1869), 27 and 34. The parks had the desired effect, dramatically increasing land prices in their vicinity. See Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, private edition, based on a dissertation, University of Chicago, 1933), 99.
22.
Bessie LouisePierce, A History of Chicago, Volume III: The Rise of a Modern City, 1871-1893 (New York: Knopf, 1957), 314.
23.
Charles M. Muller and Roderick A. Manstein, Map Showing Territorial Growth of the City of Chicago, to Accompany the Annual Report of the Map Dept. ( Chicago: Globe Lithographing and Printing, 1891), reprinted in Holland, Chicago in Maps, 137.
24.
George Warrington Stevens, The Land of the Dollar (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1897), in Bessie Louise Pierce, ed., As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 398. For other visitors touring the never fully completed circle of Chicago’s park boulevards, see Pierce, Others, 229, 303-5, 425, 438-40, 506-7.
25.
Stevens, Land of the Dollar, 396.
26.
See Duis, Challenging Chicago, 18, 26; and Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900-1930 ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 9-37.
27.
Carl W.Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875-1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 12.
28.
John Leng, America in 1876 (1877), reprinted in Pierce, Others, 220.
29.
Paul Bourget , Outre-Mer Impressions of America ( 1895), excerpted in Pierce, Others, 384.
30.
Earl Shepard Johnson, "The Natural History of the Central Business District" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1944), 297, 402.
31.
Garrison Keillor , A Prairie-Home Companion, Live from the Auditorium Theater in Chicago (November 23, 2002), available online at http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/20021123/index.shtml .
32.
Alison Isenberg , Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2.
33.
Edward Hungerford , The Personality of American Cities ( New York: McBride, Nast, 1912), in Pierce, Others, 436.
34.
Chicago Tribune (1915) and Benjamin Levering (1913), both quoted in Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 99-100.
35.
See Henry Fuller’s ambivalent novel, The Cliff Dwellers (New York: Irvington, 1893/1981).
36.
See, e.g., Christopher Moorley, Old Loopy: A Love Letter to Chicago ( Chicago: Argus, 1935); and Julian Street, Abroad at Home (New York: Century , 1914), in Pierce, Others , 459.
37.
Leader of the Chicago Association of Commerce (1911), quoted in Fogelson, Downtown, 99.
38.
Barrett, Automobile and Urban Transit, 106, 119.
39.
See Fogelson, Downtown, esp. chap. 4, 183-217. Also see Doug Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
40.
H.V. Von Holst, Modern American Homes ( Chicago: American School of Correspondence, 1913); booklet in CCA (Centre Canadienne d'Architecture in Montreal).
41.
Clarence Elmer Glick, "Winnetka: A Study of a Residential Suburban Community" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1928), 27.
42.
Hoyt, One Hundred Years, 203.
43.
Gerald Danzer, "The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives," in David Buisseret , ed., Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 145-72. For a photograph of Burnham’s office penthouse, see Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 63. For maps showing this overhead perspective, see "Bird’s-Eye Views of the Developing City," in Carl Smith, et al., eds., The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, 1996), http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/prefire/views.html ; and Holland, Chicago in Maps, 82-83, 126, 149, 185, 188-89, 196-97, 198. A more unusual bird’s-eye perspective looking eastward is in The Land Owner 6, no. 2 (February 1874): 1.
44.
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago (New York: Da Capo Press, 1909/1970), 1. This plan was a collective, collaborative effort involving Charles Moore, Jules Guerin, and numerous others who could be considered coauthors, but for simplicity’s sake I refer to it as Burnham’s Plan.
45.
See Carl Smith , The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4-6, 14-15, 54.
46.
Burnham and Bennett, Plan, 31, plate 34.
47.
Ibid., Plan, 33, plate 35.
48.
Sally Chappell , "Chicago Issues: The Enduring Power of a Plan" in The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1979), 15.
49.
Smith, Remaking, 74; also see 76-85, 111-29.
50.
Walter D. Moody , Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago: Municipal Economy, 4th ed. ( Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1924), 50.
51.
"Chicago-The Great Central Market" reprinted in Moody, Wacker’s Manual, 101.
52.
Ross Miller, Here’s the Deal: The Making and Breaking of a Great American City ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 13.
53.
Smith, Remaking, 133.
54.
In his well-researched assessment of the Plan, Carl Smith finds no definitive evidence that Burnham made this memorable statement. Smith, Remaking, 98.
55.
Chicago Zoning Commission, Zoning Chicago (Chicago, April 1922), 4.
56.
Ibid., 4.
57.
Ibid., 3, 5.
58.
Jeffrey M. Hornstein , A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2005), 105-8.
59.
Frederick Morrison Babcock, The Appraisal of Real Estate ( New York: Macmillan, 1924), 23-24.
60.
Ibid., 208-9.
61.
Dennis Smith , The Chicago School: A Liberal Critique of Capitalism (1988), quoted in Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1999), 363.
62.
Ernest Burgess , "The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project," in Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, and Roderick McKenzie, eds., The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 52.
63.
Ibid., 54-56.
64.
Ibid., 56.
65.
Herbert Spencer , quoted in Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 63.
66.
Roderick McKenzie , "The Ecological Approach to the Study of Human Community," in City, 78.
67.
Ibid., 77; and note 1.
68.
Burgess, "Growth of the City," 54, 57.
69.
Ibid., 48, 53.
70.
Ibid., 50; and McKenzie, "Ecological Approach," 78.
71.
Ernest Burgess, "Residential Segregation," in Ernest Burgess , Robert Park, and Roderick McKenzie, eds., The City, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 115.
72.
Robert E.L. Faris and H. WarrenDunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas: An Ecological Study of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 36.
73.
Ibid., 170.
74.
Frederick M. Babcock, The Valuation of Real Estate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), 2.
75.
Ibid., 47.
76.
Ibid., 58.
77.
Ibid., 18-19.
78.
Ibid., 68.
79.
Ibid., 60-61.
80.
Ibid., 3, 91.
81.
Homer Hoyt, "City Growth and Mortgage Risk: Chicago," in Chicago Insured Mortgage Portfolio (1937), reprinted in Homer Hoyt, According to Hoyt: Fifty Years of Homer Hoyt, 1916 to 1966 (Chicago: Homer Hoyt Associates, 1967), 585.
82.
Hoyt, According to Hoyt , 592-93.
83.
Ibid., 593.
84.
Ibid., 588.
85.
Walter Firey , Land Use in Central Boston ( New York: Greenwood, 1947/ 1968), 4.
86.
Ibid., 4-13.
87.
James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan (1932), in Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1935/2001), 14, 18.
88.
James T. Farrell, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan ( 1934), in Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, 269, 375, 412, 422, 433.
89.
Ibid., 407-8.
90.
Farrell, Young Lonigan, 134-35.
91.
Carla Capetti , "Ethnographers at Home: The Trilogy of Studs Lonigan," in Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 108-44.
92.
See Evelyn Heacox Wilson, "Chicago Families in Furnished Rooms" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1929); and Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), xi, 3. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess were editors of Zorbaugh’s book, which claims to uphold their theories yet actually shows the long-term stability of the Gold Coast .
93.
Walter Reckless , Vice in Chicago (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1933 ), 10-11, 120-36, adapted from Walter Reckless, "Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1925).
94.
Reckless, Natural History of Vice Areas, 323. For an accounting of vice in 1911, see Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago ( Chicago: Gunthrop-Warren, 1911), 72-73.
95.
Reckless, Vice in Chicago , 130.
96.
See, e.g., "Ambush, Shoot Dry Sleuth: West Suburbs in Turmoil over Vice War,"Chicago Tribune (July 8, 1925 ), 1; "Two Niles Center Saloons Raided by the Sheriff: Vice Activity Shifts from West to North Suburbs,"Chicago Tribune , July 11, 1917, 13; and "Crowe Raids in Suburbs; Seeks Vice Collusion: Seizes Chicago Heights City Records,"Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1921, 18.
97.
Reckless, Vice in Chicago , 134.
98.
Glick, Winnetka, 36.
99.
Ibid., 35-37.
100.
Ibid., 71.
101.
Malcolm Proudfoot, "The Major Outlying Business Centers of Chicago" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1936; abridged version published by University of Chicago Libraries, private edition, 1938), 49.
102.
Ibid., 4.
103.
Ibid., 12.
104.
Ibid., 2.
105.
Robert Charles Klove, The Park Ridge-Barrington Area: A Study of Residential Land Patterns and Problems in Suburban Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, private edition, based on a dissertation, University of Chicago, 1942), 32-34. Klove credits the concept of a neighborhood "life cycle" to L. Elden Smith, "Measuring the Neighborhood Risk," Insured Mortgage Portfolio 2 (February 1938): 9-11, 22-23.
106.
Lewis Copeland, "The Limits and Characteristics of Metropolitan Chicago" (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1937), 3-4. For the overlaps between nature and culture, see, e.g., William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
107.
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities (London : Verso, 1983).
108.
Copeland, Metropolitan Chicago, figure 58.
109.
Ibid., 5.
110.
Ibid., 231, 235.
111.
Ibid., 54, 65.
112.
Ibid., 67.
113.
Gary, Indiana ; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Chicago and its inner-ring suburbs formed the three nuclei.
114.
Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, "Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950,"Annals of the Association of American Geographers88, no. 4 (1998): 624.
115.
Firey, Land Use, 324-40.
116.
See Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
117.
Jean Baudrillard , Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), 2.
118.
See, e.g., Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
