Civic Center

Burnham working on the Plan

Civic Center Square Plan

Michigan Avenue

Congress & Civic Center plan

Lakefront Lagoon

Michigan & 12th Plan

Opera House

Villa on lagoon

Wolf Point Plan

Wolf Point

Daniel Burnham

PLAN OF CHICAGO – 1909

Sometimes an idea has more lasting influence than something actually built. But it would take a very skillful salesman to promote it. The fact that Daniel Hudson Burnham was both that salesman and Chicago’s most famous architect became the magic ingredient.

As the Director of Works, his 1893 World’s Fair, “World’s Columbian Exposition,” not only motivated the visitors to take its idea of a planned layout and cohesive designs to their cities in the guise of the “City Beautiful Movement”, it slowly dawned on Chicago’s tycoons to turn their own city into a bigger version of the grand scheme.

By 1896, Burnham thought the fair’s main site, Jackson Park, and the entire South Shore should magnificently lead up the lakefront in a grand vista to Downtown. Though the Loop itself was a grimy and loud cauldron of buggies and teeming crowds, he realized that to hook those tycoons into his idea, Burnham knew he had to tie beautification to economic progress, as well.

World’s Fair

Fair Aerial

But it took his work on the Washington Plan of 1901-02 to motivate the business community through competition with Washington, D.C. From then on, Chicago would transform from its unsanitary and humble beginnings, through its industrial and transportation grittiness, into the somewhat manicured and burnished lakefront swath it is today.

In 1906, the Commercial Club sponsored the “Plan of Chicago,” headed by Burnham, donating his services in hopes of achieving more of his own aims. Using some of his south lakefront plans and conceptual designs as a base, he envisioned a new Chicago as a “Paris on the Prairie” with French inspired public works constructions, fountains and boulevards radiating from a central, domed municipal Civic Center.

Chicago Plan A

Chicago Plan B

Renderer, Jules Guerin and Burnham’s partner, Edward Bennett, produced enormous plan and perspective renderings along with gigantic maps in pen and graphite unveiling the document and drawings at the Art Institute on July 4th, 1909.

Text and Diagrams

Comprised of its text plan along with moody watercolors on sheets of silk and huge map drawings, the combined works displayed a future Chicago with Parisian boulevards that radiated from vast plazas and fountains linking many of the existing inland parks. Both the eventual book and its exhibit pictured a grand public lakefront of greenswards, lagoons and pleasure piers unencumbered by railroad tracks.

Park A

Park B

Double decker avenues snaked along the banks of the curving river keeping delivery carts on a separate level from the horse-drawn carriages parading above. Vast museums and a library were to occupy Grant Park in a tapestry of ornamental gardens that rivaled Versailles.

But not even the Burnham firm’s own buildings were pictured in the result showing uniform structures marching to the horizon and the city’s street grid cut through by angled radial avenues. At its focus was a tall domed Civic Center in the middle, a massive lineup of railroad terminals and an edging of lakefront parks and Beaux-Arts bridges over the river.

Colloquialism

Part of the reason the Plan of Chicago became ingrained into the city’s psyche, was that the text itself was written as a conversational tutorial and not a stentorian document. It reads as fresh today as those examining the text in 1909 surely noticed. The inclusion of the maps and perspective watercolors of the exhibit and photographs of the most scenic views of European cities made the 1,650 copies of the book a best seller.

But for the bulk of citizens not reading, the lore of a Chicago pointing in a more magnificent direction became the accepted trajectory. And part of this belief was written into the Plan: Its engineering prowess in literally lifting downtown out of the swamp in the 1850s; the drainage canal built to remove waste; the building of a chain of parks around the city and the construction of the World’s Fair itself.

Plan of Downtown

Original Book

Though Washington, Vienna and various temporary World’s Fairs were referenced in the text, Emperor Napoleon III and G.E. Haussmann’s 1870s Paris was the true model and the unmistakable patterning of the European city in Chicago’s plan is apparent. Though Paris’ ancient architecture was often sacrificed for the new boulevards and street fronts, it’s unthinkable that Burnham’s own buildings would have been demolished.

It was big and grand and the exact opposite of the city’s look in 1909 for Burnham, famous later for the motto: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood...” For years thereafter, Chicago’s blood was so stirred with its audacity that the Plan, instead of remaining merely a physical blueprint for growth, became the city’s philosophy for its future trajectory and later look of grandeur along the lakefront.

Even the size of the residential parkways was discussed in the document and a simple tour of those areas today shows wider plots of grass for tree roots to produce tall leafier canopies of shade. And the absence of utility poles marching down the streets and instead relegated to alleys and underground conduits removes one of the most ungainly aspects found in other cities.

Burnham also envisioned more beautified commercial wharves alongside public pleasure piers downtown. But he also planned a port at the mouth of the Calumet River far South for heavy activity knowing that pure economics and not beautification would also work in the plan’s favor.

Competition

Since civic patronage was relatively unknown to New York or European capitals, the look of the grandiose plan resembled that of an absolute monarch’s to become the people’s accepted direction for a new Chicago.

Over time, it actually built many of Burnham’s original ideas: the monumental, Paris worthy Michigan Avenue Bridge; the two level Wacker Drive; only one pleasure pier but nearly all of the park boulevards. However, its utopian design for the railroads to share space instead of showcasing their own terminals never addressed the American capitalist system and thwarted Burnham’s grand vision.

Eventually, Beaux-Arts, Art Deco and Streamline Modern bridge houses for low bascule spans were built for the dozens of street-crossings over the river. And the two-level Wacker Drive envisioned by the Plan was finally constructed in 1926 and known to provide a quick underpass through Loop traffic.

But Burnham and the Commercial Club wouldn’t have anticipated gigantic canyons of skyscrapers along the river or the superhighway of Lake Shore Drive. Although the absence of truck traffic from the Drive is directly attributable to the Plan. Indeed, its urban tourist polish of today was outlined in it in 1909.

Not executed

The main parts of Burnham’s plan not executed were the many diagonal streets cutting through the relentless existing grid. While designed to speed traffic and provide splendid aerial views, they never became more than a fanciful idea.

And what was envisioned for Grant Park to be a cultural center of museums and a library centering on a grand natural history museum at the head of Congress Parkway instead became the enormous Buckingham Fountain within a tapestry of ornamental gardens.

By 1915, the Classical Field Museum was located just outside of the park and south of 12th Street, now called Roosevelt Road, as a visual terminus of columns and portico for Lake Shore Drive.

In the 1920s, Edward Bennett designed the formal park and fountain in the museums’ place. But in using Classical decor for Grant Park and Wacker Drive, in particular, he injected Chicago with its grand and cohesive look of balustrades, lanterns, and obelisks that was used only by European royalty for their palaces and gardens.

Yet even if it built none of its outdoor decor, Burnham would be in awe of the city created. The river itself has become a welcoming place to stroll in its canyons of highrises surrounding lush riverwalks. Towering skyscrapers now enclose Grant Park on three sides and Millennium Park has become the city’s grand outdoor public rooms and 21st Century town square. But it is the spectacular lakefront that’s still the undisputed crown jewel of all the world’s cities, growing to eighteen manicured miles for bicycles and strollers.

A twenty-six mile long lakefront developed into a system of parks, beaches and roadways that none of the world’s waterfront cities can claim. Comprised of huge naturalistic parks to the North and South and a symmetrical French garden downtown, they provide a figurative “knife edge” and a face to its aerial look, this public ownership of water frontage is unique in a world of private development along most city shorelines.

Yacht Harbor

Legacy

Along with its lakefront, what resulted from competition, money and belief was Chicago’s own urban center. And by the 1990s, it had all the attributes of a giant metropolis with the scale of New York but a grandeur unsurpassed by the world’s modern cities leading to a downtown that’s more magnificent than the two business clusters of Manhattan.

And long before downtown’s residential borders of Grant and Millennium Park had escalated in real estate value, those areas closest to the lakefront parks have also soared and the economic boon that Burnham predicted in the Plan came to pass.

The Plan of Chicago would be Burnham’s swansong. He died in Europe in 1912 as the world’s most famous architect. And even Frank Lloyd Wright would call him a “great man” and praised the Chicago he left as “the most beautiful city in the world.”