Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront

241 Pages·2018·10.441 MB·English

by  Joshua A. T. Salzmann

LIQUID CAPITAL
AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY
Series Editors:
Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird,
Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore
the relationships over time between governmental institutions and
the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large
and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and
public policy— understood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking
but also the structuring presence of governmental institutions—h as
been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the
colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular,
developments that have enduring consequences.
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
LIQUID CAPITAL
Making the Chicago Waterfront
JOSHUA A. T. SALZMANN
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Salzmann, Joshua A. T., author.
Title: Liquid capital: making the Chicago waterfront / Joshua A.T. Salzmann.
Other titles: American business, politics, and society.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2018] | Series: American business, politics, and society | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016755 | ISBN 9780812249736 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Waterfronts—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. |
Waterfronts—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century. | Land
use—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. | Land
use—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century. | Human
ecology—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. | Human
ecology—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HT168.C5 S25 2018 | DDC 304.2/097731109034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016755
Contents
Introduction. State Power and the Rise of Chicago 1
Chapter 1. Making a River Run Through It 9
Chapter 2. The Legal Construction of Free Marketplaces 43
Chapter 3. The Creative Destruction of the Chicago River Harbor 83
Chapter 4. Beauty and the Crisis of Commercial Civilization 117
Chapter 5. A Public Pier for Pleasure and Profit 146
Epilogue. A Waterscape for the New Millennium 175
Notes 187
Index 223
Acknowledgments 233
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Introduction
State Power and the Rise of Chicago
In 1818, an employee of the American Fur Company, Gurdon S. Hubbard,
described a journey that traders had been making for centuries via a land
route, or portage, between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds.
It spanned a patch of marshland that remains a crucial crossroads today—t he
site of Chicago’s Midway Airport.1 The men in Hubbard’s party paddled their
barks from the open waters of Lake Michigan into the shallow, sand-c logged
mouth of the Chicago River. From there, they ascended the main stem and
south branch of the Chicago until reaching the river’s source in a bog at the
base of a very low ridge about half a dozen miles from Lake Michigan.
That unassuming ridge was a continental divide, formed more than thir-
teen thousand years ago when melting glaciers deposited heaps of debris
onto the landscape. East of the ridge, water flowed into the Chicago River,
Lake Michigan, and, eventually, the Atlantic Ocean. West of the ridge, water
flowed into Mud Lake, a murky appendage of the Des Plaines River whose
waters ran southwest toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.2 When
Hubbard’s party got to the divide, the river ran dry, and their boats had to be
“placed on short rollers . . . until the [Mud] lake was reached.” For three days,
the men slogged through Mud Lake. Hubbard recalled the grueling trek:
“Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with . . . poles, while six or
eight others waded in the mud alongside . . . [and still] others busied them-
selves in transporting our goods on their backs to the [Des Plaines] [R]iver.”
All the while, the men were beset by leeches that “stuck so tight to the skin
that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them.”3
The area surrounding that vital and miserable passageway between the
Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds soon became the site of phe-
nomenal urban growth. That growth was the product of collaboration be-
tween public policymakers and private businessmen. Over the course of a
2 Introduction
century, they constructed crucial water and railroad infrastructure, trans-
forming Chicago into a massive metropolis.
Established as a town in 1833, Chicago was, at the time, a wilderness out-
post of just 350 residents clumped around a small military fort on soggy land
where the Chicago River trickled into Lake Michigan.4 The site was known to
local natives as Chigagou, or the “wild garlic place.” It flooded frequently and
stank. Mud abounded. Summers brought blistering heat. The bitterly cold
winters were made worse by bracing winds, from which the flat, monotonous
landscape offered little protection.5
Yet, in the course of a century, Chicagoans radically transformed the site
from a desolate swamp into a vast canvas for urban experimentation, con-
struction, and commerce. By 1933, it was a sprawling industrial metropolis of
more than three million souls.6 The city’s denizens had built canals, bridges,
and docks; laid railroads connecting the coasts; siphoned the nation’s grain
harvest into towering storage elevators; cut the tall pine forests of Michigan
and Wisconsin from the earth, stacking and selling them in magnificent lum-
ber yards; and erected cruelly efficient slaughterhouses where, as the writer
Norman Mailer later observed, “they cut the animals right out of their
hearts.”7 Chicagoans had built massive factories with giant blast furnaces to
transform the iron ore of Minnesota’s Mesabi Range into iron and steel, and
they had constructed spectacular office towers filled with white collar work-
ers who kept tabs on the rapid flow of money in and out of the city.
The point of Chicago’s existence has always been to wring profit from na-
ture. But how did the bog that Hubbard traversed in 1818 become a global me-
tropolis? Did the natural advantages of the place call Chicago into being, or did
humans build the city in spite of its sandbars, swamps, and pestilence?
Chicago’s geography has always been fundamental to its story. The im-
mense obstacles and advantages it presents have often existed in a productive
tension— t he natural advantages inspiring ever- greater human efforts to tame
the environment and tap it for economic gain. Consequently, Chicago’s
chroniclers have long been ambivalent about whether nature or human
agency played a greater role in the city’s growth.8
Many of the people who witnessed firsthand Chicago’s astounding rise
concluded that God must have predestined it. In 1880, the former lieutenant
governor of Illinois, William Bross, delivered an address to the Chicago His-
torical Society in which he claimed: “He who is the Author of Nature selected
the site of this great city.”9 In 1923, in an address to the Geographical Society
of Chicago, a University of Chicago geographer, J. Paul Goode, argued that
State Power and the Rise of Chicago 3
the city’s location made its rise inevitable. It was titled “Chicago: A City of
Destiny.”10 Likewise, in a landmark 1991 book, the environmental historian
William Cronon acknowledged the role of human decision-m aking in Chi-
cago’s rise, but he ultimately attributed its rapid growth to a combination of
easy access to natural resources—t all timber stands, rich farm lands—a nd its
pivotal position on the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes and the Chicago
and Mississippi river systems. Cronon concluded that Chicago was, in the
words of his book’s title, Nature’s Metropolis.11
Undoubtedly, Chicago’s waterways and proximity to natural resources
made the city’s growth possible, but it did not make it natural, much less in-
evitable. In 1955, University of Chicago geographer Harold Mayer under-
scored this point—a nd pointedly took issue with Goode—i n his address to
the city’s geographical society. It was titled “Chicago: A City of Decisions.”12
Scholars such as Harold Platt and Robert Lewis have likewise emphasized
that, at every stage, Chicago’s development was contingent on human ac-
tions.13 People devised remarkable technologies, crafted new laws, and cre-
ated innovative political and economic institutions to harvest the timber,
cattle, hogs, coal, iron ore, and grain produced in the city’s hinterland. At the
same time, Chicago’s development demanded that humans transform the
urban landscape, or the metropolis’s nature. Above all, they had to radically
alter the waterfront and waterways—e specially Lake Michigan, the Chicago
River, and the Calumet River— to make the wretched landscape habitable
and to make the continent’s resources exploitable by the city’s enterprising
businessmen.
The power to command water often resides with the elite.14 In this regard,
Chicago was not exceptional. The people and institutions that changed the
flow of Chicago’s watercourses and constructed its waterfront included the
arch- conservative Supreme Court Justices Melville Fuller and Stephen Field,
the idealistic urban planner Daniel Burnham and his colleagues in the Chi-
cago Commercial Club, the pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law
Olmsted, the expansive Illinois Central Railroad, the resourceful Army Corps
of Engineers, the enterprising Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago’s crafty Com-
mon Council, and the creative, cash- strapped state of Illinois.
Their achievements were monumental. They fused the Great Lakes and
Mississippi watersheds with a canal; piped in drinking water from the depths
of Lake Michigan; constructed sewers, docks, piers, and bridges; blasted
through sandbars at the mouths of the two rivers; dredged, straightened, and
widened the rivers; reversed the flow of the Chicago River; built railroad