Moving out
It was the Americans who decided to colonize the place
the French and the Potawatomi found uninhabitable. But
we've been improving upon ways to leave Chicago ever since
Essay by David M. Young
Illustrations by Daisy Juarez
The earliest Chicagoans — the
Illiniwek, Wea and Potawatomi
— mostly got around on foot.
Neolithic Chicago was a nexus of
Indian trails skirting the southern
shore of Lake Michigan. We now ride
the successors to those trails in our
automobiles, sometimes at speeds not
much faster than the Wea could walk.
We have something else in common
with our predecessors: We've used
those trails to migrate to the suburbs.
Few of us, it seems, have really wanted
to live on the banks of the Chicago
River. What is now downtown was in
Wea times a marshland considered
great for hunting but unhealthy for
habitation. Many of today's suburbanites likely share that sentiment.
The French preferred to travel
by canoe, especially when hauling
1, 000 pounds of beaver pelts back to
Montreal. To those first white explorers, Chicago was little more than a
portage between the Great Lakes and
the Mississippi River watershed.
Louis Jolliet suggested in 1673 that a
canal could be dug between the
Chicago and Des Plaines rivers, but
Gov. Comte de Frontenac didn't have
that kind of money and Louis XIV
preferred to spend his lives building
Versailles and Chambord. Because a
900-mile canoe route is not a particularly efficient transportation system,
you are reading this essay in English,
not French.
It was the Americans who decided
to build Jolliet's canal and colonize
the place the French and Potawatomi
found uninhabitable. But, then, we've
been improving upon ways to leave it
ever since.
Because the Great Lakes were
the principal avenue of commerce
before the 1850s, Illinois' largest city
developed along the banks of the
Chicago River and its branches. In
those early days, Chicago was literally
a "toddlin' town." In fact, one of the first public works projects undertook
to build sidewalks and ban livestock
from using them. Commuting was not
much of a problem. Merchants and
wholesalers usually lived in apartments above their businesses; their
employees lived nearby.
Illinois' road system
137, 726 miles ...........local
17, 000 miles . .stale highways
273 miles .......toll roads
138, 000 miles TOTAL
Source: Illinois Department of Transportation
Illinois State Toll Highway Authority
Industrialization, spurred in the late
1840s by the Illinois-Michigan Canal
and the railroads, changed all that.
The rich, then the middle class, moved
farther from the center of town. And
the immigrant workers who poured
into Chicago were forced to follow the
work. The factories moved to larger
and more remote sites, including
Bridgeport, the site of the stockyards,
Pullman, owned by the railroad car
company, and Calumet, where the
steel mills were located. And the
workers built new shack towns near
them, or in the case of some of Pullman's workers, moved into housing
the company built for them.
The city's first mass transit system
— horse-drawn omnibuses — began
not as a way to haul commuters to
and from their jobs but as a system to
transfer passengers between rail
depots. Then the omnibuses started
picking up locals on a space-available
basis and hauling them around town.
As that market grew, omnibus opera-
24 / March 2000 Illinois Issues
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tors, including Franklin Parmelee, decided to put the horse-drawn "street railways" on routes that didn't go anywhere
near railroad stations.
Parmelee and his competitors provided
a middle-class conveyance. The rich had
their own carriages or hired cabs, and the
poor couldn't afford the nickel fare. As the
downtown area became too expensive and
congested for middle-class housing, the
street railways set up routes to outlying
farms, and omnipresent developers threw
up subdivisions. Those suburban prototypes were later annexed to the city and
downgraded to mere neighborhoods.
Still, the push out from the city was
underway. The arrival of the steam railroads in the 1850s (the first dates
from 1848) coincides with the
origins of what we call suburbia. The first suburbs,
such as Paul Cornell's Hyde Park, were summer
escape the smells and squalor of the
city in good weather. However, Cornell
had to subsidize the first "Hyde Park
Special" trains on the Illinois
Central Railroad in 1856. And his
suburb was annexed to Chicago in
1889, along with Lake View, Lake and
Jefferson, because its new and by then
permanent residents demanded the
kind of services township government
was unable to provide.
Eventually, the country cottage,
promoted between 1840 and 1875 by
authors Catharine Beecher, Andrew
Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux,
became fixed in the American Dream.
But not until railroad service
improved considerably. Faster locomotives, larger passenger cars, air brakes,
heating systems and lighting that
permitted riders to read newspapers
resulted in an explosion in commuter railroad ridership in the last decades of
the 19th century. There were 10 incorporated municipalities along Chicago's
railroads on the eve of the Civil War,
some of them satellite cities that predated the iron horse. By the turn of the
century there were 56.
The lot of commuters in the city
improved considerably as well. Horsecar crews put straw on the floor in
winter to keep riders' feet from freez-
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Illinois Issues March 2000 / 25
ing. The tum-of-the-century electric
streetcar, along with its suburban
cousin, the interurban railroad, was
faster than the horsecar — though
that didn't make much
difference in
the congested Loop — and it
offered heat and electric lights.
When downtown congestion
became intolerable — the 1890s crush
of trolleys, drays and carriages make
today's gridlock seem mild — the
street railways simply built counterparts in the air, the elevated system
that gives the Chicago Loop its distinctive character. And the three-flats
marched across the landscape alongside the Els.
Enclosed automobiles with heaters
appeared after World War I. But it
wasn't until the Depression sent the
mass transit systems into bankruptcy
that residents of outlying areas, who
already had considerable investments
sitting in their garages, began using
those vehicles for commuting. The
auto freed the commuter from train
schedules, crowded stations and
standing-room-only elevated cars.
More important, the car transformed the phenomenon of subur-
banization into decentralization —
urban sprawl.
Until then, the city's suburbs had
been confined to the railroad or
streetcar lines because there was no
other way to get around. The auto
permitted development to occur
almost anywhere, and, though the
phenomenon was delayed by the
Depression and World War II, not
long after V-J Day, subdivisions began
sprouting in cornfields.
The expressway system, which was
planned during World War II as a way
to get car-owning suburbanites to and
from the Loop, had the opposite
effect. It permitted mini-Loops with
giant parking lots instead of elevated
railways to be built in such places as
Oak Brook and Schaumburg. And city residents in, say, the Albany Park
or Beverly neighborhoods could drive
to suburban Old Orchard or Evergreen Plaza instead of lugging packages home on the train. It wasn't long
before Chicago's employers began to
move their factories and offices out of
the city, too, in
search of cheaper
land. In fact, such
companies as Federal Signal and W.W.
Grainger moved out because
they lost their Chicago buildings
to expressway rights of way.
Chicago suffered accordingly.
Between World War II and 1990, that
city lost more than 800, 000 residents,
becoming an enclave for the urban
poor, young professionals and empty
nesters, while the suburbs collectively
gained 3, 000, 000 residents.
It's a myth, too, that the suburbs
were always wealthy and WASP.
For generations, the poor had been
moving to scattered communities.
And sometime after World War II,
European ethnic populations began
to migrate to the suburbs in record
numbers, followed a few decades later
by middle-class African Americans,
Hispanics and Asians.
Still, the so-called "reverse commute" was started, not by the urban
poor in Chicago looking for entry-level
jobs in the malls and strip centers, but
by office workers wanting to live in the
rural atmosphere of DeKalb or Boone
counties and work in Bolingbrook or
Hoffman Estates. The interstate highway system made commutation rustica
— commuting from the country to the
suburbs— no more difficult than driving from the suburbs to the Loop.
In the 1960s, as urban sprawl
picked up steam, such places as Oak
Brook and Schaumburg became
"megakomes," Greek for giant villages.
(The Latin equivalent, "magnavicus,"
doesn't have a ring to it.) Often called
"technoburbs" or "multinucleated
centers" by urbanologists, megakomes
are mini-cities unto themselves that
draw customers and workers from the
auto suburbs as well as Chicago.
The older railroad suburbs were
also changed. Suburban historian
Michael H. Ebner has documented
the metamorphosis of Naperville.
From a farm town with a sofa factory
in 1945, Naperville became a true railroad suburb in the 1950s. It induced
the planners of the tollway system to
build the East-West Tollway to its city
limits, and, flanked by the Argonne
and Fermi national laboratories, it
became the nucleus of a high-tech
corridor stretching along the tollway
from Oak Brook to Aurora. It is now
an auto-dominated megakome with a
population nearing 120, 000.
Indeed, the expressway system that
changed Naperville replaced the railroads as the catalyst for suburban
development in the second half of the
20th century, but that phenomenon
also has passed its denouement. Few
expressways have been built since 1965,
the Interstate 355 Tollway and Elgin-
O'Hare Expressway being exceptions,
leaving architectural historian Robert
Bruegmann to ponder whether urban
sprawl has played its course and suburban development is getting denser.
The rash of downtown apartment
construction in railroad suburbs as
disparate as Arlington Heights and
Wheaton was undertaken not so much
to boost mass transit usage and reduce
auto congestion as to bail out local
downtown merchants from the ravages
of competition from malls.
George Ranney's Prairie Crossing
subdivision, which is being built in
north suburban Grayslake, is a grand
experiment to end the century.
Ranney, who many consider to be
the father of the Regional Transportation Authority, would have us step
back in time. He convinced Metra
officials to build a station on the new
Wisconsin Central commuter rail line
within a short walking distance of
Prairie Crossing and hopes to get
a second station on the adjacent
Milwaukee Road Metra line. Still,
some of the houses in Prairie Crossing
are being built with three-car garages.
That is perhaps the line between we
and the Wea. They had no three-
travois hutches.
David M. Young is the author of
Chicago Transit: An Illustrated History
and a former transportation editor for the
Chicago Tribune.
26 / March 2000 Illinois Issues