Chicago

In October 1871 a fire crossed the Chicago River and burned for two days, taking roughly three and a half square miles and leaving a third of the city homeless. What happened afterward is the reason Chicago looks the way it does.

The rebuilding had to be fast and fireproof, which pushed architects toward steel frames and away from load-bearing masonry. The result was the Chicago School and, in 1885, the Home Insurance Building — usually called the first skyscraper, a claim historians still argue about but which is true enough in the way that matters. Photographs from the 1880s and 1890s show a downtown getting taller in a way no city had before.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was the second rebuilding. Twenty-seven million people came — at a time when the country held sixty-three million. The fairgrounds were built in neoclassical white stucco and nicknamed the White City, and they were meant to be temporary. Almost all of it came down. What survives in photographs is a place that never really existed, which gives the images an odd quality once you know it.

The Ferris wheel was built for that fair, specifically to answer the Eiffel Tower. It carried two thousand people at a time. Photographs of it dwarf everything around them.

The elevated railway opened in 1892 and the downtown Loop took its name from the track that circles it. The L runs above the street on iron, and photographs taken beneath it have a particular character — permanent shade, riveted columns, light in stripes.

Then there are the stockyards, which is where a great deal of the period's Chicago photography was actually made. The Union Stock Yards processed more meat than anywhere on earth and were a tourist attraction; visitors took guided tours. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906 and the resulting scandal produced the Pure Food and Drug Act within months.

One engineering fact deserves mention because it is visible in the maps. In 1900 Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River, so that it ran away from Lake Michigan rather than into it, because the lake was the drinking water and the river was the sewer. Bird's-eye views made before and after show the same channel running in opposite directions.

Where the Ground Itself Was Invented