One Sunday in October 1863, a few members of a religious sect called the Spiritual Philosophers headed for a site near Chicago and Western avenues, then the outskirts of town, to check out a prophecy that there was oil on the west side. They brought with them a medium named Abraham James, who walked around for a while, marked three spots with heaps of stones, and finally fell down, apparently in a trance, next to a large tree. When the Philosophers drilled there, instead of oil they struck water. The sect hurriedly claimed that water had been prophesied as well, and began to drill one of the first of the artesian wells that would supplement the heavily polluted Chicago water supply. Today, Artesian Avenue runs over that site.
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So Hayner took his idea to fellow reporter Tom McNamee, also a native Chicagoan and also curious about his city’s history. They wrote the Sunday story. Then, for a year, they coauthored weekly columns on the topic. After that, someone from Loyola University Press called. And last month the press released their book, Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names, an alphabetical compendium containing 1,145 entries–one for every street in the city.
Early on Hayner found an index-card file of street names at City Hall’s Bureau of Maps and Plas. The file had been compiled by Howard Brodman, superintendent of the bureau from 1933 to 1958. Using several sources–and a little guesswork–Brodman had come up with a brief explanation for each name.
Eventually Hayner and McNamee began seeing patterns to the names–and they learned that not every name has an interesting story behind it. Most were named after landowners or developers or their relatives, McNamee says. “Whenever there’s a really colorful story about how a street was named, and [another] story that says it was named after the developer, you can bet it was the developer.”
Since the book has been out, several people have called Hayner and McNamee to give them new stories and to confirm explanations they’d already settled on. If Loyola Press is willing, the two say they’ll probably publish an updated guide within the next few years. “If we didn’t care about money,” McNamee says, “we could make this our life’s hobby.”
