Traditional wisdom has it that the great fire of 1871 brought Chicago ruin and redemption. Evidence of ruin was plentiful from the start. Raging for 36 hours, the fire consumed 1,800 buildings, killed 250 people, and left 90,000 of the city’s 330,000 residents homeless. Photographs taken after the fire reveal a panorama of rubble that eerily resembles the bombed remains of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945. Little wonder that the fire’s survivors, searching for language to describe the event, latched on to biblical images of fury and destruction.
But what sets this book apart from other writings on the fire is its emphasis on the myth Chicago fashioned for itself during these decades. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Miller shows how postfire Chicago cooked up a glorified view of itself as a city of unparalleled opportunity and destiny. This myth, he admits, helped fuel the city’s recovery, filling folks with resolve when they were reduced to ruin. But he also describes what this new vision left out. American Apocalypse is a latter-day tale of two cities: the mythic place described by Chicago’s boosters, and the gritty, often violent city the boosters tried to ignore.
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Miller grants the need for an inspiring myth, but he also regards it as counterproductive in several ways. For one, the city’s wish to see itself as liberated from the past prevented Chicagoans from learning from earlier mistakes: Chicago wanted to turn away from the past, not examine it. Miller points out that “the blaze had uncovered the shoddy way Chicago was built,” but the architects of the 1870s ignored the mistakes and simply joined the “general frenzy of rebuilding.” The result was equally shoddy buildings that amounted to little more than “elaborated recreations of what had stood before.”
What they eventually did (together with Daniel Burnham, Dankmar Adler, William Le Baron Jenny, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others) was develop a school of architecture that stressed function and structure and eschewed superfluous ornament and frilly effects. Miller speculates that this new emphasis on structure arose out of these young architects’ patient absorption in the city’s ruins. The few remaining edifices and walls, Miller argues, revealed the purest architectural structures stripped of all unessential ornamentation. “The ruins provided a model of what architecture was at its most basic before artists ‘improved’ it. Sullivan’s sense that ‘form follows function,’ Root’s ‘architectural expression,’ and Wright’s ‘organic architecture’ developed from reimagining the ruins, not simply as rubble to eliminate but as architectural elements on their own. . . . Stripped of all ornament and vanity by the leveling flames, the fallen buildings appeared as visions of the future.” In his discussion of several of the important new buildings–Sullivan’s Auditorium (1889) and Carson, Pirie, Scott (1899) buildings, and Root’s Rookery (1886) and Monadnock (1891) buildings–Miller argues that their designs reflect the extent to which Sullivan and Root resisted the general tendency to ignore or repress the invaluable lessons of the fire’s wreckage.
American Apocalypse is about Chicago as it developed a century ago, but it also aims to tell us something about the city today. The most obvious continuity Miller suggests centers on the image of a community of grotesque contradictions–a city, as a visitor in 1893 put it, where “the ‘sky-scraper’ and the shanty stand side by side.”
American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago by Ross Miller, University of Chicago Press, $24.95.
