Chicago would ‘rise again’
The Tribune made that bold proclamation as the city still smoldered from the Great Fire. It had already begun to rise.
The city still smoldered as the first post-fire edition of the Tribune was published on Wednesday, Oct. 11. It carried an editorial that advised, “CHEER UP” and optimistically went on to shout, “CHICAGO WILL RISE AGAIN.”
It had already begun to rise, as gifts and offers of help arrived from other cities large and small, in the United States and Europe, an estimated $5 million ($112 million in today’s dollars).
Mayor Roswell Mason, whose term would end in just two months (he would be replaced by Tribune co-owner and managing editor Joseph Medill, running as the candidate of the temporary “Fireproof ” party), bypassed Illinois Gov. John Palmer and put the city under martial law. He invited Civil War hero Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan and his soldiers here to rout looters, profiteers and arsonists.
“Whether (their) atrocious acts proceeded from hate of Chicago, or out of insanity no one can say,” Edgar Lee Masters wrote in his “Tale of Chicago.” Debris was cleared and, as Masters noted, “temporary housing for the poor went up speedily; while laborers began to clear away the fallen walls, the vast wastage of brick and stone and twisted iron … Architects started to scrawl improvisations for a new Chicago.”
Critically important to rebuilding was what remained of the old Chicago, specifically the Union Stockyards, the docks and outlying railroad tracks, and dozens of factories that lay outside the scope of the flames. The relief effort was driven primarily by commerce.
Between the middle of October 1871 and October 1872, 1,250 building permits were issued, and within a week of the fire work had begun on a new City Hall and other structures. Within 18 months more than 1,000 new buildings had been erected, and barren land in what would become the Loop was selling for more than it had with buildings before the fire.
All this work built up a mighty thirst, and by 1873 there were 2,218 saloons in the city, one for every 150 inhabitants.
One can still see some of the remnants of this time in the form of a few buildings — among them 1874 s Second Presbyterian Church at 1936 S. Michigan Ave. — and some water tanks that sit atop them. They were made of redwood, fir and cypress, and placed on apartment and commercial buildings to guarantee a supply of water in case of another fire and for use in some manufacturing tasks.
Inevitably, they began to vanish, their number shrinking from nearly 1,000 to fewer than 100 today. In 2005 there was an exhibition mounted to remind us of the tanks. It was sponsored by the city and the Chicago Architectural Club and came in the form of a competition to identify new uses for the tanks. Among the 182 entries from 19 countries: transforming them into energy-producing wind turbines; huge beehives; turning them into campgrounds or art studios; painting them in the images of such local icons as Mike Ditka and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
Though there is no question that the Great Fire started in the O’Leary family’s barn, Catherine O’Leary offered sworn testimony at the official inquiry into the blaze that she was in bed when the fire started. The inquiry concluded that it found no proof of her guilt, but she and her family carried the stigma. They would later live in various homes on the South Side, and every October they were tracked down by reporters wanting interviews for the fire’s Oct. 8 anniversary. She did her best to ignore them, sometimes angrily chasing them away. Her husband, Patrick O’Leary, died in September 1894, and she the following July.
She never would visit the South Side amusement park, White City, which opened in 1905. By this time the city’s population, about 324,000 at the time of the fire, was closing in on 2 million. Those visiting White City could watch a nightly presentation of the Great Fire. Dummies were thrown and real people jumped from the second story of a building that was “burned” in a re-creation of the fire. A little boy named Ernie Byfield, whose father ran the park for a time, would rush to the aid of those dummies in a small car on whose back was painted “The Mayor of Firetown.”
In little more than three decades, the fire had gone from calamity to entertainment, and those entertainments would keep coming. Byfield would later run the Ambassador East Hotel and create its Pump Room restaurant with its wide variety of menu items flambéed tableside.
He would say, “It doesn’t hurt the food … much.”