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Thompson’s plat shows 58 blocks, less than half of which were occupied, and a list of voters for an election held in 1830, the year the survey was completed, includes the names of 32 residents. Overwhelmed by a real estate boom that anticipated completion of the canal, Thompson’s survey was not filed until 1837, the same year Chicago officially became a city. By that time, a substantial number of other surveys had appeared, and the population had grown to 4,170. Twenty years later, the number of inhabitants exceeded 100,000, and that number would grow by another order of magnitude before the end of the Nineteenth Century.

The unprecedented growth of Chicago is recorded in maps. Nearly 1,000 unique maps of Chicago appeared before the turn of the Twentieth Century in spite of considerable losses inflicted by the Great Fire in 1871. To some degree, this abundance can be explained by the fact that Chicago’s emergence coincided with technological innovations like wood-pulp paper, wax engraving, and eventually, offset lithography that made maps both cheap and ubiquitous. At another level, of course, the question arises as to the degree to which such innovations were the effect rather than the cause, a response to an increasing demand for maps. Chicago real estate speculation, in particular, exacted a heavy demand for maps, and in fact, many purchases were made at distant locations based only on maps. Beyond issues of technology, so many maps no doubt were made of Chicago because so many maps were made in Chicago. From a fledging enterprise in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the likes of Rufus Blanchard, George Cram, and Rand McNally quickly made the city of Chicago synonymous with American mapmaking. Other well known map publishers, like Caleb Hammond, eventually based their businesses elsewhere but served their apprenticeships in Chicago.

With Chicago as a center of the mapmaking trade, it is not surprising that the story of the city is a story told most vividly by maps. Maps show the migration of the central business district from Lake Street to State Street to Upper Michigan Avenue. Maps document the transition from a port-of-entry neighborhood on the near West Side to expressway and urban campus. And maps depict the transformation of a rural area that took its name from orchards to one of the country’s busiest metropolitan airports. Some historians have long appreciated the fact that the details of narratives like these can be teased from maps and understand that cartography serves not only as a source of historical information but also as a method of historical analysis. Yet the map always has been as much an agent of change as a record of change. Maps were made of Chicago, but in a very real sense, Chicago was made by maps.

When the place that would become the city was yet covered by wild garlic, advocates for one particular place or another as the future metropolis of the west invariably based their arguments on natural advantages of the site. And, as William Cronon (1991, p. 37) observed, “The talisman that lent authority to such arguments was almost always an actual map of North America.” Indeed, in their frequent appeals to the maps of Marquette and Joliet and the idea of a canal that was only a cartographic vision, Chicago’s boosters saw not what was but what was to become — the map not as reality but preceding the reality.

Similarly, when the great architect and planner Daniel Burnham looked at his hometown, he saw two prominent natural features: Lake Michigan and the unbounded plains to the north, south, and west. Like those endless plains, Burnham saw Chicago itself as a city without limits, and the maps in his Plan of Chicago (1909) not only illustrated this vision but directed the development of Chicago for the next two decades.

At a scale that is perhaps less grand but no less significant, Rufus Blanchard published the first of his many street-guides in 1857. While these guides were invaluable to visitors, they proved even more popular among Chicago residents. The image offered by the ubiquitous street guides was complemented by bird’s-eye views that were especially popular in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Although bird’s-eye views are no longer common, the panoramic aerial photographs, abundant in shops across the country, perform many of the same functions. The vertical perspective offers a privileged position that has been arguably equated with power and control, but in its detachment, verticality also affords an image that is easily apprehended and perhaps even more easily idealized. At very least, bird’s-eye views, along with popular street guides, constituted a common and shared image of the city, an image that influenced the decisions and actions of many individual Chicagoans — actions and decisions that no doubt, in turn, changed the city itself.

From Thompson’s early survey to the visions of Burnham to the popular street guides and bird’s-eye views, maps of the city then beg the question, does the place dictate the cartographic representation or does the representation mold the place? The earliest maps of the Chicago region fostered the vision of a metropolis that would thrive from a privileged location at the head of a non-existent canal. Mandated by these maps, the canal did eventually appear, although it was unforeseen rail rather than water routes that would insure a great metropolis. Plats of the city, made before it was inhabited, dictated the grid-iron pattern that characterizes Chicago, while feeding a voracious real estate market locally and in distant parts of the country. As land was bought and sold, laissez faire growth and the attendant social and economic problems gave voice to demands for reform and restructuring, a voice that often spoke in maps. And while the kind of maps of Chicago, their subject, their purpose, and their audience changed systematically through time, maps are more than static representations of the city at any particular moment and more even than icons of the city as a dynamic entity. As the examples that follow demonstrate, maps are proactive agents in shaping the city — both cause and effect.

The different colors on this map symbolize Chicago’s wards, the system of political representation that was established when the city was incorporated in 1837 and that quickly became synonymous with patronage politics. Perhaps the most striking feature on the map, however, is the gridiron pattern of streets. This pattern finds its origin in the first survey of the city completed by James Thompson in 1830. With minor concession to the course of the Chicago River, Thompson’s survey conformed closely to the section lines of the U.S. Public Land Survey System, and this grid pattern was simply extended as the city grew. In following old Indian pathways, a few streets cross the grid diagonally — Ridge, Milwaukee, and Vincennes Avenues, for instance. But these diagonals serve only to accentuate the dominance of the gridiron.

As the population of Chicago increased from approximately 100,000 when this map was published to well over a million by the end of the century, street guides grew in size. Although Colton’s map has no printed scale, the entire street system is shown on a small sheet. In comparison, Blanchard’s 1871 street guide required approximately four times as much space. More significant than the growth in physical size, however, was the growth in the popularity and profusion of street maps. The ubiquitous street guides shaped Chicagoans’ perception of their city as the map became a shared image of the place, and in some sense, the place itself.

By mid-Nineteenth Century, bird’s-eye views — common in Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries — had found their way to the United States where they were especially popular. Like nearly all bird’s-eye views of Chicago, this one on Richard’s map assumes a vantage point looking to the west from Lake Michigan above the mouth of the Chicago River, but rather than the prosperous flurry of activity seen on the well known view by Currier and Ives, this one shows the city engulfed in orange flames and covered by clouds of gray smoke. Somewhat ironically, the popularity of bird’s-eye views no doubt stems from their almost iconographic representation, their ability to instill pride in place. In this sense, the bird’s-eye view here, along with the accompanying text frame, makes it clear that even in its destruction by fire, Chicago is larger and more grand than other cities suffering similar catastrophes. In addition to galvanizing local residents — essential to the rebuilding effort — this composition also carried details of the fire to other parts of the country, thereby attracting not only sympathy, but resources.

In effectively erasing the landscape, the Chicago fire actually accelerated the social and economic trends that prevailed before the disaster and brought about more effective spatial organization, especially through agglomeration economies. As one particularly relevant example, the varied industries involved in making, publishing, and distributing maps came together after the fire in the new Lakeside Building at the corner of Clark and Adams, which resulted in increased efficiency and contributed to the rising dominance of Chicago’s mapmakers.

The final chapter of Stead’s book presents a thoroughly utopian, if highly socialistic, future in which utilities, transportation systems, and communication networks belong to a populace joined in Christian brotherhood. However quaint this parable seems more than a century later, Stead’s work — like the Hull House Maps and Papers — had a noble purpose: not just to inform but to reform. Some measure of the collective effects of the social reform movement may be found in the fact that Daniel Burnham underscored appalling socioeconomic conditions as urgent and compelling reasons for a city plan.

Like the sheet shown here, which measures 63 cm (25 inches) across, most fire insurance maps were constructed at a scale of one inch to 50 feet. Pink symbolizes brick, blue, stone, yellow for frame construction, and so forth. Although Sanborn sold their atlases on a subscription basis, the cost of producing new map sheets in response to continuing urban change was high. While extensive changes sometimes warranted entirely new map sheets, revisions were more commonly issued on correction slips that were pasted over top of existing sheets. The Sanborn maps in this volume from the Newberry collection were first issued in 1917 but were corrected through 1951. Like the sheet here, which shows the Congress Street Expressway pasted over the West Side neighborhood near Hull House, layers of paste-up corrections upon corrections render these maps literal palimpsests. Yet because the maps were used not just by insurance underwriters but also by planners, realtors, and varied commercial organizations, they not only reflect history but undoubtedly were instrumental in shaping it.

Beyond the obvious and immediate pragmatic value it once possessed, this map is a symbolic reminder of the role played by transportation in the growth of the city and the structuring and re-structuring of its space. “Checagou” took its place at the head of a canal envisioned by Joliet long before the waterway or the city itself came into existence. From this cartographic vision, the Illinois and Michigan Canal eventually did materialize, but the first railroad reached Chicago the same year. And it was rails and not water that secured the city’s place as the crossroads of the nation. Within the city itself, innovations in transportation from horse cars to street cars, from trolleys to commuter trains, and from bicycles to automobiles accommodated expansion of the city while enabling the more affluent to move progressively farther from the urban core and effecting changes in the spatial structure that continue to the present.

If the sheets in this atlas were placed together, the resulting map would measure 2.75 by 3.65 meters (9 x 12 feet) and would cover more than 10 times the area of the well known Rees and Rucker real estate map of 1849, which was drawn at precisely the same scale. Comparison of these maps once again underscores the phenomenal growth from a population of less than 25,000 in 1849 to something in excess of 3 million just over a century later, but also makes the important point that planning maps of the Twentieth Century replaced the real estate maps of the Nineteenth Century.

Although rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871 effected significant structural reorganization of the city, continued growth through the end of the century and the attendant social consequences created a compelling need for a city plan. The Burnham and Bennett Plan of Chicago served as the blueprint for many significant changes: the construction of two-tiered Wacker Drive, the broadening and enhancement of upper Michigan Avenue, the widening of Roosevelt Road, and the development of Grant Park. Although the work proscribed by this plan was brought to a halt by the Great Depression, the planning process itself was well established by that time. Chicago’s first zoning ordinance, in fact, was formulated in 1923, and provided the impetus for a profusion of planning maps in subsequent decades.

These maps offer visions of change in somewhat the same way that real estate maps of the previous century provided the basis for speculation and growth. And any doubts that the map often precedes the territory are undone by the rhetoric of the 1958 map shown here, which speaks of public improvements and urban renewal in heavy ink and advancing color. What the map does not speak to, save perhaps in a whisper, are the disruption and displacement occasioned by this progress. Also fading away under the bold symbols of improvement are the railroads that were responsible for the economic success, if not the raison d’être, of the city.

1. J. H. Colton, The City of Chicago, Illinois (New York: J.H. Colton, 1856). Newberry Library call number Case -G 10896.183
2. Richard’s Illustrated Statistical Map of the Great Conflagration in Chicago (St. Louis: R.P. Studley Co., 1871). Newberry Library call number: Map 6F oG4104.C6 1871 R6
3. William T. Stead, “Nineteenth Precinct, First Ward of Chicago,” in If Christ Came to Chicago (London: The Review of Reviews, 1894). Newberry Library call number: Case oF548.5 .S8 1894
4. Insurance Maps of Chicago, vol. 8 (Pelham, New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1917 - [51]), sheet 47. Newberry Library call number: map 8C oG1409.C4 S3 1916. Copyright 1951, The Sanborn Company, The Sanborn Library, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Further reproductions are prohibited without prior written permission from The Sanborn Library, LLC.
5. Cycle Road Map of Chicago (Chicago: J. Reed, 1898). Newberry Library call number: Case V 135.73
6. “Public Improvements in the City of Chicago,” Section 9, in Department of Planning Reference Atlas. (Chicago: Department of City Planning, 1958). Newberry Library call number: Map +G 10896.1643

Andreas, Alfred T. 1884. History of Chicago From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. Chicago: A.T. Andreas.

Burnham, Daniel H. and Edward H. Bennett. 1909. Plan of Chicago. ed. by Charles Moore. Chicago: The Commercial Club.

Conzen, Michael P., ed. 1984. Chicago Mapmakers. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society.

Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton.

Danzer, Gerald. 1990. “City Maps and Plans.” In David Buisseret (ed.), From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 165-185.

Elliot, James. 1987. The City in Maps: Urban Mapping to 1900. London: The British Library.

Harley, J.B. 2001. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

King, Geoff. 1996. Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Mayer, Harold M., and Richard C. Wade. 1969. Chicago: Growth of A Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schlereth, Thomas J. 1980. Past Cityscapes: Uses of Cartography in Urban Areas. The Newberry Papers in Family and Community History, Paper 80-1. Chicago: Newberry Library.