Gather round, children, and hear the story of Daniel Hudson Burnham, Chicago’s original man with a plan. Poet of the “livable city” and Albert Speer’s favorite architect. Prophet of the City Beautiful, the Architecture Firm Corporate, and the Lakefront Public. One half of the firm Burnham & Root, which gave Chicago the Rookery, the Monadnock, and the Reliance buildings. Head of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the discovery of the New World by Columbus and marked the discovery of Chicago by everyone else. Author of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, a vision of the city that was almost perfectly false and therefore irresistible to two generations of boosters. Inventor of a Chicago for people who didn’t like Chicago. Boss Burnham. Uncle Dan.
The blind approval with which Burnham is too often praised in Chicago is matched by the equally blind disdain with which he’s regarded nearly everywhere else. People can’t make up their minds about Dan, although the summer of 1993 is a good time to try. Thousands of architects and city planners from the United States and the civilized world will gather in Chicago at a series of conventions largely because of what Burnham thoughtfully provided in the way of tourist knickknacks. While here they will grapple with the Big Questions that remain unanswered since Burnham’s day: What is the city? Who is it for? What is the relationship between urban form and culture? Culture and power? Which way to the rest room?
Thomas Hines, author of the 1974 biography Burnham of Chicago, describes him as a mover but definitely not a shaker. His was a personality of moderation, compromise, practicality. He was Republican by temperament rather than conviction, a believer in free-market capitalism who was dismayed by its more egregious social effects. Poverty and its ills, one suspects, offended his taste as much as his morals. Hines calls him a mystic of sorts who practiced a very practical kind of Christian ethics. A conservative liberal, a man interested in results, he was the Chicago doer personified, perfectly qualified to be the chief architect to Chicago’s regular guys.
The fair revealed something of the profound dichotomy within Burnham regarding his work. There is reason to believe that the tall building per se never engaged Burnham the way it did some of his clients. The tall building was an economic necessity in downtown Chicago, not an aesthetic choice, and it is plausible that it was regarded by the city’s more polished capitalists as vulgar, even as an expression of bad business manners. The bulk of Burnham’s later office buildings are big rather than tall–skyscrapers lying on their sides, like 208 S. LaSalle, decorous, stable, solid like the Establishment members who paid for them.
The 1909 Plan is widely reckoned to be the most influential city plan of its type; certainly it was the city plan that had the most influence on Chicago. It was the 1909 Plan that sketched out today’s lakefront and Wacker Drive, North Michigan Avenue, Union Station, Navy Pier, and Northerly Island (Meigs Field), to name only the more conspicuous of the landmarks previewed in its pages. Abroad, it stimulated the City Beautiful movement, which inspired cities of pretension for two decades.
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The Plan was Burnham’s culminating work; he died, in 1916, before much of what he’d laid out could be built. On the day he died the Chicago Symphony, in concert, played the funeral march from Gotterdammerung in tribute. He is buried in Graceland Cemetery, beneath a redundant stone marker: the city is filled with monuments he built to himself.
And it came not a moment too soon. In 1906 Chicago was not a city that worked. It was congested, incoherent. Its growth had overrun the city’s puny attempts to control it, or at least ameliorate its effects. As a result, neither goods nor people could move easily through its streets; its neighborhoods were dark, dirty, and flimsily built; its public ways were open sewers. Chicago was a kind of money factory–massively profitable but also noisy, ugly, and dangerous.
