Pre-Fire Chicago 2

1857 (Detail)		From a great height you would probably note above all pre-fire Chicago's critical position as the nexus between the manufacturing East and the agricultural West in a nation that was assuming leadership of an international economy at the high tide of unbridled and undisciplined capitalism. This position explains why Chicago's boosters were correct when they argued that, the fire notwithstanding, its future was never in doubt. The city was not a free-standing metropolis that suddenly and accidentally appeared out of nowhere but a critical piece in an interdependent system--featuring an ever-increasing flow of people, money, goods, and information--that created it in the first place and would rebuild it with an astonishing rapidity that seemed to recapitulate its already breathtaking history in a kind of historical fast-forward. From a somewhat lower altitude, one would see in some detail the various enterprises that animated this system: the lakefront and the branches of the Chicago River that divided the city into its North, South, and West Divisions, all busy with commercial traffic; the ten railroads that converged on Chicago and by which, since 1869, it was linked from coast to coast; the seventeen grain elevators that could hold almost twelve million bushels; the more than 1100 factories, of which the McCormick Reaper Works was perhaps the most prominent; commercial exchanges such as the Board of Trade; wholesale houses including the grocer Z.M. Hall in the five-story Lind Block building; new State Street retail concerns such as Booksellers' Row and the Field and Leiter department store; and the city within a city that was the Union Stock Yards, which had opened on Christmas Day of 1865, through whose gates passed well over three million head of livestock in the year of the fire.
1864