BUILDING CHICAGO Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis by Ann Durkin Keating
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BUILDING CHICAGO Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis by Ann Durkin Keating The suburban subdivision, replete with iden tical houses, lawns, and families, is a familiar icon of contemporary American culture. Equally familiar are suburban governments, which many critics describe as providers of exclusive havens from urban problems. Building Chicago examines the evolution of both the suburbs themselves and their gov ernments, using Cook County, Illinois— which includes Chicago and its immediate ring of suburbs—as a case study. It argues that suburban government evolved to meet the demands of residents and real estate developers for services and amenities. Until the 1860s, only two kinds of local government were available to Chicago area residents: the chartered urban form and the rural county/township organization. But by the first years of the twentieth century, the Chicago city center was ringed by dozens of suburban incorporated villages. Professor Keating's study explores these dramatic changes and the choices that led to this ring pattern now familiar in so many metro politan areas. While the particulars are spe cific to Chicago, there are clear connections to other cities in the same period. No previous study has systematically examined the evolution of suburban govern coiitimicd on back flap URBAN LIFE AND URBAN LANDSCAPE SERIES BUILDING CHICAGO SUBURBAN DEVELOPERS & THE CREATION OF A DIVIDED METROPOLIS ANN DURKIN KEATING OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright c 1988 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Keating, Ann Durkin Building Chicago. (Urban life and urban landscape series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Suburbs - Illinois - Chicago - History — 19th century. 2. Local government - Illinois — Chicago - History 19th century. 3. Local government - Illinois - Cook County — History — 19th century. I. Title. II. Series. HT351.K42 1988 3()7.7'64'0977311 88-31457 ISBN O-8142-O455-4 C ONTENTS List of Tables uii List of Maps viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Patterns of Settlement u 2 The Expansion of City Government 33 3 Technological Change and Chicago Homes 51 4 The Best of Both Worlds 64 5 Local Government Responds to Suburbanization 79 6 Suburban Government and Annexation g8 7 The Suburb Arrived 120 Notes 127 Selected Bibliography 155 Appendix A. Note on Tables i6g Tables 172 Appendix B. Maps 209 Index 221 TABLES 1. Outlying Cook County Settlements to 1900, by Economic Base 2. Selected Statistics on Antebellum Chicago 3. Selected Illinois Central Railroad Stations in the Town of Hyde Park, 1869 4. Enumeration of New Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1831-40 5. Summary of Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1831-40 6. Enumeration of New Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1841-60 7. Summary of Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1841-60 8. Enumeration of New Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1861-80 9. Summary of Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1861-80 10. Enumeration of New Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1881 -1900 11. Summary of Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1881-1900 12. Settlements in Cook County Incorporated, 1881-1900 13. Chicago Dwellings with/without Water, 1856-58 14. Chicago Infrastructure Expansion, 1863-89 15. Municipal Expenditures in Chicago, 1863-73 16. Expansion of Water and Sewer Systems in Chicago, 1861-1900 17. Chicago Land Values, 1836-79 18. Developers Involved in Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1861-80 19. Comparison of Developed Settlements to All Outlying Settlements, 1861-80 20. Cook County Population Growth by Area, 1860-80 21. Organization of Local Government in Cook County, 1840 22. Organization of Local Government in Cook County, 1860 23. Breakdown of Economic Bases of Settlements in Collar Townships, 1880 24. Organization of Local Government in Cook County, 1880 25. Summary of Governments of Settlements in Outlying Cook County, 1K80 26. Selected Population Estimates in Cook County, 1880-90 27. Incorporated Villages Annexed to Chicago, 1890-1930 28. Miles of Selected Improvements in Chicago, 1896-98 29. Organization of Local Government in Cook County, 1900 30. Summary of Settlements Annexed to Chicago by 1900 MAPS 1. Major Settlements in Cook County, 1840 2. Outlying Settlement in Cook County, 1841-60 3. New Settlements in Cook County, 1861-80 4. New Settlements in Cook County, 1881-1900 5. Water and Sewerage Districts in Chicago, 1857 6. Extension of Chicago Water System, 1878-90 7. Extension of Chicago Sewerage System, 1857-78 8. Settlements Founded by a Developer/Development Company in Cook County, 1861-80 9. Chicago Area Parks and Boulevards, 1892 10. Cook County 1850, Showing Townships and Their Population Densities 11. Cook County 1880, Showing Townships and Their Population Densities 12. Map of Chicago Showing Extent of Settled Area by 1899 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book could not have been completed without the help of many people. Henry D. Shapiro and Zane L. Miller have provided invaluable assistance as the editors of this series. Kathleen Neils Conzen guided my work through the dissertation stage and provided many suggestions for further improvements. Many others read and commented on all or parts of this work at various stages. Among them are: Louis P. Cain, Jerilyn Cascino, Michael P. Conzen, Daniel Durkin, John and Dorothy Durkin, Margaret E. Durkin, Michael H. Ebner, Jane D. Fruin, Barry Karl, Ronald Dale Karr, JohnJ. Keating, Seymour Mandelbaum, Lamar Riley Murphy, Jon A. Peterson, Mark Rose, Christine Meisner Rosen, Howard Rosen, Patricia J. Tracy, and Marc A. Weiss. Elizabeth Brooks did the initial work on the maps. My heartfelt thanks for their time and effort. Howard Rosen and the Public Works Historical Society have graciously granted permission to use some materials previously published in their essay series. I would also like to thank Alex Holzman, Charlotte Dihoff, and the Ohio State University Press for their special help. I NTRODUCTION SUBURBS AND THEIR GOVERNMENTS Shopping malls, industrial parks, residential subdivisions, and auto mobiles are obvious parts of the contemporary American suburban land scape. Similarly familiar are the suburban governments that ring most U.S. urban centers. Indeed, for most of us, suburbs are so integral a part of modern American culture that a time when they did not exist seems almost inconceivable. Still, only one hundred and fifty years ago, suburban communities and their governments were either nonexistent or were largely indistinguishable from their rural neighbors. The purpose of this study is to explore the emergence and early evolution of suburbs and their governments, using the Chicago area as a specific case study. Perhaps the hardest task for the late twentieth-century student is to see through the superficial view of the contempory suburban landscape. A fruitless search for fast-food franchises, Levittowns, or parking lots in the nineteenth century yields the impression that suburbs are purely a phenomenon of the years since 1945. Nothing could be further from the truth. Behind this facade lie characteristics that are found in other places, other times. Social scientists since the turn of the century have worked toward isolating a basic description of a suburb. Building on their work, we can identify a number of core characteristics of the modern U.S. suburb.1 First, suburbs arc defined in relation to a city. Characterized by physical proximity to a city, they are distinguished from the urban center by their low population density. At the same time, many amenities provided in cities arc available to suburban resi dents: both physical improvements like water and sewers, and services like schools and fire and police protection. Also, suburbs are more homogeneous than their city centers because they perform only some urban functions and contain only a portion of the city's population. 2 • Introduction Both suburbs and outlying residential districts within city limits are organized internally by residents and hold some characteristics in com mon with a small town. Finally, although the specific forms vary among metropolitan areas, underlying the twentieth-century conception of a suburb is political autonomy.2 If we accept these characteristics, areas as diverse as Walnut Creek, developed largely since 1950 in the San Francisco Bay Area; Country Club Hills, built in the 1920s near Kansas City; and Riverside, founded outside Chicago in the 1870s, all are easily identified as suburbs. To apply this categorization simply to areas clearly suburban today, however, is to overlook those communities which nineteenth-century residents settled as suburbs but which have been both physically and politically engulfed by their central city. Vast stretches within cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago were originally built as suburbs but today are seen simply as urban neighborhoods. In order to study the early development of suburbs, we must include, then, not only those areas that are still clearly identifiable as suburbs, but the twentieth-century urban neighbor hoods that began their existence as suburbs.3 By including areas that today are a part of the City of Chicago in this study of early suburbs, we are able to reach beyond the era when suburban government had become a requisite part of a suburb to an era when the governance of suburbs was just being worked out. Since government does not operate in a vacuum, other changes were most likely also affecting suburbs. Government here can serve, among other things, as a flag to indicate a time when the definition of a suburb outlined above did not yet apply. For example, in the Chicago area until the Civil War, there were only two kinds of local government available to residents: the chartered urban form and the rural county/township organization. There was no "sub urban" government. This situation reflected the absence of suburban communities as described above, which demand suburban governance.