Chicago Architecture and Art: Images from Books

Chicago's built environment at any given moment in its history consisted not simply of a collection of buildings, streets, subway and elevated lines, streetlamps, and sidewalks; it consisted as well in the images which residents and visitors brought with them as they confronted the city. Books of photographs, engravings and other illustrations formed one source for those images. We have included a polyglot collection of books from various times and with various purposes, to give some of the flavor of the images which both reflected and influenced the ways people looked at and understood the city.

One of the most important such sources was the City Directory. Like modern-day phone directories, the city directory located residents, businesses and services, and often included advertising as well-- advertising that might have illustrations of the building facade, or (somefimes fanciful) presentations of the warehouse or building block occupied by the business. The city directory itself conveyed a certain geographical sense-- it was, after all, the city rendered small enough to put in one's pocket, indispensible enough (with its maps and aids, like street-car guides) that residents and visitors used these books until they crumbled. And publishers of these books came to alter them to fit their various uses. Soon these books combined the city directory and the guidebook into one. In the process, publishers made decisions about what buildings, what businesses, what civic triumphs to include in their guides, and what facts to use to convey their importance.

We've included samples from two such directories, one published in 1844, the second published much later, probably around 1890.

• Chicago City Directory
• The Lakeside Annual Guide of Chicago

Guidebooks were especially popular in Chicago around the turn of the century, as they were in every major metropolitan area of the country. The rapid pace of urbanization and the increasingly complex urban matrix meant that visitors truly needed help figuring out what to see, what to look for, how to get from one place to another, what to write home about. Guidebooks offered help in all these areas.

In Chicago, the wild popularity of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 gave rise to a boom in guidebooks, many of which were published before the Fair, and so had only rudimentary information about the sights there. In part to compensate, and in part because citizen-visitors were often utterly overwhelmed by the city of Chicago itself, these guidebooks were rich in information about the larger urban surroundings.

• The Artistic Guide to Chicago and the World Columbian Exposition
• Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago
• Chicago: Its History and Its Builders v.1

Closely allied to the guidebooks were the souvenir "View Books" that appeared before, during, and after the Exposition of 1893. These used a variety of reproduction techniques, ranging from primitive wood engraving to highly sophisticated and lovely photogravure processes, to provide a souvenir of the city. The images that appeared within, their sequencing, what was written about them, and (perhaps equally importantly) what wasn't included), all reflected the developing composite that already urban dwellers and analysts were calling the "public image" of the city.

• Brentano's Views of American Cities: Views of the City of Chicago
• Chicago: Standard Guide for 1892

By the advent of relatively cheap halftone reproduction methods at the turn of the century, writers of books, reports, and the like all began to use visual images of the city both to spice up their dry texts and to emphasize their points. With the increasing presence of committed city visionaries, social scientists, urban professionals, and (soon) Progressive reformers, the city report became a new presence in the contest to control or at least influence public opinions and images of the city.

• Historical Review of Chicago and Cook County, v.1
• History of Lincoln Park, and the Annual Report of the Commissioners compiled by I.J. Bryan, secretary of the Commissioners
• The Story of Chicago and National Development