Crosby's Opera House, ca. 1870
Chicago and the Great Fire of 1871
The Chicago fire of 1871 was a watershed event in the history of cities. Though modern urban centers had been prone to cataclysmic fires for centuries, the rapid development of cities, particularly in 19th-century North America, meant that these fires ar
rived more suddenly, burned more rapidly, and destroyed more of the city than had been the case previously. But the Chicago fire's popularity and importance was the result less of its sobering messages to city planners and entrepreneurs. Instead, it spo
ke to deeper ambivalences about the new cities that increasingly dominated the 19th century cultural landscape.
Chicago's Great Fire of 1871 was more than a conflagration-- it was a media event. In books, paintings, photographs, stereo views, wood engravings, chromolithographs, in all the media visual and written, the Fire became an instant hit. Clearly the s
ubject wasn't simply a Midwestern American city stricken by fire-- there were too many of those occurring during this moment in the development of the urban industrial matrix. The Fire resonated with deeper questions, questions asked and answered in the
texts and images that flooded forth during the years immediately following. To look at these documents, with their iconography of grief, death, forced humility and resolution, is to see the ways that this event served to bring to the surface deeper confl
icts concerning the modern urban-industrial world, the nature of human
life within its cities, and the possibility of community within them.
Probably the most comprehensive site on the subject of the Chicago Fire resulted from a joint venture by historian Carl Smith of Northwestern University, and the Chicago Historical Society. Originally an exhibition entitled The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory the visual product became a striking and more permanent website, from which some of the following pages are drawn.