Chicago: From the Fair to World War I

Chicago from the Fair to World War I: 1893-1914

In the wake of the economic boom of the 1880s and the 1893, Chicago witnessed a somewhat slower pace of economic and population growth and a maturing of the built environment in the years 1893-1914. No longer a raw Western boom town, the city by now had all of the features of a great metropolis. By the last decade in the century advances in printing technology made possible a vast expansion in use of images in publications. One result was a proliferation of illustrated urban guidebooks. In Chicago, for example, the Standard Guide edited by John J. Flinn and published in 1890 had 4 maps and over 50 illustrations reproduced by photo-engraving. The decades before the First World War also saw the flowering of the architectural photograph. Companies such as the Chicago Architectural Photography Company and the Barnes Crosby Company produced urban images of unsurpassed clarity and precision. The Chicago Historical Society has a large collection of these images, a sample of which can be seen in Larry Viskochil, Chicago at the Turn of the Century in Photographs, 1984.