LIQUID CAPITAL
AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY
Series Editors:
Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird, Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and public policy—understood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking but also the structuring presence of governmental institutions—has been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
LIQUID CAPITAL
Making the Chicago Waterfront
JOSHUA A. T. SALZMANN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Salzmann, Joshua A. T., author.
Title: Liquid capital: making the Chicago waterfront / Joshua A.T. Salzmann.
Other titles: American business, politics, and society.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: American business, politics, and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016755 | ISBN 9780812249736 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Waterfronts—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. | Waterfronts—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century. | Land use—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. | Land use—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century. | Human ecology—Illinois—Chicago—History—19th century. | Human ecology—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HT168.C5 S25 2018 | DDC 304.2/097731109034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016755
CONTENTS
Introduction. State Power and the Rise of Chicago
Chapter 1. Making a River Run Through It
Chapter 2. The Legal Construction of Free Marketplaces
Chapter 3. The Creative Destruction of the Chicago River Harbor
Chapter 4. Beauty and the Crisis of Commercial Civilization
Chapter 5. A Public Pier for Pleasure and Profit
Epilogue. A Waterscape for the New Millennium
INTRODUCTION
State Power and the Rise of Chicago
In 1818, an employee of the American Fur Company, Gurdon S. Hubbard, described a journey that traders had been making for centuries via a land route, or portage, between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. It spanned a patch of marshland that remains a crucial crossroads today—the site of Chicago’s Midway Airport.1 The men in Hubbard’s party paddled their barks from the open waters of Lake Michigan into the shallow, sand-clogged mouth of the Chicago River. From there, they ascended the main stem and south branch of the Chicago until reaching the river’s source in a bog at the base of a very low ridge about half a dozen miles from Lake Michigan.
That unassuming ridge was a continental divide, formed more than thirteen thousand years ago when melting glaciers deposited heaps of debris onto the landscape. East of the ridge, water flowed into the Chicago River, Lake Michigan, and, eventually, the Atlantic Ocean. West of the ridge, water flowed into Mud Lake, a murky appendage of the Des Plaines River whose waters ran southwest toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.2 When Hubbard’s party got to the divide, the river ran dry, and their boats had to be “placed on short rollers … until the [Mud] lake was reached.” For three days, the men slogged through Mud Lake. Hubbard recalled the grueling trek: “Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with … poles, while six or eight others waded in the mud alongside … [and still] others busied themselves in transporting our goods on their backs to the [Des Plaines] [R]iver.” All the while, the men were beset by leeches that “stuck so tight to the skin that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them.”3
The area surrounding that vital and miserable passageway between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds soon became the site of phenomenal urban growth. That growth was the product of collaboration between public policymakers and private businessmen. Over the course of a century, they constructed crucial water and railroad infrastructure, transforming Chicago into a massive metropolis.
Established as a town in 1833, Chicago was, at the time, a wilderness outpost of just 350 residents clumped around a small military fort on soggy land where the Chicago River trickled into Lake Michigan.4 The site was known to local natives as Chigagou, or the “wild garlic place.” It flooded frequently and stank. Mud abounded. Summers brought blistering heat. The bitterly cold winters were made worse by bracing winds, from which the flat, monotonous landscape offered little protection.5
Yet, in the course of a century, Chicagoans radically transformed the site from a desolate swamp into a vast canvas for urban experimentation, construction, and commerce. By 1933, it was a sprawling industrial metropolis of more than three million souls.6 The city’s denizens had built canals, bridges, and docks; laid railroads connecting the coasts; siphoned the nation’s grain harvest into towering storage elevators; cut the tall pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin from the earth, stacking and selling them in magnificent