12/30/2023 0 Comments Great chicago fire![]() Prior to the fire, Chicago was not exactly a remote outpost. When viewed through a stereoscope, these photographic images created the illusion of depth and seemingly placed the viewer directly into the environment that they were viewing. However, no media achieved this better than the stereograph. Another reporter began a detailed description of the wreckage: “Never was presented a more mournful scene” as “the desolate ruins of this city.” 4 This reporter and others sought to bring distant audiences into the spaces of ruination in Chicago. Hastily erected wooden structures seemed to evaporate completely. The once-burgeoning metropolis was reduced to heaps of ash, piles of bricks, and the skeletal façades of formerly grand buildings. 3 Following months of drought, the fire made quick work of the dry city. The Great Chicago Fire raged for more than twenty-four hours, claiming roughly three hundred lives and causing three-and-a-half square miles of damage. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA photo by Nathan Fiske ![]() Lovejoy & Foster, “Bookseller’s Row, N.E. As I discuss below, the stereographs’ pictorial allusions to a romanticized past-evident to viewers then and now-helped construct the city’s future. This brief moment of imagined, long-distance time travel made me curious about how these pictures functioned in their own era and if the ruins had significance to Chicago’s legacy beyond their initial shock value. 2 In viewing the other stereographs in the collection-noting crumbling archways, fortress-like towers, and fluted columns-I was also reminded of sites in Pompeii, Athens, Rome, and other cities with still-extant or heavily documented ruins, and I wondered how much I was imposing a twenty-first-century view onto this scene. ![]() Orienting myself to the coordinates invited reminiscences of other sites familiar to me that are no longer there, such as Marshall Field’s (which fell victim both to the fire in 1871 and, more recently, to the Macy’s department store empire). This particular stereograph, one of dozens lying before me, depicted destruction at the very heart of the city: the remnants of what was formerly Booksellers’ Row on the corner of Madison and State Streets, today the center of Chicago’s grid system. While searching for photographs of nineteenth-century houses, I instead found pictorial evidence of my hometown in ruins. Its façade was still adorned with engaged columns and low-relief, cherubic heads, but its entire interior was obliterated, save for parts of its load-bearing walls (fig. ![]() The stereograph I was examining at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, some 950 miles away from Chicago, portrayed the remains of a large neoclassical building. 1 A century and a half later, I held in my hands an image of the Great Chicago Fire’s aftermath, presented in duplicate and pasted onto rectangular cardboard. So read a special dispatch report from Chicago to a Cincinnati newspaper on October 9, 1871, its dismal prose conveying palpable hopelessness and exasperation. The water has given out, and the firemen are exhausted. All the city banks are burned, the business part of the city is gone, and the fire is still raging. everybody is burned out from Twelfth Street north, and from Canal Street on the west side, to the lake.
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