Robert A. Holland remembers that, as a kid growing up in southern Wisconsin, he made maps of the woods that were his playground. They traced the trails he and his pals traveled and the location of the secret “fort” they had built.
Later, fascinated with the frontier, he pored over maps of the Old West. Still later, he found that maps of foreign lands had the power to transport him to places he never had been.
Now, at 52, Holland’s cartography affair continues as he collects beautiful, old maps (“We need more walls,” he noted about the Lake Shore Drive apartment where he and his wife live), and he writes about them. His recently published “Chicago in Maps: 1612 to 2002” (Rizzoli, 208 pages, $50) tracks how this city got to be “on the map” in every sense of the phrase, rising from a tiny, swampy settlement to become the world-class metropolis it is today.
Holland shows how Chicago maps go well beyond being a means of finding one’s way. Maps helped to plan the city, to promote it, to track its growth, to celebrate its marvels.
“I’ve found that books focusing on the maps themselves seem a little dry,” he noted. “What I wanted to do was place each map in a historic context.”
The first context was the canvas on which the city would make its mark. From the early to mid-17th Century, maps of what then was “New France” were beginning to turn the vast “terra incognito” of the North American interior into land that was more known. Based on the direct observations of French explorers and what they learned of other places through conversations with Native Americans, the Great Lakes region began to take form, albeit with, initially, loose, potato-shaped renditions of the lakes.
In the hallway of his apartment, Holland pointed out a framed map of Lake Superior that included some islands named to honor the expedition’s financial backers.
“There are no such islands,” he said.
Despite such human foibles, a basic sense of the terrain, the hills, lakes, rivers and bays filled in over time. In some maps, otherwise blank areas contained pictures of wildlife — bears, deer, turkeys — and of the everyday lives of the natives.
“That,” Holland said of one such detail, “probably is an Indian shooting a buffalo, but it’s drawn more like a cow.”
In 1688, the “City of Big Shoulders,” the “Windy City,” appears by name, but the name isn’t exactly Chicago. There on a map by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, near the bottom of a lake identified as Lac Des Ilinois, is “Fort Checagou,” named not for shoulders or gusts but for a garlicky onion that grew wild along the river’s banks.
Amazing prescience
Rover and trader Louis Joliet documented the future site of Chicago in a 1674 map that illustrated an amazing prediction. In a report to Comte de Frontenac, the governor of Quebec, he wrote that the area where the now Chicago River met the now Lake Michigan had:
“A very great and important advantage, which perhaps will hardly be believed. It is that we could go with facility (from the Atlantic Ocean to the St. Lawrence, then into the Illinois River from Chicago, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf) … by very easy navigation. It would only be necessary to cut a canal by cutting through but half a league of prairie from the foot of the Lake of Illinois to the river Saint Louis (the Illinois).”
Joliet urged that if such a canal were dug and a colony were established at Chicago, the place would become the gateway to the West. The governor, however, wasn’t interested, and Joliet’s vision wouldn’t be realized for another 142 years.
A map showing the city as it was when incorporated as a town in 1833 charts just 20 blocks laid out, all south of the river. The map notes a population of 350, a hefty increase over the 150 it had been at the beginning of the year. Just four years later there would be 4,170 Chicagoans.
The real estate boom created a map boom. As land parcels were divided for sale, new maps were needed. These were sent East to inform investors of opportunities for speculation. In his book, Holland notes an 80-by-100-foot lot at the southeast corner of South Water and Clark that had a value of $100 in 1832. It was sold in 1834 for $3,400. The very next year, it brought $15,000. On that plot at 77 W. Wacker Dr. now stands the granite and glass postmodern R.R. Donnelly Building.
In 1837, a fiscal crash stopped the expansion, but the coming of the railroads and the digging of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (Joliet’s vision) in midcentury would put what novelist Nelson Algren would call the “City on the Make” on the move again.
Other contexts for maps include the blessings and concerns that the city’s greatest geographical asset, its water, offered. A turning point for the city is charted in “Richard’s Illustrated and Statistical Map of the Great Conflagration in Chicago.” It shows the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 from a bird’s-eye view, and it maps the extent of the destruction. This was another map with a purpose. In order to raise funds for rebuilding from out-of-town investors, the vastness of the devastation had to be advertised. Other maps attest to the speed and exuberance with which the rebuilding took place.
Character builders
In a section of the book Holland thinks of as “worlds within worlds,” the particulars that gave character to the city are mapped. There’s a 1931 cute but surprisingly accurate gangland map, a map from Esquire magazine showing the city’s jazz clubs from 1914 to 1928, and an ethnic map from 1982 by now Tribune writer Ron Grossman. In 1894, a map was published showing a lot-by-lot view of part of the 1st Ward just south of the Loop. It was the city’s major vice district and shows a block of what now is South Sherman Street between Harrison and Polk Streets that held 25 brothels, eight saloons and a bookstore.
That map is from the Newberry Library collection, which, with the Chicago Historical Society, were the sources of most of the maps in the book.
“I tried to use maps from public rather than private collections, so people could go and look at the actual map,” Holland said, noting that old maps, like other art forms, are best viewed in the original.
The map on the cover of the book is a panoramic bird’s-eye view done in Art Deco style in 1931. Like most such views of the city, it is from a standpoint out above the lake looking west to the skyline and beyond. It’s clear in this map that Chicago has begun to be a vertical city with a cluster of skyscrapers downtown. Also, the fascination with the novelty of flight is clear. There are 18 airplanes in the air above the city adding to the 3-D view. Planes seemed to symbolize new technology and a soaring spirit to lift the nation from its Great Depression doldrums.
Holland deals not only with glorious, historic maps but also with new, radically different forms of mapping.
“In building a place on 80 acres in Wisconsin,” he said, “I was making maps of the woods like I did as a kid, but these were done with the help of satellite photos and GPS.”
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cleroux@tribune.com
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A faux bird’s-eye view of Chicago
Since the first manned, lighter-than-air balloon flight didn’t take place until 1783, panoramic or bird’s-eye or aero views — nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed from above at an oblique angle — that flowered in Europe during the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, were exercises in imagination.
A grid would be laid down on paper, and the artist or mapmaker would walk the streets drawing individual buildings from that eagle’s-eye view.
Such views became popular in the United States in the mid-19th Century, and remained so well into the 20th Century. Showing individual buildings rising from the street grid gave a three-dimensional, iconic feeling. As such, communities often used them to tout their growth.
Such works often were highly detailed and busy — harbors choked with ships, trains flashing down the tracks, sometimes outsize people commenting on the sights in cartoon-style balloons.
Some of these maps could be huge. An 1875 view of St Louis measured 9 by 24 feet.
The book “Chicago in Maps” includes aero views of both World’s Fairs — the Columbian Exposition and the Century of Progress.
Nearly all of the bird’s-eye views of Chicago assume a vantage point looking to the west from Lake Michigan just north of the mouth of the Chicago River.
— Charles Leroux
