Tuesday, February 17, 2009

man with a plan

I love seeing where things come from: scratchpaper that caught the first draft of a great novel, fuzzy demos that would become favorite songs. Usually you can recognize how something ended up how it is in those first glimmers, and that the path from A to B might have been tricky but was always inevitable.

And then there is the City of Chicago.

I moved here a few years ago "for real" (I grew up in the Southwest burbs, then lived in New York), and am getting deeply into the history of the city. Turn of the century Chicago sounds like one of the wildest places on Earth, and if given the chance to see it from the eyes of either an old-timey madam or titan of ideas and industry, I'd take it in a HG Wells-ian heartbeat.

I'm learning a lot about Daniel Burnham and the Burnham plan right now, and keep needing to do a mindcheck every few pages of whatever book about him I'm reading. I'm no stranger to big dreams, but this was a guy who went to bed at night dreaming of cities, and woke up every morning to write them.



He was also fiercely in love with his wife, and pretty quotable.

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized."

Daniel Burnham: no slouch.

You can view the original Plan of Chicago online right here.

You can view Burnham's stupendous mustache right here:

1 comment:

Neil said...

I hope you've read "Devil in the White City." It's a bit long-winded, but it's a great insight into Daniel Burnham's passion for his work.

And check out forgottenchicago.com when you have time.