Up until a few years ago it was safe to say that most Chicagoans had no idea who Daniel Burnham was; the master architect of the fabled "White City" at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition was merely a name in the history books. That began to change when Mayor Daley's midnight minions plowed through the tarmac of Meigs Field and reclaimed Northerly Island as public land. The Island is the only one of the handful projected by Burnham to have actually been built on landfill for the Fair.
More recently, Burnham, and the platitude credited him, "make no little plans, they have no power to move men's ... etc." became a commonplace during the skirmish over relocating the site of the Children's Museum from Navy Pier to Grant Park. The 1909 Plan for Chicago hatched by Burnham and fellow businessmen of the Commercial Club in the early years of the last century called for the creation of "the City Beautiful" with harmonious development, a grid system of streets, improved public transportation, and a park system of land reserved as public breathing spaces amid increasing industrialization. Land leases of public property ( some for 100 years ) and favored franchises enacted following the implementation of the Burnham Plan have often been at the heart of even recent City/Citizen disputes.
At the time of the 1893 Fair, women were not even in agreement about how to display their art and industry. Social doyenne Mrs. Potter Palmer and her Board of Lady Managers had succeeded in getting a Women's Building to showcase women's work. Lesbians from all over the world participated; Nathalie Micas exhibited her invention, a railway brake. Her lover, the artist Rosa Bonheur, the first woman to receive the rank of Officier de la Legion d'Honneur, displayed her paintings ( as did Anna Klumpke, later to become Bonheur's second "wife" ) . Protesting women, mostly suffragists, who felt that women's work should stand equally with men's, formed the Queen Isabella Association ( noting that Columbus' feat would have been impossible without her support ) . Harriet Hosmer, a lesbian and foremost woman sculptor of the period, was commissioned to create a statue of Isabella; she refused to have it exhibited in the women's pavilion.
In this year of city-wide Burnham Centennial celebrations and conferences, urban activist Janice Metzger, with her twentysomething-year history as a gadfly to regional planning agencies, offers her unique approach to the 1909 Plan. In her book What Would Jane Say? City—Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos ( Lake Claremont Press, $18.95 ) Metzger posits that many of the urban ills that continue to plague Chicago could have been rectified had the planners consulted with activist women of the day. While the Burnham plan was hailed as visionary, Metzger maintains it was little more than a medium for merchants to move their goods and themselves conveniently and efficiently around the metropolitan area without encountering evidence of urban blight. Real change, she suggests, would have incorporated the work begun and implemented by the progressive women city builders, like Hull House founder Jane Addams.
Metzger gathers a few dozen activist women prominent in 19th-century Chicago circles, sits them down in imagined meetings discussing their ideas in a kind of "you are there" approach to a history that might have been. After a half dozen introductory chapters on the Plan and the principals to set the stage, Metzger constructs chapters on major issues—transportation, labor, immigration issues, education, the judicial system, housing, etc. In each she imagines the women, some familiar ( Ida B. Wells, Addams, Bertha Palmer ) , some little known ( Mollie Netcher, Bessie Abramovitz, Mary Bartelme ) , in committees discussing their areas of activism. A brief biography of the women participating precedes each chapter. In this fantasy, Addams presents a final document, summarizing all the suggestions of the various meetings, to Burnham in May 1909.
Graft, corruption and the inequities of property tax assessment—were also issues that the women dealt with. Their recommendations stressed that the plan must address "the complicated issues of taxation ... if it is to have any value to future generations." Metzger has said one of her favorite stories involves Anita McCormick Blaine and her mother Nettie Fowler McCormick requesting reassessment of their respective property values saying they were "woefully underestimated" and that "those able to pay the taxes should pay them." Equitable tax revenues would have provided the needed funds to implement their recommendations.
Metzger credits some of the men who were activists in the progressive movement, but neglects others, who like Henry Blake Fuller ( another civic gadfly and a gay man ) may have offered input in his periodical writings of the time on the issues she raises. Fuller whose novel "With the Procession" was critical of merchants who aggrandized themselves by returning some of their questionable gains to the public in the name of philanthropy, also volunteered at Hull House.
Metzger notes that her book would have been impossibly difficult without the invaluable information offered in the Schultz/Hast encyclopedic Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary ( Indiana University Press, 2001 ) . Much of the dialogue among the women in What Would Jane Say" is reconstructed from their own writings—letters, biographies and other archival ephemera. In a final chapter, Metzger asks "Can we recover what we have lost?," taking on the Chicago Plan for the 21st Century proposed by Chicago Metropolis 2020. Readers from feminists to educators, historians to aldermen have been unanimous in their praise of the book, and echo its premise urging our current, and future, city planners to pause and consider what Jane ( and the other ladies ) would have to say about their proposals before proceeding.
Lake Claremont Press specializes in books on Chicago's history. A companion volume that informs Metzger's book is Lisa Holton's For Members Only: A History and Guide to Chicago's Oldest Private Clubs ( 2008 ) . In addition to the history and attitudes of Chicago's civic and cultural clubs for both men and women, Holton's book shows that in Burnhams's time a handful of African-American clubs were in existence—the earliest founded in the 1840s. Both books are rich additions to our understanding our city's expansion and inform today's discussions on the directions of its growth.
Copyright 2009 by Marie J. Kuda
