Chicago, Illinois

The History of Chicago and its Environment

Chicago has a long history of altering the natural environment on a grand scale. Similar to any other city, its networks of trade stretched out into distant hinterlands, with the city's growth dependent on the transformation of forests into lumber and prairies into grain. Within the city limits, however, three major projects around the turn of the 20th century shaped Chicago's special relationship to its natural environment. First, the original lakefront was filled in with debris from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire and later extended with landfill to form Grant Park, popularly known as “Chicago's front yard.” Although this open space has been shared with rail yards and train tracks, it has also remained a distinctive feature of Chicago's skyline. Second, after decades of dealing with refuse being dumped in the Chicago River and then flowing into Lake Michigan, the city's source of drinking water, the Sanitary District of Chicago engineered a reversal of the river in 1900. This sent pollutants into the Sanitary and Ship Canal southward to the Des Plaines River and into the Illinois River, significantly improving the water quality of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River (though reducing water quality downstream). Finally, Daniel Burnham's design of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and his 1909 Plan of Chicago brought the City Beautiful movement to the Midwest. Although Burnham's plan was only partially implemented, many of the parks and boulevards he designed were put in place and remain important landmarks today. In addition, Burnham's spirit of large-scale visioning continues to influence planning in Chicago today, especially during the centennial of his original plan.

During the middle of the 20th century, Chicago was not particularly known for being green. Although it was one of the first U.S. cities to develop a regional transportation plan, its heavy industry and rapid suburbanization led to significant air pollution, and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s was of greater concern than the natural environment. It was not until Mayor Richard M. Daley's tenure that the city's environmental leadership began and a Department of Environment (DOE) was established in 1992. One of the DOE's first projects was the Brownfields Initiative, meant to clean up and redevelop old industrial sites to enhance economic and environmental sustainability. Another early project was the planting of hundreds of thousands of trees along city streets, along with placing concrete planters in the median strips of over 60 miles of city streets. On the one hand, this approach was criticized for focusing on aesthetics rather than on the harder problems of pollution or unemployment; on the other hand, studies have shown that having greenery nearby not only improves property values but also lowers crime and improves public health.

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