If you’ve ever shopped on Michigan Avenue, you’ve walked through the Burnham Plan’s legacy. That’s also true if you’ve been to Navy Pier. Or if you’ve gone on a bike ride through the lakefront parks. Or hiked through a Cook County Forest Preserve.
In myriad ways, the city and metropolitan region–home today of more than eight million people–is the product of Plan of Chicago.
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, who produced the plan in 1909 for the Commercial Club, envisioned a Chicago that was beautiful and green and much more livable than the congested, claustrophobia-inducing city of a century ago.
Indeed, the celebrated plan, credited with creating the field of urban planning, transformed Chicago, a city that was choking on its off-the-charts growth in the years after the Great Fire of 1871. It led to the widening of streets, the easing of traffic flow and the expansion of the city’s lakefront parks.
Burnham “turned the city inside out. He made the backyard the front yard,” said Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an emeritus art history professor at DePaul University. Without the plan, she said, “We wouldn’t be able to get to the lake. It would all be private property. We would be land-locked as New York was until very recently. The public had to go to Coney Island.”
Here is a list of major results of the Burnham Plan, reflecting either specific recommendations in the document or carried out in the spirit of its vision:
THE LAKEFRONT
The Burnham Plan envisioned a continuous string of shoreline parks from the Far South Side to Wilmette. In line with that, Lincoln Park, which ended at Belmont Avenue, was extended north to Hollywood Avenue. Shown at left are stretches of shoreline (–) where local parks are interspersed between gaps (North Side) or there is no parkland (South Side).
A. THE NEAR NORTH SIDE
North Michigan Avenue was extended over a new double-deck bridge into the area north of the Chicago River. This resulted in the eventual creation of the city’s main shopping district, the Magnificent Mile, and the late 20th- Century development of the tony Near North Side neighborhood.
B. WACKER DRIVE
This double-deck roadway along the banks of the Chicago River, named for plan booster Charles Wacker, did much to ease downtown traffic jams. Nearly a century later, its elegant design forms the backdrop for Mayor Richard Daley’s river beautification project.
C. NAVY PIER
The Burnham Plan called for two parallel piers built out into the lake as major recreational sites for Chicagoans. The 3,000-foot-long Navy Pier was the only one built. But it didn’t achieve its full potential until it reopened in 1995 after a $200-million renovation.
D. GRANT PARK
Prior to 1909, the park was an uninviting strip of land along Michigan Avenue. But the plan envisioned it as the city’s elegantly landscaped front yard. Railroad tracks blocking access to the lake were depressed below street level, and the park extended 300 feet farther east.
E. CHICAGO RIVER SOUTH BRANCH
As called for in the plan, a bend in the South Branch was straightened in 1930 so that it ran east of and parallel to Canal Street between Polk and 18th Streets. This made possible the residential development of the South Loop a half century later.
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F. NORTHERLY ISLAND
The plan called for a string of islands along the southern lakefront, but this was the only one completed. In 1948, it became the site of a small airport, Meigs Field. In 2003, Mayor Richard M. Daley sent out city back-hoes that destroyed the runways in a middle-of-the-night raid.
OTHER RESULTS NOT ON MAP:
REGIONAL HIGHWAY SYSTEM
While closely identified with Chicago, the plan also included proposals for a regional highway system, providing a map that looks very much like the highway-expressway-tollway network of today.
COOK COUNTY FOREST PRESERVE SYSTEM
As a complement to the proposed lakefront parkland, the plan called for the creation of a forest preserve district throughout the county. Today, the district has 68,000 acres.