Factories in the sky, that's what the skyscrapers were for the new and growing
female work force. Yet these vertically organized buildings were marvelously
convenient ways to do business. Within a single tall building, with its array
of legal, advertising, and commercial services, world-shaping deals were made
in a matter of minutes, to the amazement of European businessmen.
The skyscraper was also a technological wonder. The first skyscrapers of New
York and Chicago were built with traditional construction techniques. They
were supported by heavy masonry walls, which were especially thick at the base.
Window space was at a premium, and no one dared build a wall-bearing building
over ten stories. It would have collapsed in a heap.
Then, in the mid-'80s, Chicago architects, following the lead of William Le
Baron Jenney, began building skyscrapers supported by wind-braced, iron and
steel frames, or "cages" as they were called. The thin walls of brick and
terra-cotta, lined with long rows of windows, were not part of the building's
support system. The steel frame did all the work. The wall was a mere
Chicago's skyscrapers evoked the no-nonsense, business style of the city. They
were clean-featured buildings, with a minimum of surface decoration. That's
what made them distinctive, a truly American architecture. They looked like
what they were supposed to be; business buildings, while New York skyscrapers
looked like Greek temples or Roman baths.
Chicago skyscrapers looked this way because they were built by developers
interested in cutting costs, not showing off. Louis Sullivan, the first
architect to make tall buildings beautiful, argued that form must follow
function. But in Chicago, form usually followed finance.
The skyscraper was the first building in history to depend on machines for its
operation. It needed elevators to carry passengers to its upper floors, and
telephone and telegraph systems to put tenants in the air in touch with the
city below. The skyscraper couldn't have existed without another gigantic
machine, an urban transit system capable of moving its small army of workers in
and out of the city.
The Department Store
This is equally true of another great commercial invention of the age, the
department store, with its even larger army of salesclerks and customers. The
department stores of America's big cities were crowded from morning 'til night
with customers, as many as a quarter of a million a day. And some of them had
workforces larger than steel mills.
Marshall Field, who rose from stock boy to the richest man in Chicago, built
the country's most opulent department store, a Palace of Desire that catered
almost exclusively to women. In the department stores along State Street,
women accounted for 99% of the purchases. When Chicago lit its department
stores with electricity, many of these women shoppers stayed in town into the
evening, without male escorts.
Traditionalists complained about this; and also about what they called the new
vice of shopping. A cranky editorial in the New York Times called shopping a
"purse-destroying addiction every bit as bad as male drinking." Yet the
accepted place of Victorian women in a male-dominated society, in the home all
day, taking care of children, sewing, cleaning, cooking, and entertaining, made
shopping a liberating escape from domestic drudgery.
In the great Chicago novel Sister Carrie, Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser
captures this oncoming consumption culture. Carrie Meeber, his central
character, leaves her home in rural Wisconsin at age eighteen, drawn to the
lights of Chicago, as young Dreiser had been, like a moth to a flame. There
she enters a glittering department store and finds herself wanting things she's
never seen before the very moment she sets eyes on them.
There is also in Sister Carrie a brilliant sensitivity to the changing nature
of dress as an indicator of class and social station. A salesgirl at Marshall
Field's making $6 a week could save her money and buy one or two ready-to-wear
outfits that could instantly place her on a level with her middle-class
customers. In the city, it was possible to move up in life simply by buying
the right clothes; or as Carrie does, by having her lover buy them for her.
Listen to Dreiser: "When a girl leaves her home at eighteen [for the city],
she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes
better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes
worse." Here Dreiser describes how many Americans felt about cities, then, as
well as now. There was the enticement of a better life, but the equal threat of
The Transit System
In Chicago, moving up in life usually meant moving out -- outward, that is, to
the suburbs. We think of suburbia as a 20th century creation. But the suburbs,
like the central business district, came into being at the end of the 19th
century; both of them made possible by mass transportation.
Before 1800, Chicago had a transit system dependent on 75,000 horses. Teams of
them pulled passenger cars along tracks in the streets. The horse, like the
modern automobile, was a heavy noise and air polluter. When it rained, the
city's gutters flowed with rank-smelling brown streams.
In dry weather, pulverized manure blew into the faces of downtown shoppers.
The constant drumming sound of iron-shod hooves on the city's streets was
deafening. And as many as 10,000 dead horses a year had to be removed from
the streets, where they'd been left to swell and rot in the gutters.
In 1880, the cable car, a San Francisco invention, began to replace the horse
as a passenger conveyance in Chicago. It was twice as fast as a horse, and was
clean and relatively quiet. But just as cable cars were being extended, the
electric trolley came along. It was faster, quieter, and less expensive to
install than a steam-driven cable system.
By 1900, almost every American city had adopted the trolley. In the Gilded
Age, urban transit was owned and operated not, as today, by municipalities, but
by powerful, and power-hungry, capitalists. The transit czar of Chicago was an
ex-convict named Charles Yerkes, who Dreiser made into the central character of
his novel, The Titan. Yerkes had served jail time in Philadelphia for stock
fraud, and he led a scandalous lifestyle with half-a-dozen mistresses.
He'd come to Chicago, he brazenly announced, for one reason only: to make a
fortune. Employing corruption and fraud on a colossal scale, they called him
the Goliath of Graft. Yerkes built a far-flung transit system. In the
process, he made a million in land speculation.
Yerkes built tracks out to empty land on the edge of the city, land he'd
secretly bought, in advance, for a song. Then, when his transit lines were in
place, he made a killing selling it to housing contractors. But Yerkes
couldn't get along without a little help from his friends. He needed
franchises from the city to operate his transit lines on public streets, and to
get them he bribed almost the entire city council.
He was finally driven out of Chicago after he tried to muscle through
legislation that would have given him a long-term monopoly of Chicago's transit
system. Yerkes returned to New York and then went abroad to build the London
Underground. Chicago was glad to get rid of him, but he left behind one of the
finest urban transportation systems in the world.