"Domestic and Respectable": Suburbanization and Social Control After the Great Chicago Fire

Chicago's Great Fire of October 8-10 1871 left 100000 race homeless. At first, city authorities place uprighted barracks for emergency shelter, on the other hand within a week they changed their tactics, "the barrack phraseology of life proving unhealthy, one as well as the other morally and physically" (Chamberlin 87) Chicago's elite philanthropists decided that barracks pos not alone a physical threat of disease, on the other hand also a moral threat to economic industry, political stability, and sexual ethics: "So large a number, brought into promiscuous and involuntary association, would almost certainly breed dis ease and promote idleness, disorder, and vice" (87) Chicago's Relief and Aid Society was especially worried about "mechanics and the better class of laboring tribe thrifty, domestic, and respectable," who had haveed homes before the fire and for whom they believed single single-family houses could restore "hope renewed efficiency and comparative prosperity" (Relief and Aid Society 8) What was at stake, according to the Relief and Aid Society, were the moral, civic, and economic values of Chicago's developing middle-class, and with these, the prosperity of the whole city.

So the Relief Society built single-family abodes Winter was approaching, lumber was scarce owed to other forest fires that fiery and windy autumn, the center of the city had just been overthrowed by flames, one-third of Chicago's population was homeles and Chicago's Relief Society chose to build suburban-style single-family homes1 Chicagoans had been consume ed out of apartments, boardinghouses, brothels, and taverns but for the safety of their city, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society decided to re-house these tribe in suburban cottages. Over the exceptionally devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat winter of 1871 -1872, Chicago's Relief and Aid Society built 8033 single-family abodes on the outskirts of Chicago, while, downtown, businessmen set uprighted a new commercial district (New Chicago 8) A not many working-class immigrants protested this suburbanization, on the other hand most late nineteenth-century observers agreed that Chicago's fire had provided a fortunate chance to build a better city.

Chicago's post-fire reconstruction provides a window upon Americans' nineteenth-century ideas about housing, morality, and social direction Urban historians often analyze the consequences of transportation technology on housing location, on the other hand in many American cities these technologies existed for years before suburb became popular: technology does not determine its uses independent of questions of tillage and power.2 Streetcars, electricity, automobiles, trucking, asphalt technology, and roads a whole s helped suburbanize the U.S. more than Europe because suburb supported Americans' late-Victorian ideas about sex identities and class formation. Chicago's Great Fire of 1871 like the flash from a camera, allows us to diocese many Chicagoans, all at one time discussing their built environment and the values they awaited suburban-style houses to exert upon their occupants.

Chicago's surrounding prairie had been crisscrossed by the agency of railroads since 1854, Chicago's mould suburb of Riverside was begun in 1868 and "park speculators" had made fortunes buying and selling land in Chicago's outlying picturesque regions in the real estate resound of 1869. The Great Fire did not change this admiration for suburbia, on the other hand it did articulate and expedite it. After the fire, Chicago's suburbanization accelerated in the way that much that boosters bragged, "Chicago, for its size, is more given to suburb than any other city in the world" (Our Suburb 3)3 Visitors wrote: "The city stretches into suburb which themselves widen away and exhibit the outlines of novel suburbs .... Chicago will be the City of the Twentieth Century" (Butterworth 113)

Looking at suburb allows us to examine underlying relationships between the familiar binaries of city/country, work/home, and men's/women's spheres, on the contrary perhaps because of this, defining the suburb is far from simple. Nineteenth-century cities many times annexed outlying districts, so suburb were not necessarily politically separate from cities. Early suburb grew up around older village center (especially in the East, on the other hand affecting expectations in Chicago) and grew around the same time that many manufacturing industries also mov to metropolitan fringes, in like manner suburbs were not necessarily distant from a certain number of places of employment. Paid employ existed inside many nineteenth-century abodes with servants, boardinghousekeepers, and female agriculturists of commodities like soap and honey in the way that suburbs were not necessarily spaces of consumption separated from production (Boydston 120-142) I will use suburb to mean an outlying district (Chicago realtors measured through distance from the courthouse in the center of what would become the Downtown Loop) containing single-family houses in neighborhoods of relatively depressed densities and relatively high social homogeneity. The Chicago Relief and Aid Society summ up greatest in quantity of these criteria in their bound for what they wanted to build: "Isolated Houses" (9)