Views of Chicago: Picturing the Ruins of the Great Fire

On October 9, 1871, fires consumed nearly 4 square miles of the burgeoning city of Chicago, leaving behind heaps of ash, piles of bricks, and the skeletal facades of formerly grand buildings. A special correspondent for a national newspaper wrote, “Never was presented a more mournful scene” as “the desolate ruins of this city.” This reporter and others sought to bring distant audiences into the spaces of ruination in Chicago, vividly describing its remains. However, no media achieved this better than the stereograph. When viewed through a stereoscope, these photographic images created the illusion of depth and seemingly placed the viewer directly into the environment they were viewing. Enterprising Midwestern studios produced series such as “Chicago: Before and After the Fire,” which not only disseminated images of the devastation, but transported viewers to those desolate sites. Much has been written on Chicago’s “rise from the ashes” and the architectural developments that followed the disaster, but this paper will focus on the moment before that rebuilding was possible. While many have framed the fire as Chicago’s modern beginning, I argue that its pictured ruins provided a platform for its past. By visually aligning the ruins of Chicago with those of the ancient civilizations of Europe, these representations and their neoclassical aesthetic offered the potential for the recent past to be reframed as storied history, thereby boosting the reputation of the city of Chicago and doing the work of nation building for the young Unites States as it approached its centennial.