The architects of Chicago welcomed the steel frame and did something with it. The architects of the East were appalled by it and could make no contribution to it. In fact, the tall office buildings fronting the narrow streets and lanes of lower New York were provincialisms, gross departures from the law of common sense. For the tall office building loses its validity when the surroundings are uncongenial to its nature; and when such buildings are crowded together upon narrow streets or lanes they become mutually destructive. The social significance of the tall building is in finality its most important phase. In and by itself, considered solus so to speak, the lofty steel frame makes a powerful appeal to the architectural imagination where there is any. Where imagination is absent and its place usurped by timid pedantry the case is hopeless. The appeal and the inspiration lie, of course, in the element of loftiness, in the suggestion of slenderness and aspiration, the soaring quality as of a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance, Dionysian in beauty. The failure to perceive this simple truth has resulted in a throng of monstrosities, snobbish and maudlin or brashly insolent and thick lipped in speech; in either case a defamation and denial of man’s finest powers.
In Chicago the tall office building would seem to have arisen spontaneously, in response to favoring physical conditions, and the economic pressure as then sanctified, combined with the daring of promoters.
The construction and mechanical equipment soon developed into engineering triumphs. Architects, with a considerable measure of success, undertook to give a commensurate external treatment. The art of design in Chicago had begun to take on a recognizable character of its own. The future looked bright. The flag was in the breeze. Yet a small white cloud no bigger than a man’s hand was soon to appear above the horizon. The name of this cloud was eighteen hundred and ninety-three. Following the little white cloud was a dark dim cloud, more like a fog. The name of the second cloud was Baring Brothers.
During this period there was well under way the formation of mergers, combinations and trusts in the industrial world. The only architect in Chicago to catch the significance of this movement was Daniel Burnham, for in its tendency toward bigness, organization, delegation, and intense commercialism, he sensed the reciprocal workings of his own mind.
In the turmoil of this immense movement railroads were scuttled and reorganized, speculation became rampant, credit was leaving terra firma, forests were slaughtered, farmers were steadily pushing westward, and into the Dakotas; immense mineral wealth had been unearthed in Colorado, South Dakota, Northern Wisconsin, Peninsular Michigan, the Mesaba Range in Minnesota. The ambitious trader sought to corner markets. The “corner” had become an ideal, a holy grail. Monopoly was in the air. Wall Street was a seething cauldron. The populace looked on, with open-mouthed amazement and approval, at the mighty men who wrought these wonders; called them Captains of Industry, Kings of this, Barons of that, Merchant Princes, Railroad Magnates, Wizards of Finance, or, as Burnham said one day to Louis: “Think of a man like Morgan, who can take a man like Cassatt in the palm of his hand and set him on the throne of the Pennsylvania!” And thus, in its way, the populace sang hymns to its heroes.
The people rejoiced. Each individual rejoiced in envious admiration, and all rejoiced in the thought that these great men, these mighty men, had, with few and negligible exceptions, risen from the ranks of the common people: That this one began as a telegraph operator at a lonely way-station, and this one was boss of a section gang on such and such a railroad; another started in life as a brakeman; that one was clerk in a country store; this one came to our hospitable shores as a penniless immigrant; that one was a farmer boy; and their hymn arose and rang shimmering as a paean to their mighty ones, and their cry went up to their God, even as a mighty anthem, lifting up its head to proclaim to all the world that this, their Country, was vastly more than the land of the free and the home of the brave; it was the noble land of equal opportunity for all; the true democracy for which mankind has been waiting through the centuries in blood and tears, in hope deferred. This, they cried, as one voice, is the Hospitable Land that welcomes the stranger at its gates. This is the great Democracy where all men are equal and free. All this they sang gladly as they moved up the runways.
Thus the Land was stirring and quivering in impulses, wave upon wave. The stream of immigration was enormous, spreading over vast areas, burrowing in the mines, or clinging to the cities. Chicago had passed St. Louis in population and was proud. Its system of building had become known as the “Chicago Construction.” It was pushing its structures higher and higher, until the Masonic Temple by John Root had raised its head far into the air, and the word “skyscraper” came into use. Chicago was booming. It had become a powerful magnet. Its people had one dream in common: That their city should become the world’s
