No Little Plans: The Roads of Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago
No Little Plans: The Roads of Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago
The Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett was published in July 1909. At the time, Daniel Burnham was the worlds most famous architect, and his firm’s designs were both prolific and trend-setting. The Plan of Chicago was instrumental in influencing the development of Chicagoland as we know it today: Chicago’s vast lakefront parks, double-decked Wacker Drive and the Michigan Avenue Bridge, and the Forest Preserves of Cook and neighboring counties were all concepts contained in and championed by the Plan.
In our presentation No Little Plans, we look at Burnham and Bennett’s concepts for road building that included grand boulevards as well as a system of radiating and encircling highways throughout Chicago and the suburbs. They wrote, “While good highways are of great value to the terminal cities, they are of even greater value to the outlying towns, and of greatest value to the farming communities through which they pass.” The roads would assist farmers in bringing their goods to market, and would be useful for family excursions and holidays.
The presentation looks at the four encircling and many radiating highways proposed by the Plan, and how that plan differed markedly from our current dependence on tollways and expressways. Burnham and Bennett proposed a system that would add a new dimension to our existing system of surface transportation and would become an integrated piece along with rail and surface transport already in place. We look at how different Chicagoland might be if we had not dismantled our streetcar and much of our passenger rail system in favor of near-complete dependence on cars and trucks.
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