Presentations
Windy City Road Warrior Presentations–Bringing the Highways of History to YOU!
If you are looking for interesting presentations for your museum, library, social group, or any other type of organization, please consider tapping into the informational and visual resources available from Windy City Road Warrior.com! Our current PowerPoint Presentations include the following (click on the appropriate link for more information):
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Standard Presentation Details
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The Lincoln Highway across Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa
Lincoln Highway Scenic Byway Sign. Click above for larger view
A grass-roots effort began, backed by car companies and related industries, to pull the country out of the mud. The “Good Roads Movement” championed named auto trails on the best available roads and advocated for government involvement in building hard surfaces on the public highways of the country. The first named auto trail to be marked from coast-to-coast was the Lincoln Highway.
Welcome to Clinton Iowa sign at the Mississippi River. Click above for larger view
Mural in Rochelle, Illinois telling the story of Emily Post's Lincoln Highway trip
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Greetings From Chicago: Architectural Vistas through a Visitor’s Eyes
After the 1871 Chicago Fire, the city rose from the ashes to become the transportation and commercial Gateway to the American West. Builders, dreamers,
and travelers had flocked to the Windy City, creating the skyscrapers and thoroughfares that would come to define the transportation capital of the North American continent. This program showcases the builders who created the architectural vistas seen by millions of visitors.
Since the dawn of the railroad era, Jackson Boulevard in Chicago’s Loop was a haven for visitors coming to the Windy City. The thoroughfare’s proximity to five passenger rail stations made it an ideal place for hotels, and the city’s architects were employed in building them. In time the Route 66 corridor would utilize both Jackson and Adams Streets, and travelers using the highway were treated to views of some of the masterpieces of Chicago School architecture.
Greetings From Chicago: Architectural Vistas through a Visitor’s Eyes explores the architecture of this important travel corridor. Included are views and discussions of W. W. Boyington’s Grand Pacific and Stratford Hotels, William Le Baron Jenney’s Fair Store, the Rookery and Monadnock buildings of Daniel Burnham and John Root, and the Marquette building of William Holabird and Martin Roche.
Other designers and firms whose work is discussed in the presentation include Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Phillip Johnson. The information and images in this program is based upon an award-winning series of articles that has appeared in the quarterly publication of the National Historic Route 66 Federation since 2007.
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The Illinois & Michigan Canal–Past and Present
Long before highways and railroads turned Chicago into the transportation hub of the U.S., it was the Illinois & Michigan Canal that literally put the city on the map. In 1673, the French-Canadian explorers Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette were the first non-Native Americans to travel from the Illinois River to Lake Michigan via the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers. They noted in their journals that a canal could be built to connect these waterways to allow for a navigable channel of travel stretching from the Great Lakes to the vast Mississippi River system.
The promise of a canal’s future potential for spreading commerce from the settled east to the western frontier led to the founding of Fort Dearborn to protect the Chicago River harbor. The potential also led to treaties with Native Americans and the creation by the state of Illinois of a canal commission that would build and operate the waterway. Chicago was founded to be the commercial transfer point between Lake Michigan vessels and canal barges. When the canal opened in 1848, the flow of commerce across the continent changed forever.
In this PowerPoint presentation, we will explore the story of the building of the Illinois & Michigan Canal and its eventual replacement by newer canals, railroads, and expressways. We will take a “virtual tour” of its surviving structures from Bridgeport in Chicago to its terminus in Peru, Illinois 96 miles to the southwest.
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Historic Route 66: A Journey Through History
The Historic Route 66 presentation begins with a video montage of contemporary Route 66 scenes. Next, a short discussion of the history of road building in the United States notes that many of our current highways (including Route 66) follow trails first blazed by Native American footpaths, 19th century canals, and railroad trunk lines. We explore why Route 66 “winds from Chicago to L.A.,” and we look at the historic biography of the local thoroughfares that carried the highway’s traffic in the Chicago area.
Next, a video slide show of images depicts the damage done to Route 66 cities and towns by the passing of time and the migration of through traffic onto the Interstates. From the west side of Chicago, through neglected areas of otherwise thriving communities and through ghost towns like Glen Rio and Goffs, the photos show desolation caused by the bypass of previously-thriving corridors of travel. However, these images do not spell the “End of Route 66.”
The final section of the standard presentation is a “virtual tour” of Route 66 today. Through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the images show the vibrant life still lived along the highway corridor, despite the fact of Route 66’s “official” de-commissioning in the 1980s. Amidst the decay caused by the interstates, thrifty and industrious business owners and highway enthusiasts continue to breath life and longevity into America’s Main Street, the Mother Road, Route 66.
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The Roads that Lead to Lincoln: Honest Abe on the Historic Highways of Illinois
The Land of Lincoln will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s election as President in 2010. In this presentation, we begin with a whimsical look at the impact that Lincoln has made on our culture, from businesses such as Lincoln Towing and Lincoln Insurance, to cars such as the Lincoln Continental. Next, we trace the major events of his life from his arrival in Illinois in 1830 until he left for Washington as President-elect in 1861.
From New Salem to Springfield and on the trail of the Eighth Judicial Circuit through central Illinois, we follow Lincoln as he sets out as a young man to work as a store clerk, postmaster, surveyor, and then as a lawyer. He is elected to the Illinois General Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives. He runs for U.S. Senate, and then he is elected as the nation’s 16th President. When the Civil War is all but over, he is assassinated, and his funeral train makes a somber journey into Illinois at Chicago, then southwest to Springfield.
In the final section of the presentation, we take a virtual tour along Route 66, the 8th Judicial Circuit, the Great River Road, and the Lincoln Highway in search of sites related to the life of Abraham Lincoln. The tour includes images of the places visited by Lincoln, as well as monuments and museums dedicated to remembering and interpreting his legacy. The tour includes the well-known sites, such as New Salem State Park; but also included are unmarked historic locations, such as the places where Mary Todd Lincoln lived in Chicago. The emphasis is on the places that travelers can visit to better understand Lincoln while enjoying the historic highways of Illinois.
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Route 66 on a Tank of Gas: The Mother Road in Illinois
Many travelers believe that Route 66 in Illinois has more attractions per mile than any other state. With our high price of gasoline, people are deciding to remain closer to home on their vacations. Route 66 on a Tank of Gas shows in more depth than in our Historic Route 66 presentation the many Mother Road attractions within the Land of Lincoln, within 300 miles of Chicago. We also suggest a “triangle route,” taking Route 66 to St. Louis, then returning on the Great River Road and the Lincoln Highway.
The program begins with an overview of road building in Illinois, from our dependence upon the railroad to our early efforts to create “good roads” with county-wide programs and privately-marked Auto Trails. In 1918, the State legislature passes “An Act to Build Hard Surfaces upon the Public Highways in the State,” which gives the Illinois Division of Highways jurisdiction to improve and maintain a network of primary trunk roads. Financed by $160 million in road bonds backed by automobile license fees, the state builds roads at a record-breaking pace, pulling Illinois “out of the mud” on modern ribbons of concrete.
In the second half of the presentation, we take a virtual tour of Route 66 in Illinois from Chicago to the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Along the way, we stop at the restaurants, museums, and historic sites that give Illinois Route 66 its special personality and character. We stop at such iconic Route 66 treasures the Del Rhea Chicken Basket, Funk’s Grove Maple Sirup, the Cozy Dog Drive-In, and Henry’s Rabbit Ranch. For our trip back to the Chicagoland area, we take a brief look at the wonders to be seen along the Great River Road from Alton to Fulton, and the Lincoln Highway from Fulton to Chicago Heights.
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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 world’s 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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With sufficient lead-time, we can customize our presentation to the specifications of the customer. Our resources include information that can be used to create programs for any specific segment of highway and transportation history relating to Chicago, or to Illinois, or to the corridors of transportation and commerce for which the city and state serve as hubs. We stand ready to meet any challenge within the scope of our archival resources.
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