DESTINATIONS

A few years ago, the owner of the hardware store near my house in London told me that he was flying to Chicago ‘to look at its buildings’. I wondered why he might do that. I grew up in Chicago and found its buildings too rectangular, too symmetrical, too declarative. They had no mystery. Would my city disappoint him? As it happened, he came back so enthused that he intended to start saving again to return for another look.

I went back this year for a few spring days and felt as if I saw the city for the first time. Bright new buildings were going up, old ones that had been covered in mire and vulgar signage were having their original ornamentation restored, and the downtown streets were alive with people to a degree I had never seen before. Each day it sparkled in the sun, as if it had been sandblasted and hosed down during the night.

Throughout the summer, Chicago is celebrating the centennial of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for the city, the first such plan in North America. Burnham – architect, planner, PR genius and visionary – was to Chicago what Pericles was to Athens and what Haussmann was to Paris. It is to Burnham that the city owes its 29 miles of lakefront public park and its consequent airiness and infusion of light. On the 94th floor of the John Hancock center you can look directly down and see, as the ads for Chicago say, the beach you were swimming at that afternoon.

I know of no other city that opens itself so magnanimously and with such drama to its body of water. You can be in Los Angeles or New York for a week without ever seeing the former’s ocean or the latter’s rivers. Most European cities turn away from their coastlines. Chicago, tall and benign, presents itself to Lake Michigan like your favourite aunt standing at her door to welcome you into her home. ‘It seems as if the lake has been singing to us all these years until we have become responsive,’ wrote Burnham.

Chicago has long been a national crossroads, first of canals, linking the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and industry to the agricultural hinterland, then of railways and eventually of cars and planes. It grew unchecked and incoherently until it became a chaotic hive of tinderbox houses and wooden sidewalks, hideous  warehouses and running sewers. Then the Great Fire swept much of it away in 1871.

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