Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  The notion, once he has it, seems urgent. He must leave at once. There is just one thing he would like to do before he goes. He removes the silver watch from his waistcoat pocket, and unhooks the chain. “I bought this watch a long time ago,” he says, “at a jeweler’s that had just opened in Chicago, called J. H. Mulford. It was intended as a gift for someone I admired and whose company I valued, but in the end our lives would go in different directions, as lives often do. I recovered the watch and have carried it with me ever since.” He reads the engraving on the back. It is still, just, legible. “I had something inscribed in Latin on the back. There was a time when I could have told you where it came from. Ovid? Virgil? Horace? I don’t remember, and it no longer matters. In English it means ‘Meanwhile, time is flying; irretrievable time is flying.’” He sits back. “I have always liked the reminder,” he says, “that there is not a moment to lose … and that nothing ever comes back.” He grins, as though the idea has revived him. “It also makes the present seem less important than it often seems.”

  He slides the watch toward her, inviting her to hold it.

  Sunlight glints off the worn silver surface. Gingerly, she picks it up and strokes the top. “It’s beautiful,” she murmurs, turning it over, looking at the inscription. “But why are you telling me this, Mr. Wright?”

  “Because I want you to have it.”

  She frowns. “But I couldn’t possibly…”

  He insists. “It would make me very happy,” he says, “if you would accept it.” He clears his throat. “You don’t have to keep it. It must be valuable by now. An antique.”

  She shakes her head. No, she would never sell something as beautiful as that, no matter how bad things were. The point, though, is that she cannot accept such a gift.

  He smiles. He has been expecting her to object. “We both know there is something important we’ve never talked about,” he says, “and it is my fault. But it has been much on my conscience. It is cowardly of me. I should have said something long ago.”

  She raises her head slowly, the watch enclosed in the palm of her hand, trailing the chain. Her expression, on the instant, has changed. Her eyes are wide, her mouth is fallen half-open. “You mean you know?” she gasps.

  John has no idea what she means by that, but he is alarmed by the sudden change in her mood.

  She rises from her seat. The emotion in her voice is palpable. She is choking on the words. “You knew,” she says. “You must have always known. Oh, what a fool I am.”

  He is on his feet too. “Mrs. Sage? Aureka?”

  She swivels around, and there is a desperate, pleading look on her face. “You mustn’t tell him, you understand? You must never tell him. It would”—she begins to sob—“it would ruin everything for them both, if they ever knew. Promise me, John. You must never say a word.”

  “Oh dear God,” he says, slumping back into his seat as, finally, he understands. “Yes, yes, of course. Stephen. Why else?”

  Aureka puts a hand in front of her mouth, as though she would like to take back what she has just said. Her eyes look past him. She tries to wipe away the tears in her eyes.

  Stephen’s small voice comes from behind him. “Why are you crying, Momma?” The boy runs around the table and throws himself into her arms.

  * * *

  Whenever there is a smooth patch of road, John tries to make notes for the article he will pen as soon as he gets back. He invokes history and common sense, he cites the good news that is being ignored, and he prepares a string of pithy attacks against the Eastern detractors.

  He curses the twenty-five miles and almost two hours it will take to reach his office. These arguments need to go into print as soon as possible. He can still make tomorrow morning’s papers. He will speak to Joseph Medill at the Chicago Daily Tribune—Joseph owes him a favor—and he will demand two columns on the front page. Once those columns have been read and digested, people will begin to see sense again and disaster will be averted. It is not too late.

  In this way, by immersing himself in what must be said and the challenge to be taken on, he suppresses the sense of vertigo that has had him in its grip all day. The only way to avert disaster is to challenge it head-on. The city will not fall apart, and nor will he. He shivers. Dear God, though, what has just happened? For a moment, he wonders whether she might have made it up. But then he recalls the desperation in her voice and he sees the boy in his mind’s eye—the curly hair, the blue eyes, the Roman nose—and he tries to remember and work out the dates. And on top of that, there is the name.

  But then again, he reflects a little later, perhaps there is no great harm done. After all, nobody need ever know, not even the boy himself.

  The carriage comes to a halt at a crossroads. He writes notes. Submission and Surrender begone. The Path to Glory is paved by Bright Visions of the Future. Stagnation is the Root of all Evil. Learn from the Waters of our own Lake Michigan. Learn from the Wind that Blows, the Waves that Roll, the Tides that Turn and Know that Chicago will be Forever Rising.

  1861–1871

  1861

  ON THE UP

  Extract from Chicago: An Alternative History 1800–1900 by Professor Milton Winship, University of Chicago A. C. McClurg & Co., 1902

  JOHN S. WRIGHT’S VALIANT efforts with the pen to head off the Depression of 1857 would come to naught. Over the next few months, more than two hundred businesses in Chicago went bankrupt with debts amounting to over $10 million. Illinois currency lost its value, and the use of “wild cat” bills became commonplace, notes so depreciated that they paid only 60 percent of their face value. Tradesmen and retailers regularly had to issue “promises to pay” and “shinplasters.” By 1860, just one free bank in Chicago—the Marine—had survived intact. In 1861, Congress began taking steps to resolve the crisis, and this would lead to the issuance of the first greenbacks in 1862. By then, of course, the Civil War was under way.

  Once again, as had happened to John S. Wright twenty years before, he went bankrupt. He had unwisely mortgaged much of his wife’s property to fund his business activities, in particular a new factory for building the Atkins Automaton. This must have caused much ill feeling within the matrimonial home even before the schism created by the Civil War. Mr. Wright supported the Union: Mrs. Wright supported the South.

  At this point, as the Civil War begins, we take our leave of Mr. Wright. I do so with regret and unsated curiosity: regret because I have grown fond of him and unsated curiosity because in spite of my attempts to explore who he really was, I feel I have only scratched the surface. He would live for a good number of years yet, and his pen was by no means still, but as far as the history of Chicago is concerned, he has played his part. As he aged, the more volatile elements of his character would come increasingly to the fore. People began to give him a wide berth, his commercial judgment was distrusted and the biblical fervor of his prophecies were looked upon as the words of a man who was likely touched.

  My subject is Chicago, not the Civil War. Much has already been written about Chicago’s contribution to the Union cause and I do not plan to add to it. Cook County sent twenty-two thousand young men from different ethnic backgrounds to fight, most of them from Chicago. The city’s lively politics during the war, and the trouble whipped up by Lincoln’s opponents in the wake of his amnesty proposal of December 1863, have been ably dealt with by my fellow historians. My interest is in how ordinary people pursued their lives during the war. Perversely, it was a time of growth and prosperity for Chicago. Local companies won contracts for the supply of equipment and food to the soldiers. There were more jobs, immigration increased, new buildings went up. The city consolidated its position as the nation’s leading market for oats, wheat, pork, beef and lumber. In all respects, then, during those war years, Chicago was once more on the up. And that included the very ground on which the city stood.

  You read that correctly. The very ground on which Chicago stood, like everything else in the city, was “on the up.�
� To understand why, let us pause to introduce another colossus of Chicago who, like Mr. John S. Wright, has not been given the accolade by history that is his due. Who, today, speaks of the city’s pioneering sanitary engineer, Mr. Ellis S. Chesbrough? Mr. Chesbrough’s first act, when appointed chief engineer in 1856, was to tell the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners to raise the city. Yes, he said, he meant the whole darned city had to be raised—roads, houses, hotels, shops, stations, churches, you name it. The flabbergasted Commissioners were told that unless Chicago stood twelve feet higher than nature had planned, the city’s devastating sewage crisis would never be resolved.

  Reluctantly, and with many powerful voices raised in opposition, the City Council declared that streets near the lakeshore should be raised between eight and ten feet, and the rest of the city should be raised between six and eight feet. Did the councilors avail themselves of the public purse to make this happen? No, they did not. It was, as usual, every man for himself. Officials, armed with the new city ordinances, took to patrolling the streets. I have my own memories of these self-important functionaries. You, sir, want to put up a new building on that lot? Then you’d better make dang sure its foundations are laid at the higher grade. And you over there? You own the shack down that hole? Land sakes, when was that privy of a house first stuck together? You know what you gotta do, don’t you? Either knock it down or climb on out. And there’s only one way to climb, ain’t there? Raise the foundations, throw in fill, lay new footings, and make yourself an eight-foot-high cellar in the process. You don’t like what I’m saying? Heck, you’d better watch your lip because the law’s on our side. And what they claimed about the law was true. Whenever some chuffy citizen dared to bring a suit against the authorities because they wanted to stay down in their hole at the original level, the Council’s legal cavalry came charging over the horizon.

  Inevitably, Mr. Chesbrough was not the most popular man about town. Given the size of the city and the scale of the problem, it was also impossible for the conversion to take place overnight. People, anyway, had different reactions to those ordinances. You know how we human beings are. There’s the law-abiding folk who’ll do whatever they’re told, the crafty ones who try to blink the question, the crooked ones who bribe officials to turn a blind eye. And then there’s the rantankerous, the idle and the poor. Some of them can afford to do it, some of them can’t. Some of them want to do it, some of them don’t. Some of them object on principle (“the City Council should pay for raising every last inch, given those extortionate taxes they make us pay” or “nobody tells me what to do with my own goddam home”). Others don’t give two cents one way or the other.

  The result was that for nearly twenty years, Chicago would be a city that was lived on two levels, until the law had dealt with all the protesters and the land was filled and the old was replaced by the new. I guess this is always the way, that the old has to cede to the new. It certainly is when we’re talking about Chicago. As Mark Twain put it in 1883: “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago—she outgrows his own prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” Well put. Thank you, Mr. Twain. Because that was as true in 1861 as it was in 1883.

  * * *

  I hope my readers will permit me to draw on my personal experience in describing what Mr. George M. Pullman falsely claims was the first brick building to be raised in Chicago. Being seen to be first in whatever he does has always been very important to Mr. Pullman. He was the first man to build a luxurious railroad sleeping car, the first man to build a whole town for his employees, and he has recently become the first man to make a profit out of a tragic incident in our collective past by charging visitors to view what he calls The Massacre Tree, a sculpture erected on the site of the 1812 Potawatomie victory over American troops in retreat from Fort Dearborn. This knack for profiting from adversity is reminiscent of his sleight of hand in arranging for the corpse of President Lincoln, on its return to Chicago in May 1865, to travel the last stage of the journey in his “Palace Sleeping Car.” The irony probably escaped Mr. Pullman, that his Palace Sleeping Car was first advertised to the nation as a first-class hearse.

  To the matter at hand: the Tremont House Hotel was lifted up to its new level over five days in February 1861. Mr. Pullman’s erroneous claim that this was the first brick building to be raised in Chicago (the Briggs House Hotel was raised in 1857) is not the only example of his faulty memory. He also likes to recall how he marched up and down Lake and Dearborn Streets, blowing his whistle and yelling “Heigh ho!” as the Tremont made its graceful ascent. The truth is otherwise. Mr. Pullman wasn’t anywhere near the Tremont in February 1861. He had left for Pikes Peak, Colorado, where there was talk of a gold rush. His brother Albert was in charge of raising the Tremont. And how do I know this? Because I was there.

  In those days, I was a student at the Old University of Chicago, still uncertain about what career I wished to pursue and very short of money. I was a strong boy, brought up on a farm and unafraid of hard physical labor, so to finance my studies I would look for short-term work. The hours were usually long and the pay miserable, but I was young and capable of taking a few knocks.

  The raising of the Tremont was an extraordinary feat. In those days, it was the largest, most luxurious hotel in Chicago. Two hundred and sixty suites were arranged on five floors, with a capacity for two thousand guests. The Pullman Car Company needed approximately twelve hundred men for the job. That was why subcontractors were used. I was hired by one of those subcontractors—Swanson & Co.—who were responsible for a two-hundred-foot section abutting the hotel’s main entrance on Lake Street. Mr. Swanson divided us into teams of five, and in each one there was a mason, a carpenter and three unskilled laborers. The mason and the carpenter in my team were both Swedes, and the two laborers with whom I worked were of Irish extraction.

  We had to dig holes beneath and into the foundations around the circumference of the Tremont at one-foot intervals. Our team was responsible for five of them. Into our holes, we drove heavy timbers, each one supported by an iron jackscrew. All around the building other teams were doing the same thing, so that by the time we were ready to start lifting, there must have been over a thousand jackscrews in place. When the whistle blew, we made one simultaneous turn on each jackscrew. That raised the timbers a few inches beneath the existing foundations, enough to insert a new brick footing in the gap beneath. Mortar was then added. In this way, inch by inch, the building began to rise.

  Arranged on the plank boards behind us we kept a supply of bricks, sacks of Portland cement and buckets of water. We fetched freshwater from the Lake, prepared the mortar, stacked the bricks and, at the foreman’s whistle, made those turns on the jackscrews. The days were cold, but the working hours were relatively short, and the labor itself was not too hard. I had done worse. Over the next five days, the Tremont would make its slow, gradual ascent, until it stood about eight feet higher than before. We had to build temporary new plank steps at the hotel entrance as the level rose, so that guests could continue to go in and out as though nothing was happening. There is no doubt that it was a spectacle. Sightseers came every day to watch the show.

  The mason was our foreman, and a fine example he set for us all. He was also, I would come to learn, the nephew of the boss. His name was Gus. He was probably about the same age as I was. Gus was a perfectionist. Although his English was slow and halting, his passion for the work shone through in everything he said and did. He explained to us the first morning that to lift a building of this size depended for its success on everyone doing exactly what was expected of him. If we were late turning a jackscrew, or gave him too watery a mix of cement, or were too slow with the bricks, we risked causing a crack in the hotel walls. A crack could quickly spread and jeopardize the whole project. It was monotonous work, but what Gus said inspired me. I liked the idea that we had to go be
yond the next turn of the jackscrew, and see the project as a whole. History is like that too. The details are essential, but the bigger picture to which they contribute is what’s important.

  I fear that to my two Irish colleagues, Oscar and Dermot, this was nothing but a load of flapdoodle. I am not even sure they were listening. They were more interested in whistling at the fine ladies parading up and down the steps of the hotel. It annoyed me, because I liked Gus and wanted to do a good job for him. Oscar and Dermot were often behind in mixing the cement filler and its consistency varied. They handled the bricks carelessly, which meant some of them had to be thrown away. They were late turning the jackscrews.

  Maybe it was partly because they were a few years younger than I was, still more juveniles than adults. But more likely, that’s simply how they were. At first, I covered for them if I could, until I realized they did not care, one way or the other. Oscar, I remember, was the big mouth and the ringleader, Dermot merely his suggestible accomplice. Finding different ways to irritate “the Scandi” was one of the boyish wagers they held between themselves. Who could make one of the ladies turn her head with a whistle, who could creep up on the Scandi and make him jump, who could break wind the loudest. They complained about the stiffness of the jackscrews, about blisters on their hands, about the hours they had to work without a break, about the $1.50-a-day wages they were earning, about the weather, about everything. And, worse, when they weren’t passing judgment on the hotel’s female guests, they were making remarks about their “Squarehead slave driver,” disguising their insults with the thickest of Irish accents. Gus would not have understood what they were saying, but its import must have been clear.