Wire and Tower

Chicago fashioned itself over time and became a distinctive place as a result of its own unique history and various natural and unnatural forces at play. The city has a history deeply ingrained in its rebirth as a mighty industrial metropolis after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rudyard Kipling came to Chicago and hated it … it was like taking a bite of raw wild onion and cringing. Eager for American experiences, Kipling the world-wise traveler, only saw greed and avarice there, from his 1891 book, American Notes:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,And all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material.”

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

The sense of place can be overwhelming, and if you’re not prepared for its extreme conditions, or if you have never encountered it’s like before, Chicago can be like a slap in the face. Some things never change. The city grew up quickly out of the lakeside wilderness and became larger than life, a microcosm of the New World, America in all its guts and glory. Wave upon wave of immigrants made their way to Chicago and formed it into a mass of humanity and blood. The people made the town tick, as the poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently stated, "The people yes. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on."

The landscape, Calcutta-like, is uncompromising and harsh, the four seasons reeking havoc with wind and rain, snow and ice, intense heat and humidity, subzero temperatures, and spectacular thunder and lightening storms. With a certain fearlessness and innovation, the people molded Chicago into a kind of urban jungle, a place of high and low culture, again recalling Calcutta, and used their 19th century innovations to transform the landscape into the international city we know today.

The water tanks that dot the urban terrain of commercial and factory buildings in Chicago hawk back to a different time and place. They were built to last, made from the finest clear-cut redwood and cypress boards. No imperfections were allowed, and each board was 18 feet straight and 2 ½ inches thick. As long as the tanks have water in them they will never rot.

-- Alternative introduction to Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/WToC.html


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