The site of the prelude to the great conflagration and of the place where it all began. These two Landmarks are about ten blocks apart.
Touring the Fire
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Indicated on the map above are fifty-four Landmarks in the Chicago of today that are related to the Great Fire of 1871. Click on any of the Landmarks to see historical images relating to it. The number of images varies.
Below is a list of ten suggested tours of these Landmarks, arranged geographically. Each tour is accompanied by a brief descriptive introduction and a map locating the Landmarks on the tour. While they are arranged in an order that moves roughly south to north, it will be helpful to take a brief look at all the tours to get a sense of how they relate spatially to each other.
Tours
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This tour includes two bridges between the South and West divisions, as well as the one building in the South Division burnt district (other than one that was then under construction) that made it through the conflagration. Note that there are several blocks between the southernmost Landmark and the other two.
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This tour includes the Court House, the center of city and county government, as well as a number of business buildings of different kinds, one with a church on top.
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While this is one of three tours that use the term “Loop” to describe the location, the Loop as such did not exist until more than twenty-five years after the fire, when the Loop Elevated was constructed. This tour includes a number of colorful Landmarks.
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This tour includes the illustrious Palmer House in several of its different stages as well as both the pre-fire and post-fire United States Post Office and Custom House. There are also stops at the the "temporary" city hall that lasted almost fifteen years, at one building that survived the fire, and another that did not.
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This tour includes some pre-fire Michigan Avenue buildings and views, the exposition hall erected to mark the city’s recovery from the disaster, and a circular structure on whose interior walls paying customers could see an enormous and vivid re-creation of the city's destruction.
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This tour includes Landmarks near the Main Branch of the Chicago River. Among them are two bridges that burned down in the fire, a tunnel that provided an important escape route from it, and the courthouse and prison erected early in the rebuilding that followed the catastrophe.
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This tour includes two churches, two homes, the original Chicago Historical Society, and the most venerable fire landmark of them all, the Water Tower.
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This neighborhood contained a number of the homes of successful residents of the Old Settler generation. All of these gracious residences except one, the Ogden Mansion, vanished in the flames. After the fire, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society built barracks in Washington Square Park, directly across the street from the Ogdens, to house poor Chicagoans who had been burnt out.
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The area covered by this tour was part of the northernmost section of the city at the time of the fire, when the city limits extended only as far north as Fullerton Avenue, above which was the town of Lakeview, and Lincoln Park was much smaller than it is now. The local population consisted largely of working people, many of whom were immigrants.
