Early Chicago town and city governments required people to move their buildings off of streets and onto the grid real estate lots during the 1830s. It became real estate only with the arrival of the grid. government, so that as Chicago grew up around Fort Dearborn, no one could own land there. According to Ann Durkin Keating, a historian at North Central College, “By the Greenville Treaty of 1795, a parcel of land at the mouth of the Chicago River was ceded by Native Americans to the U.S. The settlement soon got snapped to the grid like Legos.
It was the moment Chicago ceased to be a wilderness outpost and became a city for sale. It was less than half a square mile, bounded by Kinzie on the north, Washington on the south, Jefferson on the west and Dearborn on the east, but it was the template for a network that would eventually cover the 234 square miles of Chicago-and extend into suburbs beyond its borders.Īugust 4, 1830, the date Thompson published his plat, “marks the birthday of Chicago as a town, and the ‘Fort Dearborn settlement’ disappeared,” Andreas wrote. Since Thompson was subdividing a township section, he simply repeated that pattern in miniature when he designed Chicago’s first street map. Illinois had already been divided into square townships and sections by the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. The man hired to plat a town at the mouth of the Chicago River was James Thompson, a surveyor from Kaskaskia, and the father of the Chicago Grid. The state decided to lay out towns along the prospective route, and sell lots to pay for the canal. Andreas in his History of Early Chicago, “Chicago had but a mythical existence, the name applying sometimes to the river and again to a cluster of cabins along its marshy shores or sandy banks.” However, Congress had recently granted land to Illinois for the construction of what would become the Illinois & Michigan Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. The values that shaped us as a city also shaped the streets on which we walk and drive.Ĭhicago’s grid system dates back to 1830, making it even older than the city itself. Why are Chicago’s streets such a near-perfect arrangement of 90-degree angles? The reason has to do with both Midwestern practicality and commerce. (The least-perfect grid is Charlotte, a Sunbelt city whose street system is more entropic than Rome or São Paulo.) On a scale of 0 to 1, in which 1 is a perfect grid, Chicago scores 0.9. A recent academic study, “Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy,” by Geoff Boeing, looked at the maps of 100 major world cities, and found that Chicago’s “exhibits the closest approximation of a single perfect grid.” Nowhere else have urban planners been so successful in imposing Euclidean order on natural surroundings. It is right to compare Chicago’s street network to something so obsessively exact. “It looks like electronic circuitry,” I commented, and the salesman agreed. As the plane passed from the blankness of Lake Michigan, we looked out the window at a perfectly ruled network of glowing orange streetlamps-illuminated squares repeating themselves toward the horizon in three directions.
Some street names were loosely translated from Dutch to English and some were changed entirely.I was flying into O’Hare one night, sitting next to an electronics salesman. While the Dutch grid itself has remained largely as it was in the 17th century, when the British took control of New Amsterdam in 1664 and changed the colony’s name to New York – in honor of the royal proprietor the Duke of York, later King James II – the Dutch street names changed as well. These Dutch streets were forever cemented in the makeup of New York City when they became a designated New York City landmark in 1983. When Dutch settlers colonized the southern tip of Manhattan and established the colony of New Amsterdam, they created the island’s first street grid. Today they are called Beaver Street, Pearl Street, and Bridge Street. You may not recognize these Dutch street names of NYC, but these are the names of streets you have likely walked on in Lower Manhattan. 1916 Redrawing of The Castello Plan, map of 1660 New Amsterdam via Wikimedia Commonsīegijn Gracht. Paerel Straet. Brugh Straet.
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