Abstract
If water is essential for sustaining life, it is just as necessary for maintaining commerce. In that sense, the Chicago waterscape is ‘liquid capital’ (p. 4), argues Joshua Salzmann. In Liquid Capital he discusses the development of the Chicago waterfront from 1818 to 1916, describing the partnerships between public policy makers and business leaders that led to the growth of one of the Great Lakes’ largest commercial and industrial ports and to its transformation into a collection of public spaces wherein commerce depends upon recreation and tourism. The journey was a long one, tortured by lack of resources, characterised by political and legal wrangling, and sometimes subject to outright thievery. But it also included the work of visionaries and philanthropists who steered Chicago’s future in a direction that the author clearly celebrates. In his view, ‘Chicago’s brand of buccaneering capitalism depended upon Chicagoan’s success at making the city’s waterways and its waterfront into ports, points of railroad connection, sewers, sources of drinking water, and grounds for pleasure and public life’ (p. 6).
Geography is the key. Chicago was founded on lowlands in the southwestern quadrant of Lake Michigan because of the importance of the Chicago River. By virtue of its proximity to Mississippi River tributaries, this watercourse allowed those in small craft to portage between the southern end of Lake Michigan and the inland river system. First a trading post, then a military outpost, and finally a commercial city, Chicago developed its water resources to serve trade by using public/private partnerships to adapt to changing times. At first the Chicago River could be manipulated to absorb ever larger commercial vessels, but by the mid-nineteenth century waterborne traffic interfered with land-based transportation and development, creating increasingly complex problems. Faced with substantial economic, legal, and political challenges that made adapting to the growing size of steel lake vessels impractical, Chicago was forced to acquire a new commercial port more suitable for industry. Chicago annexed the neighbouring Calumet River in 1889. Located about a dozen miles south, the Calumet River was not fully developed and therefore offered the potential flexibility to compete with new industrial harbours being created on the Indiana shoreline.
The displacement of the commercial port centred in the Chicago River suited the urban elite, who gradually adopted the waterfront beautification mantra expressed by Frederick Olmstead and encapsulated in the ‘White City’ of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Support grew for providing working people with publicly managed areas for recreation. These interests came together in the 1909 Plan of Chicago authored by Daniel Burnham. The impressive system of waterfront parks culminated in 1916 with the opening of Municipal Pier (now Navy Pier), which was originally intended for commercial purposes with a nod to tourism and recreation. Ironically, it was the latter use that took the firmest hold and solidified the beautification of the waterscape and its use for recreation and tourism.
The book is focused on the decisions of economic and political elites, explaining how leading Chicagoans envisioned, debated, planned, and ultimately responded to contemporary market and political forces (local, state, and federal) and tried to predict future waterfront needs. The resulting public/private partnerships are portrayed as practical, philanthropic, and visionary by contrasting them with cases of graft, economic control, and double-dealing. In the background is always the class, ethnic, and economic tensions in the city, but the focus is on the elites who made the final decisions intended to best serve the public trust, ultimately treating the waterfront as a ‘public utility’ (p. 153). The work is at its best when explaining the role of public spaces backed with analysis of lawsuits, public policy, and the interplay between actors in both the public and private spheres. The discussion of fraud in the grain business is particularly well-written.
The book presents a nuanced understanding of economic and political geography, but not of the maritime industry. Commercial vessels powered by sail are referred to as ‘sail boats’ (p. 82), ‘Lake Eerie’ (p. 88) is an important Great Lake, and small watercourses ‘dribble’ rather than flow. Even more distracting is the preoccupation with Chicago’s status among ports. Chicago is referred to as ‘the continent’s preeminent inland metropolis’ (p. 10) and the ‘Great Lakes’ leading port’ (p. 86), yet no statistically verifiable and comparative evidence is presented to show that it outstripped every other inland North American or Great Lakes port during a clearly defined time period. Comparative data on port usage for Chicago and other mentioned ports (Buffalo and New Orleans, for instance) based on tonnage figures are available for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but is not provided. Only statistics for Chicago are provided in tabular form. Since one of the primary themes of the book is Chicago’s struggle to provide facilities adequate to accommodate the rapid increase in the size of large steel bulk carriers during the late nineteenth century, the failure to provide comparative contemporary tonnage figures from competing ports is particularly puzzling. Likewise, there is no bibliography to allow the scholar to easily ascertain how much of the research is based upon primary versus secondary sources. Some tables (pp. 158–161) have no cited source at all. These issues leave the reader without sufficient contextual information about either Great Lakes or Mississippi River system ports to gauge the veracity of the overall work.
These challenges are a distraction from what is otherwise a contributing work that is both worthy of reading and enlightening in its approach to how public/private partnerships shaped the economic and political geographies of one of America’s great port cities. One will learn a great deal about the development of the Chicago waterfront from this book. But the reader will not be able to gauge the importance of these changes in a contemporary maritime context from this book alone.