Catastrophe and Catharsis

During WWII, my father was a forced laborer from Czechoslovakia, working and living in Berlin. Late in his life I talked to him in depth about what certainly had to be a harrowing experience, enduring not only the loss of his freedom, forced exile in the country that brutally occupied his own, and life under a tyrannical dictatorship, but also living in a city under constant bombardment courtesy of the Americans by day, and the British by night. "Oh it wasn't so bad..." he told me with a wry smile, "...I was a young man living in a city where all its male citizens were off at war." He didn't have to fill in the details.

Talk about making the best of a bad situation.

I thought of this the other day as I was doing some reading about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Through all the tremendous devastation and loss of life*, the city not only recovered, but it prospered. Only the hiccup of a nation-wide panic and brief depression in 1873 and 1874, prevented the city from being rebuilt in half a decade. By 1880 there was barely a trace of the fire at all.

"Chicago in Flames" The Great Fire of 1871
Hand colored Lithograph based upon a sketch by John R. Chapin
published by  Currier & Ives

That's not to say there was not great suffering for the survivors, many of whom with little or no resources found their lives would be never return to normal. Many Chicago Fire survivors left the city never to return. But far more came than left. Like my father who saw an opportunity and seized upon it in Berlin, people saw the tremendous opportunity of being part of rebuilding the devastated Chicago. Between the years 1870 and 1880, the population of the city nearly doubled to half a million residents. Ten years later, over one million people called Chicago home.

I've often thought about what Chicago would be like today had it not been for the fire. Mark Twain had the same thought 134 years ago:

New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. 

In 1891, a writer for the journal Industrial Chicago put it more succinctly:

Those fires were fortunate events for the Garden City as a whole, and none profited directly from them, so much as art and architects,  for the flames swept away forever the greater number of monstrous libels on artistic house-building, while only destroying the few noble buildings of which Old Chicago could boast.

Would Chicago really be a much different place today without the Fire? After all, the die was cast for the contemporary city well before October of 1871. By then, all rail lines in the Midwest led to Chicago. At the same time, the Illinois/Michigan Canal was still operating, the only water transportation conduit between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The grain elevators and the commodities exchanges, both invented here, that would forever change the way farmers got their product to market, were well established by the 1870s and would be back up and running in a nick of time. Chicago as the transportation hub of the midwest, was already a major center of manufacturing, and much of that was untouched by the Fire.

By 1871, much of the physical layout of Chicago had already been established. The massive undertaking of raising the street grade was well underway. Chicago's property lots and rigorous street grid had been conceived, if not already established throughout town, and the boulevard greenway system and parks that would ring what were at the time Chicago's city limits had begun to take shape. Thanks to Potter Palmer and his speculative investments, State Street became the main commercial street of Chicago, taking the place of Lake Street, and with that, the major axis of the city turned ninety degrees from east/west to north/south, following the lakefront.

The major obstacle to the practical construction of tall buildings was overcome in 1864 as the first steam driven elevator was installed in Chicago in the Charles B. Farwell Store in Wabash Avenue. That alone did not solve the second obstacle, making elevators safe enough for people to want to ride in them. Great steps were made in that direction in 1870 when the first hydraulic elevator was initialed in the Burley and Company Warehouse on West Lake Street. We know that those contraptions became accepted, albeit hesitantly by the general public from the accounts of people being rescued from stalled lifts in Chicago's posh hotels during the Fire.

Chicago is known around the world for its innovative architecture, especially in regards to the construction of tall, commercial buildings. As the Mark Twain and Industrial Chicago quotes sited above suggest, we have the Great Fire to thank for that. But is that true?

Once the elevator became commonplace, the urge to cram as much rentable space into a single lot became inevitable, especially in the highly valuable property of the central business district. The race to build taller buildings was well underway before that famous blaze began near Mrs. O'Leary's barn after that long hot, dry summer of 1871.

On top of that, most of the architects who would create the new architecture that became known as the Commercial Style or the Chicago School of Architecture, including Dankmar Adler, William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Daniel Burnham already lived in Chicago as young men at the time of the Great Fire. With the exception of Adler, all of these future shapers of Chicago's built environment came through in one capacity or other, the office of William LeBaron Jenney, who before the Fire was responsible for among other things, the original design of the three great West Side parks, Humboldt, Central (later named Garfield) and Douglas, and the boulevards that connected them.

The earlier generation of architects responsible for many of the buildings of the pre-fire city, most notably John van Osdel and William Boyington were still active and quite busy after the Fire. The tallest buildings in Chicago until 1895, were the works of those two architects. In fact Chicago, the Second City which sprung up almost as soon as the ruins from the fire to began cool down, didn't look all that different from the First City. You can see for yourself as a number of 1870s post-fire buildings still exist, many of them concentrated just north of the River on Clark and Wells Streets. There you can still find in tact, buildings graced by Italianate facades that were the fashion of the day, before and after the fire.

So as we've seen, the groundwork for the Chicago we know today was clearly laid well before the Chicago Fire. Would it then be reasonable to say that the Fire was a mere setback, delaying what would have been the inevitable development of the current city?

Author Ross Miller in his book The Great Chicago Fire, argues no, the conflagration was in fact Chicago's seminal moment, a catharsis that allowed the city to wash away all its past mistakes, and start from scratch, enabling Chicago to become much greater city.

Barely four decades old at the  time of the fire, Chicago was already developing bad habits. The insatiable lust for instant profit meant little attention was given toward the future.

The children of the the pioneers who settled this city, the folks whose names you see streets named after, as so often is the case, became used to a comfortable life with little sense of obligation:

Seen from a  distance, pioneers like Butler and Ogden became models of respectability, combining Eastern education with the demands of Western settlement, They became the Chicago establishment. Set up in fine houses and rich enough for philanthropy, Chicago's first generation had time for pieties and church-going. Fortunes already in hand, they looked for ways to spend their money and perpetuate their newly minted good reputations. Their sons and daughters, with the pressure of making money removed, lacked any direction. ... Playboys and dilettantes, especially before the fire, appeared to be Chicago's legacy. 

The fire was a truly democratic catastrophe, it wiped out the homes of the rich and the poor alike. Of course with greater resources at their disposal, the rich had a far easier time to get back on their feet, but the fire created a bond between people living in Chicago in October 1871, those who lived anyway. They had all been tested by fire, and survived. Consequently, the term "Chicagoan" gained currency throughout the world. Quoting from the introduction to Robert Cromie's book of the same title, Miller throws in this tidbit:

You could tell a Chicagoan in any city of the world, for he would not talk a minute, scarcely until he would let you know he was from Chicago.

Before the Fire, outrageous land speculation led to tremendous fortunes won but mostly lost. Shoddy construction, haphazard building techniques, and simple lack of attention to detail, led to a city that was an eight square mile tinderbox, a disaster waiting to happen.

On a strictly economic and political basis, Chicago in the months and years after the fire could be shown to have made a startling correction for four decades of nearly random, unplanned development, ...Real estate speculators who had suffered severe losses might in the future be less reckless; their buildings would be made of better materials. The fire because it "checked the too rapid rebuilding of the city in all directions", would lead to a rebuilding of the city's central business district. In addition, by getting rid of failing or marginal businesses, the fire could be seen as a purifying act.

A fitting metaphor could be the fires that periodically sweep through the Midwestern prairies, ridding the land of dead plants and providing nutrients to the soil to insure strong and healthy new growth. Chicago of course, is built upon those very prairies.

Just as the fire's tremendous devastation was made possible by a great storm of concurrent unfortunate events, the recovery of the city was made possible because it came precisely at the crossroads of 19th century technological innovation and creativity.

Out of necessity, the city was compelled to welcome experimentation. Chicago was burned out of an earlier and relatively primitive form of industrialization into the most modern. In this environment, techniques that might have remained dormant under normal conditions of urban growth were perfected and them rigorously tested. 

Finally, it there is any doubt that the fire inexorably altered the direction of the course of this city, take a good look at the list of Chicago architects who lived in Chicago at the time of the Great Fire. They represent an honor roll of builders who shaped the look of the city in the last half of the 19th Century and beyond. But there are two prominent names missing from that list, both of whom came to Chicago because of the Fire.

They are Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root.

I'll deal with them in my next post in my series on the tall buildings of Chicago.


* Until fairly recent times, city-destroying conflagrations were not uncommon. What is something of a mystery is the very unpredictable death rate caused by such calamities. I've always assumed that the 300 or so who died in the Great Chicago Fire was a remarkably low number, given the ferociousness of the fire and the enormity of damage it left in its wake. That is until I discovered that during the Great London Fire of 1666, all of six people perished. On the other hand, during the earthquake and resulting fires in San Francisco in 1906, nearly 3,000 people died.

Reinheitsgebot

That word and everything it entails meant that at one time, all was well in the world, at least in Germany. It was the law stipulating that in order to produce something and call it beer, (yes I'm writing about beer again, just a warning), you could only use four ingredients, water, barley, hops and yeast. The law was repealed in the 1990s when Germany became part of the E.U. and the laws of all the member nations were consolidated. German beers sold domestically continue to adhere to the law. But it is now possible for German brewers to export something they call beer that is something well, just a little less than beer.

What's the world coming to?

A wise man once said:
As goes beer, so goes the world.

I don't remember who said it, maybe it was Abraham Lincoln. Anyway, in this topsy turvy economy with our manic-depressive stock market and the country on the verge of class warfare, the world of beer in many ways parallels the bigger picture. After all, if you can't trust beer from a place that takes beer as seriously as Germany, what can you trust?

Yes friends, I'm saying that beer is a metaphor for life.

OK for those few of you who have continued reading after that last line, I offer my thanks for sticking with me.


The beer world is essentially divided in two camps, the macros and the micros. The macro breweries, Big Beer, represent the one percent of the population who control most of the wealth. As such they represent all that is evil with corporations, greed, capitalism, you name it. Their product is a watered down version of real beer, filled with adjunct ingredients like corn and rice that dilute the product, designed to increase the profit margin for the sole purposes of making the rich CEOs of the multi-national corporations who control them, even richer. Why do people drink their ghastly swill? Because the multi-nationals have brainwashed the unsuspecting public through their marketing campaigns, into believing that using their product will make them hipper, sexier, manlier, more attractive, more honest, and less pretentious than drinking the beer of the smaller, less visible, independent companies, the micro breweries who represent the other 99 percent, aka, the rest of us.

Instead of occupying Wall Street and Chicago, maybe today's protesters of corporate greed gone amok should be at the doorsteps of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis and Miller in Milwaukee, both subsidiaries of the evil global corporations based in South Africa, or Europe or God only knows where. After all, Big Beer in all its incarnations, controls about 95 percent of the beer market in America, and one of its products, an appalling concoction known as "Bud Lite" has a 28 percent market share all to itself. The insatiable appetite of Big Beer will not rest until its opposition is thoroughly crushed, mangled, and wiped off the face of the map, or short of that, absorbed into Big Beer.

It's not like the old days when the hard working immigrant brewers who brought their recipes from the old country and founded thousands of small breweries in this country, all made wonderful beers and happily co-existed with each other in blissful utopia when the world was less cruel.

Well that's the story as told by the most strident beeristas, the real story isn't quite as salacious. It is true that brewing in America resembles the overall economy in its complexities, and its inscrutable system of hierarchies, ownerships and distribution. But the history of beer making in this country is also a fascinating tale of struggle, innovation, survival, and ultimately for the lucky ones, tremendous success and fortune.

Beer was brewed in the New World before the arrival of the Mayflower. But if you consider beer a genuine part of American culture, as anyone who watches TV commercials during sporting events does, the real dawn of the brewing industry in America came during the great influx of German immigration in the nineteenth century. The thirst of all those new arrivals needed to be quenched and one of the most valued professions among their ranks was that of brewer. Hundreds of breweries were founded in the cities with large Teutonic settlements such as New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and of course, Milwaukee.

In America, the brewers did the best they could to replicate the beer they made back home, but found that the barley available to them on this side of the ocean resulted in a cloudy brew. They discovered that the addition of corn or rice (ingredients that would have been prohibited in Germany), provided the clarity their customers demanded. The beer those customers wanted was a type of beer known as lager, which was the prevalent, but certainly not the only style of beer found in Central Europe at the time. The descendants of those German brewers would create an entirely new style of beer known as American Pale Lager, which would become virtually the only style this country would produce for a very long time.

The names of a handful of those immigrant brewers are immortalized to this day on the bottles and cans of the products that represent the companies they founded. The names include Frederick Miller, Adolph Coor, Captain Fred Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Adolphus Busch. The fact that we still know those names and not the others, testifies to the fact that these men, all of whom came from humble backgrounds, were businessmen first, and brewers second. In each case, they bought their way into existing breweries, and ended up with success far beyond their wildest dreams.

Joseph Schlitz's brilliant marketing skills were helped along by tragedy, the Great Chicago Fire. Five local breweries were destroyed in the fire and almost as serious, the city's water system was contaminated. Relief came from Milwaukee in the form of hundreds of barrels of beer, courtesy of Herr Schlitz. That bit of altruism not only solidified the company's reputation around the country but also that of its hometown. In fact the slogan: "The beer that made Milwaukee famous" was inspired by Schlitz's act of generosity back in 1871. For his part, Schlitz gained a foothold in the lucrative Chicago market which enabled him to open up several saloons serving of course, exclusively Schlitz beer. You can see evidence of this today as the familiar logo of the Schlitz company, (the earth wrapped by a banner displaying the name of company), still graces the facades of many surviving buildings that once housed Schlitz owned saloons.

Beer plays an important part in Chicago's history. Back in 1855, the city fathers enacted a law banning the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Since it was the tradition of Germans to congregate in beer gardens on their one day of rest, the law was seen as an affront to that community. This resulted in the Lager Beer Riot on April 21st of that year. The ban was soon lifted. The labor movement that rocked the city in the 1870s and 80s was made up mostly of Germans and Bohemains, and the resentment towrd those folks and their drink of choice, fueled the fire of the temperance movement, as did the intense anti-German sentiment during WWI.

Well into the twentieth century, most beer was sold in saloons. If you wanted to enjoy your beer at home, you'd have to go to the local watering hole and fill up a vessel of one kind or other to bring home. Part of my family's lore is the story of how my great-grandfather Robert Houlihan became a teetotaler. One Sunday morning, Robert had a taste for a beer and asked his wife Margaret to head out to the tavern to fetch him some. Margaret wasn't in the mood for a Sunday morning jaunt to the neighborhood tap so she did what any sensible parent would do, she sent her child. Apparently, Robert's reaction to the sight of his favorite daughter Marie, my grandmother, returning from the saloon struggling to carry home a bucket of beer, sent him into a tizzy. Such was the disgust from the sight that from that day forward my great grandfather vowed, not to fetch the beer himself, but to give up drink. He would become an ardent and vocal supporter of temperance and Prohibition. Fortunately his beliefs did not rub off on most of his progeny.

The "noble experiment" of Prohibition sent a tidal wave of change throughout the land, little of it having to do with the expressed purpose of eliminating the evils of drink.

A good number of breweries had the wherewithal to survive the thirteen years of Prohibition, mostly by selling legal near beer, malt extract or yeast products. What the consumers did with those products was apparently their own business, so long as they didn't make beer, wink wink.

One unintended consequence was that Prohibition created a whole new market for beer. Old time saloons were primarily the domain of men, whereas the illegal speakeasies of Prohibition were filled with men, women and even children. When the repeal of the 18th amendment came in 1933, the breweries, anxious to recoup their losses, were eager to expand their market well beyond the traditional Central European, male core. The heavily malted, intensely hopped beverage that Bohemians and Germans preferred, was shall we say an acquired taste, not necessarily popular among this new group. So the brewers adapted their recipes to create a beer that was less intense, easier to drink, and had a greatly reduced mouth feel and aftertaste. They did this by adding more corn or rice, depending on the location of the brewery. This was the beginning of the aforementioned American Pale Lager, which became so dominant in the American market.

Many in the beer world call American Pale Lager an inferior product, but that's not really true. The lack of taste and distinction (at least compared to other styles), is certainly the chief characteristic of APL, but that's exactly the point. While making a boatload of money is certainly their goal as with any business, big brewers do not skimp on effort or the quality of their materials. In fact, the opposite is true for the most part. The breweries spend a great deal of money to procure ingredients of the highest quality and to maintain the highest standards of quality control in their facilities. A brewmaster's most important job at a commercial brewery, especially a big one, is not creativity or experimentation, but quality control, making sure his beer tastes exactly the same, one insipid sip after another. That's not an easy job in the notoriously fickle art of brewing.

When a brand of beer becomes inconsistent, trouble follows, as the makers of Schiltz found out not too long ago. Schlitz was the leading brewer in America for most of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, the company seeking to improve its profit margin, tried to cut corners by experimenting with new techniques that would shorten the aging process and enable them to use a higher percentage of corn, which is cheaper than barley. The change of recipe changed the product, and resulted in a beer than was inconsistent from batch to batch, causing loyal drinkers to switch brands in droves. In about ten years, the great Downtown Milwaukee brewery closed for good, and Schlitz was absorbed into the Pabst company. The Schlitz label exists today, still owned by the Pabst Company, and contract brewed by Miller, as a boutique brand, brewed using the old recipe. Better yes, but don't expect it to taste like Pilsner Urquell.

If innovation, creativity and experimentation are not a part of the brewmaster's job description, that is certainly not the case for the marketers of beer. Early beer ads testify to the beer companies' desire to convince non beer drinkers to drink beer. They typically describe the healthful attributes of beer as well as other benefits. The following is the copy of an ad from around 1900: *

There is no beverage more healthful than the right kind of beer. Barley malt and hops - a food and a tonic. Only 3 1/2 percent of alcohol - just right for digestion.


Rhine wine is 12 percent alcohol; champagne, 20 percent; whiskey, 40 percent.


There are no germs in pure beer, while the sweet drinks you give you children are full of them.


Pure beer is a tonic which all physicians favor. They prescribe it to the weak, the run-down, the convalescent. And they recommend it to well people who want to keep well.

Of course you have to drink the right beer:

But get the right beer, for some beer is not healthful. Schlitz is the pure beer, the clean beer, the filtered and sterilized beer. No bacilli in it - nothing but health.

And now for the coup de gras:

And Schlitz is the aged beer that never causes biliousness.

Of course not.

As the advertising world became more sophisticated, a product's image became the selling point for everything from soup to nuts. Beer was certainly no exception. For more or less the first two thirds of the twentieth century, beer ads typically made an effort to present the image of their product and its users as urbane and sophisticated, in marked contrast to the public image that beer was the drink of working class men. The Miller Company for example, famously advertised its signature product, Miller High Life as the "Champagne of Beers"

Here is a TV spot featuring the suave and debonair Ray Milland in character as private detective Roy Markham from around 1960. Note the non-discreet product placement during the closing credits of the program:


A few things happened to beer advertising in the sixties. TV commercials became more epic and cinematic. Gone were the days of on screen talent simply explaining the merits of a product as they did on radio. Imported beer started making real inroads in the American market and the bland, less expensive, American beers could no longer with a straight face claim to be more sophisticated than a beer from say Holland or Germany. So American beer companies reacted by turning to their old reliable consumers as you can see in this ad from 1971:

This commercial was made in the era when the slogans; "Miller Time" and "For all you do, this Bud's for you" were introduced. Their message was; after a hard day at work, sit back, relax, and pour yourself a cold one, you deserve it. The aggressive, over-the-top manly, men doing über-manly things campaign of Schlitz didn't go over as well as its creators had hoped, maybe because viewers found it hard to relate to say, tuna fishermen. But it was part of the trend that continues to this day to market American beer primarily to the working man.

In the seventies and the eighties, the marketers and brewmasters got together to create an entirely new style of brew, light beer. Influenced by the diet soft drink, light beer was probably intended to be marketed toward beer drinking women who wanted to watch their waste lines. The Chicago brand Meister Braü was the first to market the stuff but went nowhere with it. The Meister Braü label was purchased by Miller, who was at the time owned by cigarette giant Phillip Morris Company. "Meister Braü Lite" became "Lite Beer from Miller", and the target audience was changed to thirsty men. The new angle was that you could drink a whole lot of this stuff and get drunk (ok not in so many words), but not get bloated. They also claimed it tasted good which I guess is a matter of opinion. Miller produced several commercials showing some of the manliest of men, mostly sports stars who wouldn't be caught dead drinking diet beer, but were happy to drink two cans of beer that had the same effect of one normal beer. It was brilliant. Not only did the beer companies have a successful new product on their hands, but they could sell twice as much of it. Every major brand jumped on the light beer bandwagon and today about 45 percent of all the malt beverages sold in the U.S. is "Lite" beer of one brand or another.

At the same time, another revolution was taking place in the beer world. No one agrees exactly how or where it all began, but the micro/craft brewing movement brought a whole new world of beer to this country. The author and renowned beer authority Michael Jackson, categorized beers from around the world and identified dozens of different styles in his groundbreaking book; The World Guide to Beer, first published in 1977. Another author, Fred Eckhardt, elaborated on the various styles is his book; The Essentials of Beer Style. Small, independent breweries and brew pubs began creating brews in every conceivable style. In the meantime, home brewing became legal for the first time in the United States since Prohibition, and all over the country people read Charlie Papazian's book, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and learned how to make their own Oatmeal Stout, English Bitters, Belgian Ales, India Pale Ales, German Kölsches, Weißbiers and Bocks, barley wines, heck even American lagers if they chose to do so. The end result was that in America, people who never knew they liked beer because all they ever drank was the tasteless product of Big Beer, became connoisseurs. It was a great awakening. New breweries sprung up all over the States after a steady decline for decades. Today there are almost 1,800 breweries in this country, and all but about 100 of them are either micro-breweries or brewpubs.

Big Beer of course is taking notice, not that craft breweries are really a threat to them. Boston Brewing Company, the largest craft brewery in the United States, shipped 2,259,000 barrels of beer in 2010 and ranked as the eighth top brewing company in the country according to Newsweek Magazine. That's a lot of beer. But its market share is 1.1% compared to 47.9% for Anheuser-Busch InBev, and 28.9% for MillerCoors. Boston's market share is even less than one half that of Pabst Company which doesn't even brew its own beer. Still those numbers would put the Boston Brewing Company in the ranks of Big Beer, even though there is world of difference between its flagship product, Sam Adams Boston Lager, and your standard American Lager from those other companies.

This year it was announced that Chicago's own Goose Island Brewery was to become part of the Anheuser-Busch InBev portfolio. In other words (to mix a couple metaphors), they went over to the Dark Side by selling out to the Evil Empire. Of course no one has a clue how this will all play out over the next several years, but it's unlikely that the giant multi-national corporation is interested in the brewery simply to destroy it. Here is some evidence to that effect. I seriously doubt if Goose Island will be cranking out Bud and Bud Lite anytime soon.

The craft beer movement has separated beer drinkers into people who either drink beer because of the taste, or because of the label. Big Beer is still the big player in the industry and far more people drink their product than any other beer. I'll admit that there are lots of folks out there who drink American Pale Lager simply because they like the taste of it better than anything else. But I'm willing to bet that far more people drink Big Beer more because of the label.

Again, there's that ever fascinating subject, marketing, and its ability to elevate one product over another even though there is absolutely no difference between the two. Take Pabst Blue Ribbon, an old time brew that was once best known as the beer preferred by red necks. PBR has recently gained a new life as the hip beer of the indie rock set. How that happened was a combination of dumb luck and shear brilliance. In the mid-eighties, Pabst was a near moribund company whose future was in the hands of a hostile takeover. The new owner concentrated on selling all the real estate holdings of the company and all but eliminating the advertising budget. The label became essentially invisible for a decade, until young, anti-establishment types, "re-discovered" it as a cheaper alternative to the familiar, more "commercial" brands like Miller and Bud that their fathers were drinking. Without any effort at all from the company, Pabst became big again, and while keeping away from main stream advertising, the new owners, the Metropoulos family have nudged the brand along by sponsoring alternative events such as concerts at indie rock venues, bike messenger contests and artists who work on Pabst related projects.

In the meantime, the good folks at Miller, in a sense bucking the trend themselves, began to emphasize their "macro-beer" image, featuring the High Life brand that we hadn't heard from for a while, though it never went away. A recent ad campaign has featured a likable Miller High Life deliveryman who actually takes his beer away from people whom he deems pretentious and therefore unworthy of "living the high life." This is a message obviously directed at the "everyman" but in a way has made MHL hipper than hip as a counter-counter culture product. In other words, drinkers of MHL reject the faux coolness of PBR and view its drinkers as poseurs. They drink what is in their opinion, a more honest, therefore hipper product.

The irony of all this is that Pabst Blue Ribbon is contract brewed by Miller. While the two are brewed using slightly different recipes, they are both made in the same brewery and are essentially the same beer. I'm guessing that if the workers at the Miller bottling plant accidentally switched the labels on a batch of PBR and a batch of MHL, nobody would notice.

These are pretty good times for beer lovers in America. For those of us who love beer for the taste, never before has there been more selection of styles of beer available to drink fresh, at a local brewpub, or to pick up at a retail establishment, even the local supermarket. For those drawn to the label, many of the old, forgotten brands will be coming back as a sort of niche for drinkers interested in nostalgia. Of course they'll all be brewed up at Miller's, but what's the difference, label lovers only care about the label after all.

For those folks who feel bilious about big business, there are still independent brewers out there without any corporate affiliation, you're job is to find them.

And if the idea of anyone at all profiting off of the making of beer sends you into a tizzy, you can always brew your own.

It is after all a free country. Let's drink to that, while we still can.



* reprinted from an advertisement for Schlitz Beer, c. 1900 as found in:
Breweries of Wisconsin, Jerry Apps, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

Some sources on the Great Fire

Late one night, when we were all in bed,
Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed.
Her cow kicked it over,
Then winked her eye and said,
"There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!"

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. I wrote a post about the event a couple of months ago which you can find here.

Here's a partial bibliography:

• History of Chicago, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time by Alfred Theodore Andreas, 1886, in three volumes is as comprehensive a history of the city as you are likely to find, pre-1886 of course.
• The Great Chicago Fire, by Robert Cromie, McGraw Hill, 1958, is a compelling narrative of the eponymous cataclysm.
• Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, 1973, by Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, University of Chicago Press, is the classic illustrated compendium of Chicago history that includes important pre and post fire panoramas taken from the Court House.
• Lost Chicago, by David Lowe, Houghton, Mifflin, 1975, is an elegy for a bygone city.
• The Great Chicago Fire, by David Lowe, Dover Publications, 1979, edited by the author of Lost Chicago, is a collection of first hand accounts of the event.
• Smoldering City, Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874, by Karen Sawislak, University of Chicago Press, 1995, is a thorough examination and critique of the recovery from the fire and the re-building of Chicago.

And here are three excellent web sites about the Great Fire:

• Chicagology is an independent web site dealing with many aspects on the city with an especially useful section devoted to the Great Fire. Its image Gallery contains an indispensable collection of photographs and engravings of pre-fire buildings.
• The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory web site, the work of the Chicago History Museum, is the most comprehensive site devoted to the fire.
• The PBS series The American Experience, devoted an episode to the Chicago Fire. Here is the accompanying site which features a chronology of the event.

Other than a good reading list, what would be the best way to commemorate the event? Well for my part, I'd like to remember an Englishman, one A.H. Burgess, who was so moved by the tragedy of the Great Fire that he proposed a donation not of money, or food, or supplies, but of books.

Said Mr. Burgess:

“I propose that England should present a Free Library to Chicago, to remain there as a mark of sympathy now, and a keepsake and a token of true brotherly kindness forever…”

The 8,000 plus books that made their way across the waters would become the foundation of the Chicago Public Library which was founded as a result of the donation in 1872, the year after the Fire.

One hundred forty years later the kindness of you and your great country has not been forgotten. Thank you Mr. Burgess, wherever you are.

The Great Fire

Back in the days before stringent fire codes and modern fire fighting technology, catastrophic urban fires were not uncommon. That's perhaps how Mark Twain in his 1883 memoir, Life on the Mississippi, could get away with this flip remark, commenting on the quality of the architecture of New Orleans:

New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago.

I've been doing some research at work on a multiple frame photographic panorama (not pictured here) made shortly after the Great Chicago Fire, perhaps made by one of the most important nineteenth century American photographers, George Barnard. It's difficult to find any "good luck" in the devastation pictured in any image made shortly after the fire. The hard facts are these: 300 people died in the Great Fire that began on the evening of October 8, 1871, 100,000 were left homeless, and roughly four square miles, including the entire central business district were leveled in the conflagration.



Chicago had been a city for 34 years at the time of the fire. In that time, it had grown from a settlement of 4,000 mostly rough hewn scraggly settlers, to a metropolis of 300,000, the most important city in the Midwest. The canal that joined the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River System at the Chicago River, and the railways that connected the city first with the East Coast, then the West Coast, meant that all roads led to, and through Chicago. Industries followed, along with the people to work in them. It was a boomtown the likes of which had never been seen before, or possibly since.

Out of necessity, Chicago was constructed hastily. The balloon frame was invented here, a method of framing a house using readily available wood for the beams and joists that would form the structure. Then more wood was slapped on top of the frame to form the skin. It was quick and cheap, you could build a house in a few days, entire neighborhoods sprung up in weeks providing much needed shelter for the new arrivals who flooded into the city.

Even the more substantial "fireproof" buildings downtown, the ones with the magnificent stone facades, still had plenty of wood in them. The industries that provided the inflammable materials that went into those buildings, lumber mills, paint factories, turpentine factories, lined the river. Add to that all the other industries that used wood and other inflammable materials to manufacture their products, as well as one of their chief by-products, sawdust.

Back then heating fuel, wood again, was stored in the home. Many folks kept livestock in barns behind their homes to supplement their incomes, the most famous of which of course would be the one belonging to the O'Leary family of DeKoven Street. Those of greater means had horses at their disposal. All those animals required feed and bedding stored in the barns and stables which were themselves made of wood and highly inflammable.

Oh did I mention that Chicago's sidewalks, and the streets that were actually paved at the time, were also made of wood?

Topping it all off was a summer of record drought. Barely one inch of rain fell between July and October. In early October, the western half of the United States was in the midst of an enormous cyclonic storm capable of producing winds of up to 80mph.

Chicago the great tinderbox, and the rest of the Midwest in the fall of 1871, was a disaster waiting to happen.

On Saturday October 7th, a massive fire broke out on the city's West Side. It would be the worst fire in the city's history, a distinction that would last exactly one day. The city's over-worked, under-manned fire department was able to bring that fire under control, but not before it consumed four square blocks, and left the firefighters exhausted.

The evening of following day, the fire that was to claim more lives than any other in United States history took place.

It happened in a town and the surrounding forests in northeast Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The Peshtigo Fire claimed between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. It consumed an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. That same day, Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, all sizable Michigan towns, also burned.

And of course, so did Chicago.

In all the details about Chicago Fire, certainly the least significant was how it started. Given the circumstances, a great fire was practically inevitable. Yet at the time, the media was obsessed with finding a scapegoat, or in this case a scapecow. That the fire started in or very near the barn behind Patrick and Catherine O'Leary's home in the near west side is indisputable. The story of the cow kicking over a kerosene lantern carelessly placed in the way by its owner, the lady of the house, unlikely as it turned out to be, became a legend, fueled largely by the anti-Irish sentiments of the time. Mrs. O'Leary would unfortunately become the symbol of the lazy, drunken, good-for-nothing immigrant portrayed by the media and the native born public. She would not live it down for the rest of her life.

However it started, the fire spread quickly, feeding on all that dried out wood, straw and sawdust of the barns, shanties and businesses of the west side. A series of tragic mishaps involving mis-communication, led to wrong directions being sent to the first responding firemen, wasting critical moments early in the blaze. Soon the fire easily leaped over the river which itself burned due to all the grease and garbage in it. The gale force winds, greatly exacerbated by terrific winds produced by the firestorm, blew toward the northeast, sending burning embers in that direction high into the night time sky, depositing them on the wooden roofs of the fancy downtown buildings, marking their doom.

One of the most enduring images of the fire is that of the great bell atop of the courthouse. It rang continuously warning Chicago of the fire, until the tower containing it succumbed to the flames, sending the bell crashing to the basement that only moments before, housed the city's prisoners.

That evil wind became even crueler as it fanned the blaze in a straight line right toward the Waterworks at Chicago Avenue and Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue). Like most of the buildings downtown, the pumping station, the walls of which still stand today, was attacked from above by flaming embers carried by the wind, landing on their wooden roofs. It was the first building in the area to go. With it, all hope of controlling the fire was lost as it was the only pumping station in town. When it went, the fate of the entire north section of the city, as well as downtown was sealed.

Given free reign, the fire would indiscriminately take the homes of the rich and poor alike, turning working stiffs as well industrial titans like Cyrus McCormick into refugees. The fire did not destroy all of downtown at once. Employees at the Tribune on Madison and Dearborn worked feverishly to get out an edition of the paper, in the end unsuccessfully, while the flames were consuming buildings only a block away.



Guests at the Palmer House on State Street breakfasted at the luxury hotel on Monday morning before being forced to evacuate shortly thereafter. Hours later, all that was left of downtown were a scant few surviving buildings, and some very impressive ruins. By Tuesday there was little left to burn and a welcome rain finally put an end to what was left of the fire.

But the rumors of Chicago's demise, this time to paraphrase Samuel Clemmons, were greatly exaggerated. The fire it turned out, was merely a temporary setback. Resolve and energy soon replaced grief and despair. Before the dying embers cooled down, plans for the "second city" (the origin of Chicago's famous moniker) began. The panorama photograph I've been studying was made perhaps one month after the fire. In it you can see that makeshift businesses and shelters have already appeared along with telegraph poles and streetcar tracks. Perhaps most indicative of the life goes on spirit, a beer hall is seen in the foreground of the picture.

Within three years, the city was virtually rebuilt. That's not to say all was right. The temporary equanimity that came out of the common plight of the homeless quickly eroded. The haves, with their wealth of resources, recovered quickly while those of lesser means struggled for years, if ever, to return to normal. Fearing that chaos among the have-nots would break out after the fire, Mayor Roswell Mason with the support of the leaders of the business community, called for marshal law in the streets. General Phillip Sheridan was happy to oblige. Those measures were strongly opposed by Illinois Governor John M. Palmer who saw the act as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution. The governor's protests turned prophetic when a volunteer sentry in Sheridan's militia ironically shot a member of the establishment, one Colonel Grosvenor, the public prosecutor. He was questioned by the sentry who tried to stop him late one night as he was walking home from a party. Having had possibly one too many, the prosecutor gave the sentry some lip and kept walking. For that brief indiscretion, Grosvenor paid with his life. In the end it turned out that most of the mayhem that occurred in the city according to an official report, was "committed by soldiers of General Sheridan's command."

The class struggle that inspired martial law and the vitriol leveled against foreign born Chicagoans escalated after the Fire and would have world wide consequences in the subsequent decade. The right for workers to organize that we take for granted today was born during those heady days at the plants of McCormick, and George Pullman, in Haymarket Square and on the gallows of the basement of the new courthouse built on the north side of the river.

Through the struggle, Chicago continued to grow in prominence. With its selection to host the World's Fair of 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, (later pushed back to 1893), Chicago announced to the world that it had finally arrived. The sky was the limit, between the Fire and the end of the nineteenth century, its population would increase tenfold. Only New York City stood in the way of Chicago's claiming the title of pre-eminent city of the United States.

It's difficult to say what would be different had there been no fire. Despite a depression starting in 1873, the boom that occurred after the fire equaled or eclipsed the original boom. Certainly the opportunities to rebuild Chicago attracted even more people to the city, including the architect Louis Sullivan. But it would be a mistake to assume that the great architecture that this city is known for would not have been possible were it not for the fire. With the exception of Sullivan, most of the architects who would create the movement known as the "Chicago School" were already in town at the time of the fire. Besides, the city was pretty much rebuilt in the old style by 1874, several years before Burnham and Root built the Montauk Block, considered the first Chicago School building.

One significant change in the landscape was the new zoning law that prevented frame construction in the commercial district. Gone would be the homes and churches that once were sprinkled through that part of town. Downtown Chicago would remain exclusively commercial until very recently when commercial buildings were converted to residential use.

While the Chicago Fire ranks as the fifth worst disaster (in terms of loss of life) in Chicago, it is the defining moment in this city's history. Our Great Fire wasn't even the worst tragedy on the day it occurred. The Peshtigo Fire claimed at the very least five times the number of people. Yet the Peshitgo Fire and the other Chicago disasters are merely footnotes in history while volumes continue to be written on Great Chicago Fire. It can't simply be the tragedy that captures our imagination.

No, it was the total devastation of a great city, then the recovery and rebuilding, the phoenix rising from the ashes, that symbol of indefatigable human spirit that turns destruction and misery into hope, opportunity, and progress that so indelibly attracts us to the story. After some tragedies, we pick up the pieces, mourn our dead, then move on. Other tragedies are transcendent.

Fire survivor and real-estate man William Kerfoot put it all into perspective better than most. Shortly after the fire he put up a temporary office in the midst of the rubble of the South Side. A sign in front of his new place of business simply read:

All gone but wife, children and energy.

Inspiring words indeed that we should take to heart in our own troubling times.

Post script:

Here is a list of some of the sources for this post.