S. Q. ZHANG
so that speculators could buy and sell them sight unseen. In
addition to its mathematical regularity, it was “flexible, with
plenty of room for variety within and between the presumably
anonymous blocks” (Reps, 1965: p. 267). Space was counted in
order to be occupied. The grid was a versatile planning model
and open to expansion once planned. It used a hydraulic model,
as opposed to the stable, the eternal and the constant.
Almost all cities, towns, and villages planned after the turn of
the 18th century reflected an underlying grid in their physical
appearance. Chicago unexceptionally accepted the expression
of Jefferson’s grid. Chicago had two dominant natural features:
the expanse of Lake Michigan, which stretches, unbroken by
islands to the horizon; and a corresponding area of land ex-
tending north, west, and south without hills or any marked ele-
vation. Its lack of geographic features made it highly suitable
for a grid plan. The effects of the city were obtained by repeti-
tion of the unit. Even though the shape of the city was a little
irregular; the perpendicular pattern remained and became cru-
cial for the city’s expansion. A map from 1830 by James
Thompson contributed much to the ultimate shape and person-
ality of the future metropolis. Additions to the city over the last
century extended the grid pattern established in the original
plan. A map of 1834 exhibited Chicago’s first real estate de-
velopment. The Kinzie Addition began from the north of the
Chicago river and east of State Street; the Wolcott Addition
was along the North Branch of the Chicago river. As the West
began to grow prodigiously, overland routes multiplied and
stimulated the growth of the city. The stimulus to Chicago’s
growth also came from the eastern transportation facilities to
the city (Mayer & Wade, 1965: pp. 24-25). The city’s frame-
work, the grid of Chicago, was compatible with the commercial
activities, manufacture and transportation.
The Loop was not only the physical symbol of Chicago’s
commercial power, but also the engine of the city’s expansion.
Concentrated with the Loop were many commercial skyscrap-
ers, government buildings and offices, new department stores
and the leading civic cultural institutions. The old boundaries of
the Loop could no longer contain the growing population and
burgeoning commerce. Commercial facilities expanded from
the center of the city, forcing residential construction to move
to the edge of the town and into the suburbs beyond. Real estate
investors were busy due to the urban development and they
settled into new suburban areas. The grid plan was applied
during this urban expansion. It was relatively easy to designate
city streets by numbers rather than names, permitting fast
growth of the city.
The fire of 1871 did not stop the growth of the city. By 1880
a new cycle of development was under way. Chicago solidified
its position as industrial and commercial leader for the nation
and adopted radical innovation in mass transit, which acceler-
ated its horizontal expansion. The increased speed and effi-
ciency of transportation permitted the vast expansion of the city
beyond its earlier confines. Uncultivated land quickly fell to the
developer and the framework of the grid. Chicago became an
“exploding metropolis” as its grid swallowed up neighborhood
areas (Mayer & Wade, 1965: p. 144).
The great growth of the metropolis took place in the outer
zones rather than central zones. Foreshadowed by Potter
Palmer’s move to Lake Shore Drive in the 1880s, the exodus
from the center became a rush after 1893. Social elites were
eager to escape from the congested city and shifted to the shore
of Lake Michigan on the near north side. Thus, every year,
many people were released from the centrally-located neighbor-
hoods into the middle class areas. There areas occupied a wide
belt around the densely inhabited residential and commercial
core, thinning out toward the municipal limits and fading into
nonurbanized areas. The outward expansion of the metropolis
was not confined to residential development. The central city
was too small and congested to accommodate the growth of
manufacturing. Investors looked for undeveloped land close
enough to the city yet far enough from downtown to be unclut-
tered and cheap (Mayer & Wade, 1965: p. 186).
There seemed to be nothing to prevent Chicago from its rapid
expansion and it was dubbed “the City of Speed” by Newton
Dent of Munsey’s Magazine. He wrote (Mayer & Wade, 1965:
p. 272) :
Nothing, that either man or nature can do, apparently, can
check the growth this city that has spread back from the
lake like a prairie fire, until its great bulk covers nearly
two hundred square miles of Illinois (Mayer & Wade,
1965: p. 272).
Chicago’s grid became a “rhythm without measure” (De-
leuze & Guattari, 1987: p. 264), ready to occupy a non-varying
space. Its keynote was expansion and its vitality lay in its inde-
finable periphery. As addressed by Daniel Burnha m, “Peo ple i n
Chicago must recognize that their city is without bounds or
limits” (Burnham & Bennett, 1993: p. 80). Due to the charac-
teristics of the grid, Chicago was territorialized and at the same
time continually deterritorialized through the opening of fron-
tiers and exodus. The grid was formed not only on the basis of
its powers of accumulation and the city’s extension, but also on
the basis of its capacity to develop itself more deeply, to be
reborn, and to extend itself throughout the latticework of soci-
ety.
To go back to the starting point of Jefferson’s grid, the grid
on American frontier was not, however, strictly functional.
Despite its seemingly practical mechanism, Jefferson’s grid, as
suggested by André Corboz, it reflected a certain ideology and
religious outlook. André Corboz demonstrates in his article
“Die kulturellen Grundlagen des territorialen Rasters in den
USA” that among other things the American grid, which origin-
nated in 1785 with Jefferson’s Ordinance, must be a religious
grid because it follows the same impetus as described in the last
chapter of the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament—God
plans Israel as the land of the future, the Promised Land—by
dividing it up into perfectly equal parts among Israel’s twelve
tribes (Corboz, 2001: pp. 186-260)1. He does not intend to ar-
gue that Jefferson gridded America because he wanted to recre-
ate what he had read in the Bible. The argument is about a cer-
tain mentality embedded in the nature of American grid which
is related to the perception of the future. Jefferson saw a corre-
lation between architecture, behavior, and belief. Architecture
was understood by him as “a symbolic expression of a culture’s
ideals and achievements and as an instrument for intellectual
and moral improvement.” For Jefferson, architecture should be
a style appropriate for a democratic society and landscape
should be cultivated properly.
In Jefferson’s ideal version of America, independent farmer
citizens who lived in simple cottages on their plots of land
should occupy the vast landscape for the emerging nation of
America (Kostof, 1987: p. 15). Living the life of a country
1I must thank Julia Ng for translating the German text for me.
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