Chicago's Mythical Cow
People living in Chicago on the morning of October 10, 1871 were experiencing a lot of
the same fears folks are having today about their livelihoods. The night before, a fire started on the southwest side of the city and by the time the sun was rising over Lake Michigan that morning, smoke filled the air of the central business district. No one believed the fire would advance so far from its origins, and even if it did, downtown was built of sturdy brick and stone and would never burn. Never say never.
By the time the fire ended on October 11th, 4 square miles of the city was in ruins.
The blaze began in a small barn located at the back of Mrs. Catherine O'Leary's property, and marched 34 blocks north before it finally petered out. Very few buildings in the fire's path were left standing, the most famous survivor is the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue. Built in 1869, the tower housed a tall standpipe that worked in conjunction with a pumping station located across the street. Although there were hundreds of other buildings covered in the same Joliet limestone, they collapsed in heaps while the tower and pumping station withstood the heat of the firestorm.
Cow Art, TEB471959 via flickr /Artwork: designslinger]
The disaster effected a sea change for the city. Essentially wiping the business district
clean, a building boom began unrivaled in America till that time. Chicago became the proving ground for new and untried methods of construction. So much so, that the first skyscraper ever built, The Home Insurance Building, rose in Chicago in 1885. William LeBaron Jenney, came up with a radical idea; build a steel skeletal frame to support the weight of a building, thereby reducing the load of the exterior walls. The steel frame allowed you to build as high as you dared. Till that time the higher you went, the thicker the walls had to be at the bottom. A ten-storey building had a 2 to 3 foot thick wall at its base.
In the aftermath, tons of rubble had to be disposed of and since the commercial area was
adjacent to the lake, workers simply pushed the debris into the water. The piles of stone, brick and timber created the base of Chicago's front yard - Grant Park.
And, poor Mrs. O'Leary; the woman was pilloried in the press. A reporter for the Chicago
Tribune printed the story of Mrs. O'Leary and her cow, which he admitted several years later was a complete fabrication. The City used the cow story in a brilliant marketing scheme in the summer of 1999. 300 life-sized fiberglass bovines were given to 300 artists to create distinctive artworks. The cows were placed around town and proved so popular, that the exhibit is attributed to bringing in $200 million in tourist dollars. The cows were then auctioned off and the $3.5 million raised went to a variety of charities.
Chicago has one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world. That skyline is the result
of a disaster that began in the barn of a poor woman, who through no fault of her own, has been tied ignominiously to a cow - that never existed.
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