{"id":34157,"date":"2026-08-08T22:48:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago-history-2\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T22:48:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:48:31","slug":"vintage-chicago-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/vintage-chicago-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Vintage Chicago: A Cliff Dweller&rsquo;s History"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-1 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1372.8px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-0 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-1\"><h1>Introduction<\/h1>\n<p><strong><u>Origins of the Vintage Chicago History Project.<\/u><\/strong> I retired in 2014 with a hard drive containing more than 70,000 photographs and no plan for what to do with them. Most photos were the ordinary residue of a family and working life \u2014 vacations, business trips for United Press International and later Encyclopaedia Britannica, family visits here and in France \u2014 basically the accumulated clutter that comes from always having a camera at hand.<\/p>\n<p>After retirement, with even more time on my hands, I turned my attention to collecting from online public sources old Chicago photographs, postcards, lithographs, maps, and artwork, and then adding them to my photo archive after geotagging and captioning them. By 2025, I had a substantial, well-organized collection of vintage Chicago pictures and absolutely no way for anyone else to see them.<\/p>\n<p>The arrival in 2025 of artificial intelligence platforms and one of its computer code-writing progeny, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, helped me to create the interactive <a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/map-vintage-chicago\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vintage Chicago Map<\/a>. By writing some 50,000 lines of code gobbledygook that I couldn\u2019t, the machine named Claude enabled me to give all those vintage photos a utilitarian home by making them widely available on the interactive map platform of Vintage Chicago, A Cliff Dweller\u2019s History.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Vintage Chicago, A Cliff Dweller\u2019s History of Chicago\u2019s Six Eras.<\/u><\/strong> A critical corollary complementing the interactive map\u2019s visual focus on Chicago\u2019s past is this companion textual narrative, <em>A Cliff Dweller\u2019s History of Chicago<\/em>. A copy can also be accessed from the map\u2019s legend. This brief history of Chicago has six chapters divided into the city\u2019s chronological eras of the development:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"margin: 0 0 10px; padding-left: 22px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.7;\">\n<li><strong>1688\u20131812 Colonial Era<\/strong>. Chicago\u2019s Native and colonial beginnings;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1813\u20131870 Early Settlement Era<\/strong>. Its early settlement and the arrival of the railroads;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1871\u20131900 Post-Fire Era<\/strong>. The Great Chicago Fire and the later rebuilding and industrial boom;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1901\u20131950 Jazz Age Era<\/strong>. The Great Migration and the Chicago Renaissance;<\/li>\n<li><strong>1950\u20132000 Digital Era<\/strong>. The second half of the twentieth century; and<\/li>\n<li><strong>2001\u2013Present Contemporary Era<\/strong>. The city as it stands today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each chapter is illustrated with historic photographs from the map and concludes with a hot linked bibliography to encourage further reading.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>The Vintage Chicago Map Legend.<\/u><\/strong> The map\u2019s legend is the Jane Byrne Interchange of the visual side of Vintage Chicago. You can get everywhere and access everything from it. Its numerous filters and era choices now open the door to more than 3,000 photographs that cover Chicago\u2019s visual record from 1688, when the Italian Franciscan friar Vincenzo Coronelli drew the first printed map to carry the name \u201cChekagou,\u201d down to today. Layered onto the map are galleries for 100 Famous Buildings and 50 Famous Architects, Famous Writer Locations, a filter for exploring each of Chicago\u2019s 78 neighborhoods, aerial photos, historic maps and artwork.<\/p>\n<p>The map legend has been designed to offer a variety of ways to view Chicago\u2019s history. You can zoom down to a neighborhood street corner, take a closer at one of the city\u2019s famous buildings or read about how the city evolved from a muddy trading post into the global metropolis of today. You can also begin to understand how it was that Chicago arrived in its current role as the architectural design capital for distant megatall structures all over the world.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>The Cliff Dwellers.<\/u><\/strong> There is also a filter devoted to notable architects, writers, artists, and photographers of The Cliff Dwellers, the small downtown arts club that I\u2019ve belonged to for decades and once served as president. This connection is why I refer to the Vintage Chicago map as \u201cA Cliff Dweller\u2019s History.\u201d It\u2019s a personal label as much as a descriptive one, and the map permits me to celebrate the role of some of the club members who have left their mark on Chicago\u2019s cultural plane following the club\u2019s founding in 1907.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Interest in Chicago History.<\/u><\/strong> My original interest in Chicago history goes back to a single spring school vacation when I was a teenager. My mother, eager to keep me both educated and out from underfoot, suggested I spend some days at the Newberry Library.<\/p>\n<p>Before long I was poking through A. T. Andreas\u2019s three-volume <em>History of Chicago<\/em>. This grand story of the city\u2019s early history begins with LaSalle\u2019s 1679 expedition, and carries through to the 1812 Fort Dearborn massacre, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the railroads, the Great Fire of 1871, and Chicago\u2019s immediate and astounding recovery right up to the year 1884, when Andreas published his first volume. I didn\u2019t appreciate it fully at the time, but that week at a Newberry reading table set something afoot that took another 70 years or so to fully develop.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Interest in Chicago Architecture.<\/u><\/strong> The Vintage Chicago map\u2019s special focus on Chicago\u2019s architectural history reflects a lifelong interest in architecture engendered by my uncle, my father\u2019s brother Judge Augustine J. Bowe. Mayor Richard J. Daley had appointed him in 1957 as the first chairman of Chicago\u2019s new Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks.<\/p>\n<p>As the Commission\u2019s inaugural chairman, Gus led it during its formative years, including the significant 1960 initiative that designated the first 38 buildings as official landmarks. These buildings included the Glessner House, and the Rookery. He was also centrally involved in the high-profile, and ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save Louis Sullivan\u2019s Garrick Theater. (See <a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/1995-07-01-The-Demolition-of-Louis-Sullivans-1892-Garrick-Theater-Journal-of-the-IL-State-Historical-Society.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Demolition of Louis Sullivan\u2019s Garrick Theater<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Acknowledgements.<\/u><\/strong> A work like the Vintage Chicago map would not exist without the institutions and people who do the difficult, patient work of keeping Chicago\u2019s past alive for later generations. To name a few: the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artic.edu\/library\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ryerson and Burnham Library<\/a> at the Art Institute of Chicago, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newberry.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Newberry Library<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagohistory.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago History Museum<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lib.uchicago.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">University of Chicago Library<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/library.uic.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">University of Illinois Chicago Library<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.architecture.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago Architecture Center<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/chicagology.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicagology<\/a> resource, and Erik Nordstrom, with his architectural scholarship and his <a href=\"https:\/\/bldg51.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Building 51 museum and gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Not to be forgotten are the generous members of half a dozen Facebook Chicago history groups who kept turning up photographs I\u2019d never have found on my own. I owe all of them a debt I can only repay in general terms, as the Vintage Chicago map arrived well after most individual photo credits that once existed had been lost. I didn\u2019t see the AI-assisted future coming far enough in advance to capture earlier available provenance.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Errors and Assigning Blame.<\/u><\/strong> This map and its history I\u2019m sure have their quotient of gaps, misstatements, and errors. This may be particularly true where I was trying to assign an accurate geotag location to a map or the place from which an aerial photo was taken. If you stumble across other embarrassments, such as coding bugs or generative text that\u2019s garbled, leave Claude out of it and blame me. I\u2019ll deal with Claude myself if necessary.<\/p>\n<div class=\"vc-modal-byline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">William J. Bowe<\/a><br \/>\nNorthbrook, Illinois<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/map-vintage-chicago\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vintage Chicago Map<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wbowe.com<\/a><br \/>\nAugust 2026<\/div>\n<hr \/>\n<h2>Read the Six Chapters<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/chicago-colonial-era-1688-1812\/\">Colonial Chicago, 1688\u20131812<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/chicago-premiers-colons-1813-1870\/\">Early Settlement Chicago, 1813\u20131870<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/chicago-apres-l-incendie-1871-1900\/\">Post-Fire Chicago, 1871\u20131900<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/chicago-jazz-age-era-1901-1950\/\">Jazz Age Chicago, 1901\u20131950<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/chicago-ere-numerique-1951-2000\/\">Digital Age Chicago, 1951\u20132000<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/chicago-epoque-contemporaine-2001-present\/\">Contemporary Chicago, 2001\u2013Present<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/map-vintage-chicago\/\">\u2190 Explore the interactive Vintage Chicago Map<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34157","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Vintage Chicago: A Cliff Dweller&#039;s History - William J. 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