About This Map
The Photo Archive
The Vintage Chicago map grew out of my photo archive of more than 100,000 images. Most of the archive’s photos are a byproduct of travel within the United States, visits to my extended family here and in France, and global travels while on business trips working for the newswire service United Press International and Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Vintage Chicago Map
The map’s initial 2,400+ photographs were primarily collected from publicly available internet sources that I acquired after my 2014 retirement from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The map content encompasses postcards, lithographs, maps, and artwork spanning Chicago’s history from the earliest European cartography in 1688 to the present day.
Photo Selections
The photo selection across all map layers prioritizes visual quality, historical significance, and geographic coverage — with the goal of making Chicago’s layered past explorable one street corner at a time. Architectural significance was important, but so was the informal life of the city, so street scenes have their place next to skyscrapers.
Photo Locations
Each image on the map was individually selected, geotagged, captioned. I also assigned latitude and longitude coordinates to where I thought the camera might have been when a particular photo was taken. This explains why markers for aerial photographs are often far from their primary points of interest. While I did my best with these GPS decisions, if you run across a photo marker in a whacky place, try to think of the tennis or golf player who occasionally mishits in a wildly inexplicable way or, in football terms, think of wrong way Corrigan.
Photo Dates
Most Vintage Chicago photos are assigned what I believe to be the correct year. However, if you need exact dating, please treat these dates with caution. Many images gathered from the internet likely came with errors that I did not catch during my research. For photos with no date information, I have done my best to place them within the appropriate general time period.
The Cliff Dwellers
I refer to my Vintage Chicago map as “A Cliff Dweller’s History.” As a long-term member and one-time president of this small Chicago arts club, I wanted the map to celebrate the role of some of the Club’s architects, writers, artists, and photographers who have left their mark on Chicago’s cultural plane from the Club’s founding in 1907.
The Newberry Library and My Interest in Chicago History
The map’s creation and content reflect a lifelong interest in Chicago history. This focus started after visiting the Newberry Library as a teenager. My father William J. Bowe, Sr., and his brother Augustine J. Bowe (“Uncle Gus” to me), both raised their families in apartments in the same building on Elm Street on Chicago’s Near North Side.
In the 1950s, Gus’s son, John Bowe, married Kathie Pargellis, whose father was the Librarian of the Newberry Library. With the Library nearby and that family connection in place, my mother suggested during one spring school vacation that I spend some time there. She was always eager to encourage my education, though I suspect she also wanted to keep me constructively occupied during the break. So, on most days of that vacation, I walked to the Newberry and spent hours reading. Knowing that the library held a wealth of material on early Chicago, I imagine my first question to the desk clerk was something like, “Do you have anything on Chicago history that I might read?”
The Newberry certainly did. Today, I still remember sitting alone at a reading table with the imposing three-volume History of Chicago by A. T. Andreas before me. For the better part of my time that school vacation, I was immersed in his stories and illustrations of geography, culture, and commerce related to the city’s recent explosive growth. His account began with LaSalle’s expedition to the Illinois River in 1679. At the time, this was only a muddy area at the south end of Lake Michigan settled by members of the Pottawatomi tribe. He covered all the big events since, the Fort Dearborn massacre, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the arrival and proliferation of the railroads, the Great Chicago Fire, and the rebuilding of the city that quickly followed. The history ran right up to 1884, the year the first volume of his history was published.
Judge Augustine J. Bowe and My Interest in Architecture
I wouldn’t have studied 20th Century architecture at Yale University in the 1960s if Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley hadn’t in 1957 appointed my Uncle Gus as the first chairman of the newly organized Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks. At the time of his appointment in 1957, Gus was a prominent attorney and a past President of the Chicago Bar Association. Daley’s commission was established by a city ordinance passed that year, making it the first official municipal body in Chicago dedicated to identifying and preserving the city’s architectural heritage. The commission Gus headed was the direct precursor to today’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which was created under a stronger ordinance in 1968, two years after my uncle’s death in 1966.
As the Commission’s inaugural chairman, Gus led it during its formative years, including the significant 1960 initiative that designated the first 38 buildings as official landmarks (such as the Glessner House and the Rookery), and the high-profile, though ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save Louis Sullivan’s Garrick Theater. After 1960, Gus was also serving the city as its newly elected Chief Justice of the Municipal Court of Chicago.
While Gus served as the Commission’s inaugural chairman and had his significant judicial duties to deal with in this period, he also continued to lead the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, a position he held under three Chicago mayors. This was all during a difficult period of increasing racial tensions. It’s fair to say, Gus had his hands full.
When I returned to Chicago to attend law school at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1964, I lived at home in order to assist my mother in caring for my ailing father. That circumstance gave me many evenings to spend with Gus and my Aunt Julia, since they were only an elevator ride away. My long conversations with Gus before he died taught me not only a lot about law, politics, art, and poetry, but also about architecture, and life.
This broad informal education wasn’t surprising, because Gus had balanced high-level judicial and civic roles while also being a published poet and a central figure in Chicago’s 20th-century intellectual, legal, and political circles.
