The Burnham Blog by Patrick T. Reardon

Who was Edward P. Brennan? Thank heaven for Edward Brennan.

Patrick T. Reardon — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:45:33 -0600

In the summer of 1901, Edward P. Brennan, private citizen, went on vacation to Paw Paw, Mich., with an armload of Chicago maps.

He came back with a set of proposals that, in their way, were as important to the development of Chicago as the 1909 Plan of Chicago, written by Daniel Burnham and his co-author Edward Bennett.

The goal of the Burnham Plan was to reshape the landscape of the city with new parks, a beautiful lakefront and a more efficient street system. To bring order to the physical world.

Who was Edward Bennett? And why has he been overshadowed for a century by Daniel Burnham?

Patrick T. Reardon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:32:52 -0600

For more than an hour, experts from around the world had been rhapsodizing about Daniel Burnham and the 99-year-old Burnham Plan, the ground-breaking document that shaped today’s Chicago and created the modern field of urban planning.

It was July 10, 2008, and the gathering was the plenary session of the 13th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society in the grand ballroom of the Chicago Marriott Downtown.

Just another video

Patrick T. Reardon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:54:32 -0600

For Shani Edmond, it started out as just another video.

Although she’s only 17, Edmond, a senior at the Woodlawn campus of the University of Chicago Charter High School, is a veteran videographer.

As part of the Digital Youth Network, she has been writing and directing short movies since she was a seventh-grader. Indeed, for the past two years, she has been a paid employee of the network, serving as a teacher’s assistant.

Agent provocateurs

Patrick T. Reardon — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:38:56 -0600

Today, we don’t think of Daniel Burnham as a radical, as an agent provocateur. Yet, that’s what he was.

Take a look at how barren the lakefront off Grant Park was in 1909 (below) --- and notice how the railroad tracks blocked people from getting to the water easily.

Q&A with Carl Smith --- "All this energy"

Patrick T. Reardon — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:32:54 -0600

Third of three

That was then, Carl Smith says. This is now.

Throughout this year, Smith, the author of “The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City” (University of Chicago Press), has been asked how Burnham, the principal author of the Plan, would react to today’s planning challenges.

Q&A with Carl Smith --- "He was in their club"

Patrick T. Reardon — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:33:02 -0600

Second of three

Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans and visitors learned more about Daniel Burnham and the Plan of Chicago this year during the centennial celebration of that document.

So did Carl Smith.

Q&A with Carl Smith --- "How the world came to be the way it is"

Patrick T. Reardon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:05:01 -0600

First of three

Carl Smith has had a ringside seat for this year’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Plan of Chicago.

In 2006, after a series of academic and publishing twists and turns, he came to publish a book about the document, more commonly called the Burnham Plan, after its principal author Daniel Burnham.

Someday

Patrick T. Reardon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:10:42 -0600

Someday, fairly soon, a 10-year-old girl will look out over a vast panorama of prairie grasses and travel back hundreds of years to a time when the landscape was unplowed and unpaved. She will imagine herself as a young Native American or perhaps the daughter of a German immigrant heading west for opportunity.

Standing there, in the Learning Center at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington, she won’t know how important Nov. 5, 2009 was in making that journey of the imagination possible.

Our green future

Patrick T. Reardon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:58:08 -0600

In the 1909 Plan of Chicago, Daniel Burnham wrote:

“While the keynote of the nineteenth century was expansion, we of the twentieth century find that our dominant idea is conservation….The time to secure the lands necessary for [regional parks] is now, while as yet the prices are moderate and the natural scenery is comparatively unspoiled.”

Well, we of the twenty-first century have our own responsibility to look forward.

Messiness --- and "a nice place to live"

Patrick T. Reardon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:16:08 -0600

“A city is competitive if people think of it as a nice place to live.”

Chicago Sun-Times business reporter David Roeder isn’t as grandiloquent as Daniel Burnham was a century ago. But he articulates an idea that was at the heart of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago.