Burnham Plan Centennial invites comparisons to 2016 Olympic Bid

How would you get to the Near North Side if Michigan Avenue ended at the river? Chicagoans have Daniel Burnham to thank for widening and extending that street into what is now the city’s bustling “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. One hundred years later, the city is celebrating the legacy of Burnham, one of its most influential urban planners, and looking to him for guidance in planning the city's future.

Among Burnham’s achievements are designing the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Washington Park and setting a tone for Chicago’s 20th century urban development epitomized in the often-quoted phrase “Make no little plans…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” Now, as the city prepares to celebrate the centennial of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago this fall, some citizens are asking, “What would Burnham have to say about the 2016 Olympic bid?” —an event that would bring international attention back to the park and neighborhood where he once orchestrated a World’s Fair.

“Daniel Burnham was very influenced by his work on the World’s Fair, and that transference of ideas [between nations represented at the fair],” MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, said at a recent panel discussion about Burnham’s anniversary. “I wonder if the Olympics could be another transformative moment for [Chicago], where we think beyond what we’ve done in the past.”

To some, Burnham’s vision of Chicago’s urban landscape invites comparisons to the city’s ambitious bid to host the Olympics.

One feature the Olympic bid shares with the Burnham Plan, which was co-authored by architect Edward Bennett in 1909, is its emphasis on the value of parklands.

According to Mary Woolever, art and architecture archivist for the Art Institute of Chicago, Bennett was particularly interested in using public parks to benefit citizens’ health, and this is reflected in the Plan of Chicago.

For Bennett, she said, “The parks were a way to take a very progressive approach to building citizenship. He thought…he would make a healthier citizen that in turn would make a healthier city.” This line of thinking led to the creation of field houses in many of the city’s parks, including Washington Park, which offered lunchrooms, bathing facilities, and classrooms for English and vocational training, among other public resources for citizens.

Likewise, the hallmark of the city’s bid, according to Chicago 2016 spokespeople, is the way it will take advantage of existing parks and public structures along the lakefront to host the Games and accompanying ceremonies.

But if you ask Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (this fall’s One Book, One Chicago selection), “What would Burnham do?” might be a bad question for understanding how significantly the Olympics will impact the city.

“The real question is what do we think about the bid,” Smith, a professor at Northwestern University, said in an interview. According to Smith, the command to “make no little plans” should be interpreted as the ethos behind a large redevelopment vision in the wake of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire—not the rallying cry for particular events.

“Regardless of whether the Olympics is the issue at hand, people try to invoke both the example of Burnham and that particular quotation whenever they propose an idea,” Smith said. “They try to use the success of his example and the obvious rhetorical power of that phrase as an endorsement of whatever their idea is… but we have to remember this is a different city and a different time.”

At the time of Chicago’s World’s Fair, the city was just recovering from the 1871 fire and many saw the fair as an opportunity to showcase its “rebirth,” Smith said. In fact, the similarities between the World’s Fair and the Olympics may end with their choice of venue, Washington Park.

At the turn of the century, Chicago was predominantly an industrial city with just above one million residents, less than a third of today’s population. In comparison, the city now faces a host of post-industrial, twenty-first century concerns from globalization to mass-transit that could not have factored into Burnham’s plans.

“What the Olympic committee is talking about is taking a mature park and building a temporary competition space within it that will be in significant part broken down afterwards,” Smith explained. “The Olympics run for three weeks—this was a fair to run for six months. And at that point Jackson Park was a swampy mess.”

“It's a different city and a different time," he added. "The example that Burnham offers is someone who learned from other places and other examples and then tried to decide what was best for Chicago...and we should do the same.”