The Record · Chapter Three · 1848 to 1893

The Franchise and the Fire

The streets leased for a century, a city burned and rebuilt in steel, a bomb and a rope, and the streetcar king who taught the city what an alderman’s vote was worth.

Chicago · 30 September 2026

The streets for sale

The canal made Chicago a crossroads. The railroads made it a city. By the Civil War, trains ran out of here in every direction, and people poured in to work them, load them and unload them.

People needed to get around inside the city too, and that meant streetcars. Streetcars run on public streets. So whoever got permission to lay track down a street had a piece of the public ground for as long as the permission lasted. That permission is called a franchise.

In 1863 a bill in Springfield, nicknamed the Gridiron Bill, proposed handing out streetcar franchises for 99 years. In 1865 a version of it passed, known ever after as the Ninety-Nine Year Act.

Think about that length of time. A public street, leased to a private company for about four generations.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The city leased the Skyway for 99 years in 2005 and its parking meters for 75 years in 2008, and the meter deal changed hands again in September 2026. The 1865 act is the grandfather. Same instrument. Better lawyers.

This is the play we call kill the public option, second edition. The streets belonged to everybody. The right to charge people to ride them belonged to a few.

The yards

On Christmas Day, 1865, the Union Stock Yards opened on the South Side. Railroads and packers pooled their money to build one giant market for livestock. Within a few years Chicago was butchering for the nation.

The yards ran on labor. Irish, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian and Slovak workers first, later Mexican and Black workers too. Their story is almost entirely missing from our files so far. It needs its own reporting, not a sentence. It is named below as a hole.

The Fire

On the night of October 8, 1871, a fire started in the West Side barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. The cow story is a legend. The fire was not. A dry summer, a strong wind and a city built of wood did the rest.

It burned until October 10. About 300 people died. Roughly 17,500 buildings were destroyed and about 100,000 people were left homeless, about a third of the city.

The fire is on the flag as a star too. A fire that size is also the biggest real estate event a city can have.

Insurance was the first test. Many of the companies that had written fire policies in Chicago could not pay and went broke, so a lot of families who had done the responsible thing got nothing. Relief money poured in from around the world, and much of it was handed to the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a private group run by businessmen, which decided who deserved help and on what terms. Then the city fought over fire limits, rules about where wooden buildings could go back up. Brick costs more than wood, and working families could not afford to rebuild in brick.

Put those three together and you can guess who rebuilt fastest and who got pushed out to the edges. We cannot yet put names and dollar figures on each of those three. When we can, they go here. For now it is a named hole.

What the city built next was a win. In 1885 the Home Insurance Building went up at LaSalle and Adams with a frame of iron and steel carrying the load instead of thick masonry walls. It is widely called the first skyscraper. The steel frame came out of Chicago, and it changed every city on earth.

The strike and the viaduct

In July 1877 railroads across the country cut wages again, and railroad workers walked off the job. The Great Railroad Strike reached Chicago that month. Workers from other trades joined in.

The police and troops were sent in. The worst of it came at the Halsted Street viaduct near 16th Street, where police fired into crowds. About 30 people were killed in Chicago that week.

The strike was broken. The wage cuts stood.

This is the second time in this Record that force settled a money dispute. The first was the Meskwaki siege of 1730. It will not be the last.

Haymarket

On May 4, 1886, workers held a rally on Des Plaines Street, just off Haymarket Square on Randolph, part of a national push for an eight-hour workday. It was peaceful. The mayor, Carter Harrison, stopped by, listened and went home.

Near the end, as police moved in to break it up, someone threw a bomb into their ranks. The police opened fire. Seven officers died, from the bomb and, historians believe, some from their own side’s bullets in the chaos. An unknown number of civilians were killed. Nobody has ever proved who threw the bomb.

Eight anarchist leaders were tried anyway. The evidence did not tie them to the bomb. The trial tied them to their speeches and newspapers. Seven were sentenced to death. On November 11, 1887, four of them were hanged. One killed himself in his cell the day before.

In 1893 Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three still in prison, and he said in writing that the trial had been unfair. It cost him his political career. He did it anyway. That is a win too.

The lesson the owners took from Haymarket was that state force was a normal tool for settling labor fights. They would use it again eight years later, at Pullman.

The streetcar king

Charles Tyson Yerkes came to Chicago in the early 1880s with a prison record from Philadelphia for a financial scandal and a plan. He built or bought up streetcar lines on the North and West sides until he controlled a large share of the city’s transit.

To run streetcars you needed franchises, and to get franchises you needed the City Council. So the price of an alderman’s vote went up. A job that paid next to nothing on paper became worth a great deal to a man willing to sell. Chicago earned a nickname in those years, the Boodle Capital, and “boodle” was the local word for a bribe.

The aldermen who sold most reliably were called the Gray Wolves. Among them were John “Bathhouse” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna of the First Ward, and Johnny Powers of the Nineteenth.

Yerkes then went to Springfield for the big prize. He wanted his franchises locked in for up to half a century. In 1897 the legislature passed the Allen Law, which let the city grant franchises that long.

Then the public revolted, and that is the win. Citizens packed the Council chambers, reformers organized ward by ward, and voters threw enough of the boodle crowd out to turn the Council. The Allen Law was repealed in 1899 before Yerkes could cash it. He sold his Chicago holdings and moved to London, where he helped build the Underground.

We call this play the seating chart. Nobody needed a secret meeting. They needed the right men in the right chairs.

Jumping the line

In 1889 John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil went looking for a place to build a giant refinery to serve the West. Its first choice was South Chicago, at the foot of 100th Street, where pipeline and tanks were already in place.

It did not build there. It went a few miles east to Whiting, Indiana, over land costs, taxes and local politics. The Whiting refinery became the largest in the country.

Sixteen years later United States Steel would do the same thing and build Gary. Two of the biggest industrial plants in America both hopped the state line to get a better deal while keeping the Chicago market. We call it jumping the line.

The next ditch

By the 1880s the Chicago River was an open sewer draining into Lake Michigan, which was also the city’s drinking water. The answer was to make the river run backward, away from the lake and down toward the Mississippi.

In 1892 digging began on the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the largest earth-moving job anyone had tried until then. We do not yet have reliable figures on how many men dug it or how many died. That is a hole.

How it ended, on a freezing morning in 1900, is in the next chapter.

The scoreboard

Holes, named

Sources

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