The Burnham Plan, Forever Open Free and Clear

In nineteen oh nine, the Chicago Commercial Club published a document unlike anything an American city had produced before. The Plan of Chicago, written by architect Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, was a comprehensive blueprint for the entire metropolitan area: a unified park system, a redesigned street network, civic monument corridors, a new lakefront. Burnham had spent years on the project; he brought in urban planners and landscape architects from across the country. The plan's ambition was continental.

Its most consequential provision was also its simplest. The Plan stated that the Lake Michigan shoreline for the city's entire length should remain forever open, clear, and free of private development. No private buildings. No private piers. No private appropriation of the shore. The lake belonged to everyone, or it belonged to no one, but either way it did not belong to the people who would otherwise buy it.

This was not a revolutionary idea in the abstract. It was a revolutionary idea in practice, because every other major American city was doing the opposite. New York's waterfront became warehouses and piers and eventually highways. Boston's waterfront became rail yards and industrial facilities. Los Angeles's waterfront became oil refineries. Chicago's lakefront, as a result of a principle embedded in city ordinance and defended in court repeatedly over the following century, became twenty-three miles of public beaches, parks, and paths that any person in the city can walk for free today.

The credit for this outcome is not Burnham's alone. A merchant named A. Montgomery Ward spent twenty years and his own money in court fighting the city and private developers who tried to build on Grant Park. Ward's lawsuits are what gave the ordinance its teeth. When the city tried to allow the Field Museum in Grant Park, Ward sued again. When an armory was proposed, Ward sued again. He was reviled in his time as an obstructionist. His legal victories are why there is nothing between the Loop and the lake except grass and path and water.