The Castle That Would Not Burn

The limestone castle just ahead is almost the only thing standing here that remembers the night Chicago burned. When the Great Fire swept through in October of eighteen seventy one, it was the one public building in the entire burned district left standing, even though it took real damage: the wooden roof caught fire during the blaze and collapsed straight down onto the pumping machinery below, destroying the pumps and, with them, any chance the city had of fighting the flames with its own water system.

The tower itself survived because it was built from limestone just two years earlier, in eighteen sixty nine, designed by the architect William Boyington mainly to hide an iron standpipe that smoothed out pressure surges in the water mains, a purely functional job dressed up as a Gothic castle because the city wanted its waterworks to look like a landmark rather than a pipe.

In the fire's immediate aftermath, with the city's libraries and private book collections reduced to ash, the empty tower took on an unexpected second job: it briefly held books donated to replace what Chicago had lost, including volumes sent by Queen Victoria herself, part of a wave of international sympathy and aid that poured into the city once word of the disaster reached Europe.

Today the tower holds a small art gallery instead of library books, but it still stands exactly where it stood in eighteen seventy one, surrounded now by glass towers instead of the wooden city that burned around it. Of everything built in Chicago before the fire, very little is left to look at. This is some of it.