There was a renovation at the downtown branch of the Chicago Public Library (the one named after former mayor Harold Washington) that took my two favorite departments...the multimedia department and "CPL Express" which had new releases into one large department featuring all the music CDs, DVDs, books on tape, and hot new books a fella could want.

While there I checked out the 4 DVD set of PBS's AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: CHICAGO CITY OF THE CENTURY (the century, by the way, is 1800-1899) which totally rocks, in spite of being narrated by David Ogden Stiers.

So this is what I'm learning about my adopted hometown...early on Chicago attracted ambitous young men who didn't intend to remain, they just wanted to make their fortunes and leave (most ended up staying). Chicago wasn't necessarily better situated than Cleveland, St. Louis, or Milwaukee but it did have more of these ambitious young men. When the concept of The Railroad first appeared, Chicago had a critical mass of people willing to invest in this new venture with the result that all railroad lines connected to Chicago; it became the hub. If you were gonna go east or west, north or south, you had to pass through Chicago.

Chicago is all about introducing efficiency to America and the world. Cyrus McCormick develops a reaper as a way of harvesting wheat. Wheat apparently is easy to grow-just drop seeds on the ground-but a pain in the ass to harvest. Men would walk the fields whacking away at wheat stalks using sicles and scythes which then had to be collected. Lots of wheat would just die right there in the field. The McCormick reaper looked like a ferris wheel...rotating blades that would cut wheat in a path created by a horse pulling the reaper. This was a huge, huge efficiency. Later, the grain elevator (invented in Buffalo but put into widespread use in the midwest near and in Chicago) meant that grain could go straight from wagon load to storage to freight car rather than be packed into bags and handled in such relatively tiny units (a sack of grain would travel from the farm to a stream, from the stream to a river, from the river to a larger river, from that river's port to a freight car, from that frieght car etc.) thereby increasing efficiency.

Increasing Efficiency, on a large scale, always leads to a ton of money. Think of Silicon Valley, Microsoft, the internet boom and the growth in the 90's. Sure some of that was illusory but those gains in productivity are real. Imagine, for instance, a law firm without benefit of a word processor. Imagine life before computerized billing. What were things like before bar codes?

Chicago had this kind of innovation. How can we collect enough ice in order to process pork year-round and not just when it is cold? And now that we have said ice, how can we get enough pigs to keep busy? And then package those pork products. And then transport those products everywhere.

Steel and Petroleum get all the flashy credit for being old-school multinational industries but Pork was first. Before Chicago, pork was a local, intimate affair. Pork came from your pig or perhaps your neighbor's pig. The idea that pork could be a commodity, like a bolt of fabric or a bag of sugar was a new concept, one developed by Armour in Chicago.

The slaugherhouse was the precursor to the assembly line (Henry Ford visited the stockyards and adapted the ideas he saw there to his manufacturing lines in Detroit) with hogs tied by their feet to lines, their throats slit and their bodies cut into components. The slaughterhouses became attractions for tourists...appalling and impressive at the same time.

All the waste, by the way, was being dumped into the river and the river was so greasy it caught fire during the Great Fire of 1871.

Also some talk in this documentary of the immigrants, mostly Irish and German. The Irish were so loathed that black people would move out of a neighborhood if too many Irish moved in. The Irish came mostly to dig canals and sometimes the city didn't have the money to pay them and would issue bonds, allowing the bearer to buy property. Enough Irish collected bonds and bought property, a neighborhood on the South Side called Bridgeport, and did not remain itenerant, canal-digging labor but put down roots. Bridgeport remains an Irish enclave today. Mayor Daley (Sr.) raised his family, including Mayor Daley (Jr. and current mayor) along with 3 other of Chicago's mayors. In 1997, a black kid named Lenard Clark rode his bike through the neighborhood and was beaten to the point of brain damage by local kids.

Germans didn't speak English but had industrial training back home and generally assimilated more easily than the Irish. Both groups drank quite a bit but they each thought the other had drinking problems. Irish drank in a saloon, standing up and quickly, buying rounds for one another. The Germans drank sitting down, with families and they disdained the practice of buying rounds for one another, noting that it made people drink more than they might otherwise in order to keep pace with the group. Hence the concept of Dutch (Deutsch) Treat...paying for yourself.

The city was all built of wood and it went up quickly in the great fire of 1871. Here's something to think about in the wake of commemorating the disasters of 9/11. After the fire, fully 1/3 of Chicago's population, or 100,000 people were left homeless. This, of course, in the time before coordinated public assistance efforts.