Chicago Fire Academy - memorial of point of origin of the Chicago Fire of 1871
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 52.159 W 087° 38.520
16T E 446722 N 4635466
The Academy now sits on the grounds where the Great Chicago Fire allegedly began, also marked by a sculpture of flame reaching skyward. In the 1870's, this area used to be densely populated with wooden structures.
Waymark Code: WM45FM
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 07/10/2008
Views: 120
Excerpts from: (
visit link)
Besides the fact that the Great Chicago Fire started around 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, somewhere in or very near the O'Leary barn, the exact particulars of its origins are unknown. But, given the dry summer and the careless way the city had been built and managed, a kick from a cow would have been sufficient but by no means necessary to burn Chicago down. As A.T. Andreas, the city's leading nineteenth-century historian, put it, "Nature had withheld her accustomed measure of prevention, and man had added to the peril by recklessness."
The so-called "Burnt District," a map of which appeared in virtually every account of the fire, encompassed an area four miles long and an average of three-quarters of a mile wide--more than two thousand acres--including over twenty-eight miles of streets, 120 miles of sidewalks, and over 2,000 lampposts, along with countless trees, shrubs, and flowering plants in "the Garden City of the West." Gone were eighteen thousand buildings and some two hundred million dollars in property.
After a brief downturn in the financial markets and an even briefer moment of doubt about the future on the part of some Chicagoans, the city's rebuilding began in earnest. Within days a few pioneer businesses sprang up in sheds and stands among the ruins, and traffic started moving again. The rubble was swept away, a good portion of it pushed into the lake south of the river to make new real estate. Basic services were quickly reestablished in temporary quarters--the post office, for example, was set up in the Methodist Church on the corner of Wabash and Harrison. Inside of six weeks, work had begun on 212 stone and brick buildings...Visitors soon looked upon a new Chicago that a local journalist described as "better classified, and its future more distinctly marked, than could have been possible before the fire."
A bronze, 33 foot sculpture of stylized flames entitled Pillar of Fire by sculptor Egon Weiner was erected in 1961 on this point of origin of the Great Chicago Fire.