41.8819°N / 87.6278°W · United States
A grid, almost perfect, laid on a plain without relief: streets run true north to south and east to west, eight blocks to the mile, broken only by a few old diagonals crossing at an angle. To the east it stops dead against the water.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
At the centre the river draws an inverted Y, its north and south branches meeting the main stem just west of the business district, and to the south-west the Sanitary and Ship Canal runs straight out towards the Des Plaines. In the crook of that Y sits the Loop, which is not a ring road but the rectangle of the elevated railway. A caution about it: on our backgrounds the railway is drawn as a very fine line. The name is on the map, the figure is not.
Along the lake, the shore is a continuous band of parks and beaches, because the lakefront stayed public. Not all of it, though: to the far south-east, around the Calumet river and lake, docks, rail yards and industrial ground close the water’s edge. And the diagonals that cut the grid, Milwaukee, Archer, Ogden and Clark, are not avenues driven through a city in the Paris manner: most of them are trails older than the grid itself.
Chicago asks for a binary drawing: the dense ink of the grid, and one great blue. The lake should hold the eastern quarter of the sheet in a full, calm value, the shore of parks a narrow green fringe between the water and the weave. Treat the river and the canal in a blue darker than the lake, almost black, so the inverted Y stays legible in the mass.
The city runs along the lake, and the subject is where the grid meets the water. The frame has to hold the shore of parks at least from Lincoln Park to Grant Park, and the Y of the river near the centre. Cutting the grid at its other three edges is no loss: it is endless by design, and showing that is part of the drawing. One thing not to expect: the rectangle of the Loop. It is there in name, but our backgrounds draw the elevated railway too finely to make a figure.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street number, a date, the name of a neighbourhood: that line is what turns a plan of Chicago into your plan of Chicago.
The shore owes its drawing to a servitude of 1836: “Public Ground, to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings”. Aaron Montgomery Ward defended it in court from 1890, and the Illinois Supreme Court confirmed it in October 1909, a few months after Daniel Burnham published his Plan of Chicago. Neither of them let anything be built on Grant Park. Of the city’s thirty miles of lake shore, twenty-six are covered by parks.
On 2 January 1900 the Sanitary District of Chicago completed the Sanitary and Ship Canal, twenty-eight miles that reversed the course of the Chicago River. Instead of emptying into Lake Michigan, the city’s own drinking water, it has flowed ever since towards the Des Plaines, then the Illinois and the Mississippi. The Y at the centre of the map and the straight canal running south-west are the two halves of that operation.
Chicago’s grid already existed at James Thompson’s survey of 1830, but each district annexed in the nineteenth century had kept its own numbering. In 1901 Edward P. Brennan proposed starting again from two baselines: State Street for east and west, Madison Street for north and south. The council adopted the plan in 1908 and it came into force on 1 September 1909: eight hundred numbers to the mile, one hundred to a block, eight blocks to the mile. An address in Chicago states its distance from the corner of State and Madison.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
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Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
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The block you lived on, the stretch of shore you ran, the bridge over the river you crossed every morning. The grid is the same for everyone. Where you stop in it is not.
Compose my Chicago poster
