Chicago in the Gilded Age

eATLAS’ Deep Pockets of Graceland Cemetery Adventure visits the gravesites of many of Chicago’s wealthy families associated with the Gilded Age, including Marshall Field, Daniel Burnham, and the Palmers. Or you can take the Pullman National Historical Park Adventure to learn about the city’s important role in the labor movement during that era.

By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)

HBO’s hit series The Gilded Age takes place in 1880s New York, where the nouveau riche Russells, modeled in part on the Vanderbilts, struggle for acceptance in society against the old money families, as depicted by the fictional Van Rhijn-Brooks and the real-life Astors. 

By contrast, Chicago was less than 35 years old by 1870 (the start of the Gilded Age, which lasted until the dawn of the 20^th century), and therefore didn’t have a long-established social hierarchy. But it had already become known as a place where those without a pedigree could become rich through brains and hard work. Yes, there were people from wealthy families who came to the new town and built upon their fortunes – first mayor William Butler Ogden and reaper inventor Cyrus McCormick, to name two – but many of Chicago’s rich and powerful men in its earliest days made their fortunes after moving to the city from small, rural East Coast towns. This included dry-goods-store-owner-turned-hotelier Potter Palmer, his protégé Marshall Field, and meatpacker Philip Armour. 

Then came the city’s darkest hour, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The rebuild led to the birth of the skyscraper. It also resulted in lavish new institutions, whose over-the-top décor reflected a break with the staid, refined taste of previous decades. The second iteration of the Palmer House, completed in 1873, was a perfect example. Built at a cost of $13 million, the seven-story hotel featured 700 rooms, 85,000 square feet of marble flooring, and spaces for 16 shops, including a barbershop with 800 silver dollars embedded in its floor. The Palmer House was expanded and remodeled from 1923-5 and remains a masterpiece of proto-Art Deco luxury.

Southeast of downtown near Lake Michigan, Prairie Ave. between 16^th and 33^rd Streets, an area untouched by the fire, was emerging as the address for Chicago’s most prominent families. Armour, Field, and railroad car magnate George Pullman were the most famous residents of “Millionaire’s Row,” and many of the city’s elite families joined them. 

Potter and Bertha Palmer, however, stayed in the penthouse of their hotel until 1885, when their permanent residence was complete on the brand-new Lake Shore Drive. Designed by Henry Ives Cobb and Charles Sumner Frost, the “Palmer Castle” had 42 rooms, each decorated in a different style, a 75’-long ballroom, and art by contemporary European masters like Renoir, Monet, and Degas. 

The Glessner House – a Richardson Romanesque home on Prairie Ave. – and the Driehaus Museum in the former Nickerson Mansion in River North offer glimpses into what Chicago life was like for the wealthy during the Gilded Age and the first few decades of the 20^th century. Or you can explore the free Chicago Cultural Center. Built from 1892-7 as the first public library, the “People’s Palace” features two art glass domes, including the largest built by Tiffany, plus mosaics and other ornamentation throughout.  

But the opulence on display only tells one part of the story. After all, Mark Twain coined the phrase “The Gilded Age” in 1873 as a metaphor to describe how a thin layer of gold could cover up myriad problems below the surface, and Chicago was a textbook example of both the massive wealth at the top and the poverty underneath. 

During the Gilded Age, Chicago’s population spiked from 300,000 to 1.7 million. To meet the labor demands of a rapidly growing industrial city, immigrants from across Europe arrived. Lured by the promise of better jobs and freedom from oppression, many found themselves performing back-breaking work under awful conditions in the Union Stock Yards, factories, and railroads, and living in slums on the South and West Sides while their bosses resided in mansions. 

The disparity led to unrest, with three major incidents that made national news as part of the growing labor movement. A railroad strike that started in West Virginia in the summer of 1877 went national. As the center of America’s railroad industry, Chicago found itself in the middle of the battle. Protests, and the attempts by law enforcement to quell them, turned violent, with 30 people killed over a four-day stretch in July. 

Nine years later, factory workers throughout the city converged to strike for an eight-hour work day, leading to more skirmishes with the police. On May 4, 1886, the day after several workers were killed in front of the McCormick Reaper Works factory, a nighttime protest at Haymarket Square on the Near West Side was broken up by 175 policemen. A bomb was anonymously thrown into the fray, and the police responded by firing into the crowd. At least seven officers and four civilians were killed. 

Another railroad strike happened in 1894 in Pullman. Workers’ hours were slashed due to an economic downturn, but rents for their homes, which were owned by the Pullman Palace Car Company, remained the same. President Grover Cleveland sent in the Illinois National Guard to break up the strike as it neared its second month. It was quashed within three weeks, but not before 30 people died. 
The excesses of the Gilded Age soon made way for the reforms of the Progressive Era. But those 30 years saw Chicago rise from the ashes of the fire to announce its arrival as a major global city at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.