Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age

by Ann Durkin Keating

Book Overview

Formed by images of crowded city streets and towering skyscrapers, our understanding of nineteenth-century Chicago completely neglects the fact that the city itself was only the center of a web of neighborhoods, farm communities, and industrial towns--many connected to the city by the railroad. Farmers used trains to transport produce into the city daily; businessmen rode the rails home to their commuter suburbs; and families took vacations mere miles...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226428826
• ISBN13: 9780226428826
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Understanding the roots of metropolitan Chicago

The subtitle understates the scope of this book, which also covers Chicago and suburbs in the plank road age, the canal age and even the highway age. It links rural sites to the metropolitan region and offers critical tools for understanding the types of development that form the whole -- not only the downtown, or the city's community areas, but places that began as agricultural trade centers, satellite cities, railroad commuter suburbs and recreational towns. I was particularly please to see Keating sketch the history of picnic grounds and beer gardens that used to dot the fringes of the city, the best known of which evolved into Riverview Park.