Browse Exhibits (27 total)

At the center of a vast network of transportation, production, and consumption, the story of Chicago's rapid growth is inextricably tied to its embrace of commerce. Starting in the nineteenth century, Chicago's boosters seized upon every opportunity to promote and grow their city.

One does not have to spend much time in Chicago to start noticing that the name "Burnham" keeps popping up. Plenty is named after the architect and urban planner, Daniel Burnham, and it does not take much digging to see why. Not only did Daniel Burnham design several buildings in the city, he co-authored with Edward Bennett the 1909 Plan of Chicago, a comprehensive urban planning document. The document was deeply influential in Chicago's development, and was in fact required reading in all Chicago Public Schools for years. Commonly referred to as "the Burnham Plan," the 1909 Plan of Chicago literally shaped the city.

Determined to dispel East Coast notions of Chicago being a smelly, backwater town of the Midwest, certain wealthy Chicagoans set out to create lavish hotels that distinguished guests from around the world would flock to come marvel at the city's accomplishments. These palaces and the lifestyles they promoted sharply contrasted with the quotidien lives of the city's immigrant working classes. Nonetheless, their luxurious architecture and notoriety promoted Chicago as a worthy tourist destination, truly earning it the name "Paris of the Midwest."

Theater in the late 1960s used group participation as a dramatic and popular form of socio-political collective action. Protests against established power in the United States grew between the years 1967 and 1968 because dramatic aspects of political and cultural rebellion manifested in theatrical methods. One prominent example was the Festival of Life by the Yippie Movement outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. During this intense period of domestic conflict, these activists embraced radical theater as a visible form of protest. 

The Yippies, the police, and Chicago city administration used theater to express their conflicting messages. Yippies knew that their outlandish protest tactics would be unlikely to change the results of the Chicago convention, and thus represented Americans who were alienated from the political system. Police actions and the behavior of city leadership also indicate the alarming scale of conflict that developed in Chicago over the course of the weeklong convention. Radical theater reached its culmination in the turbulent struggle between the city and its demonstrators, and the Yippies would continue to use it in their future demonstrations for a changed America during the 1970s.