Instead of a monumental Civic Center (above) at Congress and Halsted, the site is today the interchange from which the region’s superhighways radiate (below right). In the late 1920s, Bennett envisioned Congress Street as a landscaped parkway (below left).

Regional highways Burnham saw as useful for commerce and recreation reshaped the region in ways he could not foresee.

Bennett’s neoclassical elements such as obelisks and stone balusters (left, at Wacker and Michigan) continue to be reinterpreted as modern markers of civic pride. The 1937 Lake Shore Drive Bridge (right) was built in the moderne style, not the classical look favored by Bennett.

At no period in its history has the city looked far enough ahead.

—Plan of Chicago, p. 80

Even civic improvement efforts that were already underway were boosted by the attention given the Plan of Chicago. For example, renewed efforts to purchase outlying forest preserves finally succeeded in 1913, and the Cook County district made its first purchase in 1916. By 1922, it had purchased 21,000 acres and today holds 67,000 acres.

The Chicago Plan Commission remained a private body largely supported by the Commercial Club, simply offering advice and expertise to the government agencies who built various public improvements. Bennett advised the city of Chicago as it adopted a zoning ordinance in 1923 and mapped out districts for various land uses. His firm prepared plans similar to the Plan of Chicago for Waukegan, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Elgin, Joliet, and Gary, and for other cities around the country.

In 1923, mindful of work under way in
New York and Los Angeles, the City Club of Chicago encouraged formation of the Chicago Regional Planning Association. The new association emphasized coordination and cooperation among independent municipalities rather than a formal vision of a reshaped region. The association successfully coordinated plans for new and improved regional highways. It encouraged forest preserve districts and state parks throughout the Chicago region. Many towns adopted zoning and subdivision ordinances based on the association’s research.

In Chicago, 86 bond issues passed, and the Plan’s improvements reshaped the central city in the 1920s. Bond issues began to fail at the ballot box in the late 1920s as voters tired of scandals in city government. The Great Depression hit Chicago hard, and only federal public works programs enabled construction of North Lake Shore Drive in the 1930s and the Lake Shore Drive Bridge, opened in 1937.

For all its symbolic importance in the Plan, the massive West Side Civic Center never appears to have been seriously attempted. A new City-County Building was under construction as the Plan was being written, and a downtown location was defended as the most convenient for citizens. In the 1950s, civic center proposals focused on the southwest corner of the Loop and the area near City Hall.

In 1939, the Plan Commission was reorganized as part of city government, as planning had become an accepted, occasionally bureaucratic, part of municipal decision-making. But the Plan itself became part of Chicago legend, more important than any city planning document before or since, and still influential in civic discussions.

The Plan of Chicago caught the spirit of its time, but also the character of a place that dreamed the impossible and often accomplished it. It is hard to separate the Plan from an aphorism that appears nowhere in it, words attributed to Burnham:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.

The Plan of Chicago and even its imagery influenced “Chicago Metropolis 2020,” a 1999 report that urged regional solutions to keep the area economically competitive. The Commercial Club of Chicago sponsored the report and created an organization, also called Chicago Metropolis 2020, to implement its recommendations.