The Plan proposed pushing widened or new diagonal streets (red) through densely built neighborhoods surrounding the Loop. Relocated railroad facilities (dark blue) would allow the business district to expand.

North Michigan Avenue (above right) became a grand new boulevard in the 1920s, flanked by new hotels and office buildings. It replaced a narrow residential street north of the river, requiring condemnation of the shaded areas (above left).

Ogden Avenue was extended 2.7 miles through the Old Town neighborhood in the 1920s (above); only 40 years later it was abandoned as unnecessary. Buildings on the east side of Michigan Avenue were cut back and refaced (below left), a technique that would be repeated hundreds of times as arterial streets were widened citywide. To allow widening of Ashland Avenue, Our Lady of Lourdes Church (below right) was moved across the street.

Congestion is a menace to the commercial progress of the city. —Plan of Chicago, p. 100

Chicago’s streets were wide and evenly distributed by European standards, but the busy river and extensive railyards created serious congestion. Incomplete arterials needlessly forced crosstown traffic through the Loop. Heavy freight wagons clogged downtown streets going to and from railroad facilities.

The Plan proposed several circuits of widened streets around the central area, and creation of a broad Michigan Avenue, anticipated to become the busiest street in the world. Widening of Michigan Avenue by taking a strip of Grant Park was the first accomplishment of the Plan, and the former Pine Street was more than doubled in width north of the river. A new double-deck bridge, opened in 1920, allowed north-south traffic to avoid conflicts with freight traffic bound for railyards and docks at the mouth of the river.

Another early Plan improvement was a wide new viaduct to carry Roosevelt Road across many blocks of railyards and the South Branch of the Chicago River, opened in 1916.

Inspired by the Plan but motivated by the growth in auto traffic, the city widened or opened 120 miles of streets between 1915 and 1931, which required shaving several feet off the front of hundreds of existing buildings. Improved business and increased property values on the widened streets convinced owners along other streets to support such projects.

The city’s grid was crossed by several historic radial routes, but Burnham praised Haussman’s recent work in Paris and encouraged creation of more diagonal streets. Since this required extensive demolition, only one was ever attempted: Ogden Avenue was extended from Union Park to Lincoln Park.

Particularly dramatic was the Plan’s suggestion that two-level drives be built along the downtown riverbanks, with an upper level matching the height of new bridge approaches and a lower, riverbank level for freight traffic and handling. The city’s wholesale market along the riverbank was moved to the Near West Side and double-level Wacker Drive opened in 1926. Space was left next to the Merchandise Mart and Union Station for similar drives on the opposite riverbanks, which were never built.

At the center of the Plan’s diagrams was Congress Street, at the time an unimportant narrow street running only from State Street to Michigan Avenue. Burnham proposed that it become the city’s central axis, running from a Cultural Center in Grant Park to a massive Civic Center at Halsted Street, and then as a great boulevard westward. As superhighway planning began in the 1920s, Plan coauthor Edward H. Bennett personally protested a Monroe Street rather than Congress Street alignment for the West Side route, and objected to the construction in 1930 of the main post office building where it would block the extension of Congress. A tunnel through the post office building was finally used 25 years later for the Eisenhower Expressway, a boulevard considerably less grand than the one Burnham and Bennett envisioned.

Lake Shore Drive is another legacy of the Plan, though its origins are in the 19th century. As it advanced along with lakefront landfill operations, this parkway intended for pleasure drives took on most of the characteristics of an urban expressway. Writing in 1909, Burnham saw the automobile only as a way for city dwellers to escape for recreation or “the pleasures of suburban life.”

More than 100 miles of arterial streets were widened (purple) or created (red) in the 1920s.