Lost Chicago

Lowe, David Garrard

ISBN 10: 0226494322 / ISBN 13: 9780226494326

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2010

About this Item

The book is in good condition with all pages and cover intact, including the dust jacket if originally issued. The spine may show light wear. Pages may contain some notes or highlighting, and there might be a "From the library of" label. Boxed set packaging, shrink wrap, or included media like CDs may be missing.

Seller Inventory # BSM.13N06

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lost Chicago
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226494322
• ISBN 13: 9780226494326
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed.

Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city,  a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress.

“Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review

About the Author

David Garrard Lowe is a lecturer, cultural historian, and the president of the Beaux Arts Alliance in New York City. He is the author of Stanford White’s New York, Beaux Arts New  York, Art Deco New York, and Chicago Interiors.