Plate 49 from Plan of Chicago 1909: Chicago. View of the City from Jackson Park to Grant Park, Looking Towards the West. The proposed shore treatment as a park enclosing a waterway (or a series of lagoons) is shown, together with the enlarged yacht harbor, recreation piers, and a scheme for Grant Park.

“Make no little plans,” Daniel H. Burnham reputedly exclaimed around the time he unveiled his Plan of Chicago, the first comprehensive metropolitan plan in the United States. Providing the vocabulary for Chicago architecture through the 1920s, the project was the legacy of Burnham, whose renown in large-scale city planning began when he was chief of construction for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Commissioned by the Commercial Club of Chicago, the plan was developed with the assistance of architect Edward H. Bennett, who elaborated parts of it after Burnham’s death in 1912 and was responsible for executing many of its recommendations. Emulating the grand classical design of European cities, Chicago was to become “a Paris by the Lake.” Features included the development of Chicago’s lakefront and Lake Shore Drive, the construction of Grant Park, and the transformation of Michigan Avenue into a premier commercial boulevard following the completion of the Michigan Avenue bridge. Eleven of the seventeen perspective views were rendered by Burnham’s frequent collaborator, the Beaux-Arts-trained Jules Guérin. The draftsman’s stunning, impressionistic views, with their unusual perspectives and dramatic use of color, bring the Plan of Chicago to life, imbuing it, as Burnham stated about his own aims, with the “magic to stir men’s blood.”