Chicago Fire

I was driving around the west loop today and i stopped to take a picture of St. Patrick's Catholic Church, one of the few buildings to survive the chicago fire of 1871. i tried to find some old pics of St. Pat's to compare, but couldn't really find any really old ones taken from the same angle. i also didn't look that hard.

so that got me to searching for other buildings that survived the fire. which lead me to Holy Family Catholic Church in the 1000 block of West Roosevelt. i thought that sounded not really in the path of the fire (because who doesn't know exactly where the fire spread. i do. c'mon). turns out that the building didn't SURVIVE the fire, but it's been around since BEFORE the fire. but to find out where the fire spread, i had to find a map. thank god for the internets.

so i got the map. and in trying to find out what year the map was made, i looked into the far corners of the maps and found "Brighton Trotting Park." huh. i wondered what that became? so i went to the maps googles.

the problem with comparing maps that are hundreds of years apart in age is that the street names rarely stay the same through the years. so here are the two maps so you can see how much has changed.

roosevelt used to be called Twelfth St. Ashland used to be called Rueben Street. the south branch of Chicago was filled in the 1920s. and the Brighton Trotting Park? it became McKinley Park in 1902.

and the map was made in 1869.