I sometimes here people discussing the rise and fall of cities use a story about St.Louis and Chicago as a caution against geographic determinism. They note that St. Louis did have the benefit of location when riverboating was a major means of transport but that the leaders of St. Louis dismissed investing in railroads while Chicago did. Hence, St. Louis lost out on a major change in the economy.
Any truth to that? Are there geographic reasons why Chicago became such a railroad focal point?
It is at the tip of Lake Michigan, giving it pretty easy access to the Atlantic.
Chicago is located where it has access to both the Great lakes and the Mississippi river.
There really isn’t anywhere else in North America where you can tranship goods between those two waterways. And it became a rail hub for the same reason, transport your goods by rail to Chicago and it could go out through the St Lawrence or down the Mississippi.
Nonsense. You can just as easily ship from St. Louis to the Great Lakes; Chicago is just a bit closer, but farther from the Mississippi than St. Louis. And little of Chicago’s output is sent down the canal and the Illinois river anyway, compared to its rail and lake output.
St. Louis lost out because not that much is MADE around St. Louis. As someone pointed out in an article in USA Today that ran a couple days ago about the unlikelihood of a major airfreight company using St. Louis as a hub, it’s only the center of ag products. Chicago, on the other hand, is near to or at the center of a quite wide array of manufacturing centers, agricultural production areas, mining areas, etc.
Also (not railroad-specific):
-The need to rebuild after the fire of 1871 attracted a lot of architects, engineers & builders to Chicago (from New York, France & Germany)
-Then the specific geography of the Loop (hemmed in by the River and the Lake) prompted taller buildings; the skyscraper was invented and developed Chicago in the 1880s. Chicago was perceived as an exciting center of innovation.
-The World’s Columbian Expo of 1893 sealed the deal. 1/4 of the country’s population attended.
I’ll nitpick myself before someone else does. Point 1: they came from lots of other places too. Point 3: The attendance equaled 1/4 of the country’s population.
A river runs through St. Louis–not a baby river like the Chicago River, but a big, gnarly river that’s expensive to bridge. That fact of geography constrained the ability of St. Louis to grow as a railroad hub to the extent that Chicago did.
That’s not to say that railroads bypassed St. Louis. Both Chicago and St. Louis, of course, owe their origins to water transport (St. Louis=Mississippi/Missouri confluence; Chicago=easy portage, and then canal, between Great Lakes and Mississippi). When the railroad network began to grow in the mid-1800’s, lines converged on both cities to link up with the existing water network.
But again, St. Louis was constrained. The Eads Bridge wasn’t built until 1874–over the opposition of steamboat lines–and it could only carry a limited amount of traffic across the river. Rather than a single hub, the St. Louis area grew as two hubs, with giant manufacturing and railroad centers on both sides of the Mississippi, but minimal connection between them.
That was well and good while it lasted–as recently as the early 1900’s, St. Louis had two baseball teams, an Olympics, and a rousing World’s Fair (Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis) of its own. But the St. Louis area, limited by its dual-hub nature, never developed the huge and diverse economy that Chicago did. When manufacturing declined, East St. Louis all but dried up and blew away, and St. Louis proper suffered hard times, and sad to say . . . lost the Brownies forever.
If you want to read an outstanding account of Chicago’s rise, i highly recommend William Cronon’s excellent book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Cronon traces the spatial, political, economic, and social factors that made Chicago such a powerhouse during the nineteenth century expansion of America. It’s really a great read.
Geographically speaking, this might not be what you’re looking for, but from the book City Worlds , “between 1833 and 1848 many people optimistically hoped that Chicago would become a great city. They imagined that, as soon as the canal between Chicago and St. Louis was built, trade routes to the southern states would be opened up. However, the construction of the canal was continually delayed – and Chicago’s potential would not be realized. Instead, St. Louis dominated the region because of its superior waterway routes. It was, therefore, St. Louis that could have become the East-West gateway city” . . . “but a group of politically and economically powerful people concluded that, without the canal, the future of Chicago rested on a new technology: the railway. No-one, however, had enough money to build it; nor did they have the remotest idea what it took to run a railway. Nevertheless, the Chicago businessmen set up a railway company, but its finances came mainly from very small investments by local farmers, who were promised in return a train station that would link them to Chicago. Only because thousands of farmers believed in the sales-pitch of the railway company, and then decided to make their small, risky investments, did the railway ever get built. Of course, once it was built, it made sense for new railway lines to end up where the existing ones already terminated, that is, in Chicago. Since St Louis simply did not have the connections, it could not achieve the same status.”
Hope I’m not violating some sdmb rule here w/ the quote.