The Fire Cyclorama, Scene the First

Such dramatic re-creations hardly ended there. The fire provides the climax of the film In Old Chicago (1938), which gave a starring role to the special effects team. This motion picture takes numerous dramatic liberties, from small inaccuracies like showing firemen using hand-pumped equipment to wholesale inventions like a stockyards stampede through the center of town that crushes the mustachioed villain. The 1950s CBS simulated television news program You Are There, which was anchored by Walter Cronkite and "covered" momentous historical events by having actual correspondents interview actors in period costume, traveled back in time to 1871 Chicago. It supplemented its own "reporting" with footage from In Old Chicago. Similarly, as staged battles and disasters became a regular attraction at world's fairs and amusement parks, Chicago's catastrophe was a natural choice. It was featured, for example, at White City, the park that operated from the turn of the century to the Depression at 63rd Street and South Park Avenue. In New York City's Freedomland, which had a short life in the early 1960s, firemen (again operating hand pumps) rushed several times a day to the rescue of a steel-and-asbestos mock-up of Chicago ablaze. All of these capitalized on and extended the vivid public memory of this great urban catastrophe. Whether the conflagration was their main subject, or, as was the case in such fiction of the fire as Martha Lamb's Spicy (1873) and John McGovern's Daniel Trentworthy: A Tale of the Great Fire of Chicago (1889), it improbably intervened to complicate or resolve (sometimes both) an already outlandish plot, the smoke and flame guaranteed audience interest. More intriguing, however, are those works that, like the many sermons on Chicago's terrible ordeal, seized on the fire as text from which one could extract some higher "lesson." And, also like these sermons, the lesson was almost always unashamedly sentimental and relentlessly moralistic.

The Fire Bugs of Chicago

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