Make Me a City

Carr’s enticing debut is an “alternative history” of the first 100 years of Chicago’s history as a city, using real-life historical figures to tell of a century of idealism, optimism, imagination, risk, and corruption. The book begins in 1800 with a chess game determining who would be the founder of Chicago, a homesteading mulatto or a drunken white man, and ends in 1900 with the opening of Chicago’s Sanitary and Ship Canal, an engineering marvel. Through the decades, dreamers, speculators, inventors, politicians, and scoundrels are connected by Carr’s clever use of a dented copper kettle, a silver watch, and an old painting passing through the generations. Carr introduces John Wright, an irrepressible land speculator and hopeless romantic; Eliza Chappell, Chicago’s first schoolteacher; civil engineer Ellis Chesbrough; the city’s first female newspaper reporter, Antje Hunter; nutty inventor Jearum Atkins; Irish politician and crook Oscar Brody; charlatan and petty thief James Cloke; and other fascinating characters. Significant historical events and thorny social issues are here, too, including the creation of the Chicago Anti-Slavery Society, the Great Fire of 1873, the anarchist Haymarket riots in 1886, the World’s Fair in 1893, pollution, political and financial corruption, and even murder. This is a gritty and entertaining fictional history of a great American city. (Mar.)