Introduction: City of dreamers and doers -- Discovery. The priest and the explorer ; Joliet's dream -- "Didn't expect no town." Wild Chicago ; Banishing the past -- Ogden's Chicago. The founder ; A prairie aristocracy ; The grid and the balloon frame -- The great Chicago exchange engine. The big junction ; The mechanical man ; Stacker of wheat and wood, packer of pork -- Empire city of the West. Chicago against nature ; City of extremes -- My lost city. The Great Fire ; Unapproachable in calamity -- Introduction: Let us build ourselves a city -- That astonishing Chicago. "Grander and statelier than ever" ; America's city -- The Chicago machine. Empires of order and blood ; A fortress of oppression ; The Pullman idea ; Steel rails to country kitchens -- The streetcar city. Palaces of desire ; The Loop ; City and suburb ; Sunday in Chicago -- Stories in stone and steel. Something new under the sun ; Burnham and Root ; The major's birdcage ; Factories in the sky -- Sullivan and civic renewal. The Auditorium ; A proud and soaring thing -- The new Chicago. Burnham's White city ; Hutchinson's three-ring circus ; Harper's university ; The social defense of caste ; The new Chicago woman ; Cleansing the city -- The battle for Chicago. Politics "ain't bean bag" ; Why the ward boss rules ; Haymarket ; It's Harrison again -- 1893. The Fair ; The "Gomorrah of the West" ; Stories of the streets and of the town -- After the Fair. If Christ came to Chicago! ; Regeneration

Examines Chicago's nineteenth-century history, looking at its progress from a fur-trading post to a bustling city that burned to the ground in 1871, rising again by 1893 to become one of the greatest cities in America, with the busiest and most modern downtown in the country and over a dozen of the highest buildings ever constructed