Theses and Dissertations

Advisor

Giesen, James

Committee Member

Hersey, Mark

Committee Member

Ridner, Judith

Committee Member

Thompson, Joseph

Date of Degree

5-15-2026

Original embargo terms

Immediate Worldwide Access

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

History

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of History

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the decentralized and competitive urban government of Chicago regulated not only the material conditions but also the aesthetic beauty of three separate park systems formed in 1869 as a response to Chicagoans’ broad push for improved recreational landscapes in the city. The systems, political entities each governed by its own commission, experienced varying levels of independence from the city of Chicago. As commissioners worked towards the creation of urban parks modeled after the idealized beauty made popular by New York’s Central Park, they encountered the bureaucratic and environmental realities of Chicago, two forces that often worked together to slow or even halt progress. The commissioners’ focus on efficiently creating and managing the desired park systems reveals a type of bureaucratic efficiency more often attributed to the Progressive Era at the turn of the twentieth-century. I argue that this earlier form of progressive efficiency is showcased in the bureaucratic realities of Chicagoans’ efforts to establish major pleasure ground style parks between 1860 and 1890, before the Progressive Era truly took form. The attention of Chicagoans placed efficiency under an intense amount of strain and scrutiny as two concepts – bureaucracy and beauty – worked within a system not designed to accommodate both. Bureaucracy, the effort to efficiently order municipal actions under the gaze of government expertise, and beauty, typically separate from such orderly and dry minutiae, simultaneously opposed and supported the other as various commissions attempted to put into place an effective system of management for the green spaces of the growing city. The resulting tension defined the core functions of each commission that undertook this task and determined how efficiently, if at all, they operated. Chicagoans’ longstanding desire for a “City in a Garden” and their long-term efforts towards this goal produced one of the most cohesive and complete park systems in nineteenth century America. Though this narrative examines the top-down role of bureaucracy and the impact of efficiency and beauty, it does not invalidate the role of residents in their never-ending work to gain access to ornamental landscapes. The emergent push for municipal efficiency of the 1850s established the groundwork for the creation of Chicago’s major urban park systems and carried the commissions forward towards the Progressive Era.

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