The Civic Center: Heart of Chicago

Central to the 1909 Plan, and perhaps the part that Burnham personally thought was most important was the construction of a massive civic center. The Plan describes the civic center as the "keystone of the arch" at the "heart of the city." Burnham believed that it would act very much like a true heart does in the human body, as the organ which pumps life out to the rest of the city. Several proposed diagonal streets converged on the plaza upon which this civic center would sit and that plaza would be surrounded with other buildings of civic importance. The proposed civic center sat in the center of Congress Street and Halstead Street, four blocks west of the south branch of the Chicago River. 

 

While depictions of the civic center are slightly different in each image provided in the plan, each depiction shows a bilaterally symmetrical  building with a massive dome. One version shows the dome as tall as forty-four stories. It was meant to be seen from all around the city as the center of civic and commercial life, where great minds and hearts would come together for the betterment of the whole city.

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The construction of the civic center was never attempted. The construction of other government buildings was already underway as Burnham and Bennett were writing their plan, and by the time new civic buildings were needed, the city's center of population had shifted rendering the 1909 Plan's location unfavorable. In a way, the major arteries of Chicago do converge here today, but not in the grand and inspiring way that Burnham and Bennett had proposed. Instead, the site is the location of the I90 - I290 interchange.