Surveying Wired Landscapes

Surveying Wired Landscapes: Chicago & The Telephone Directory

Chicago Telephone Directory: March 1, 1899 (Chicago History Museum & Research Center)

Chicago Telephone Directory: February 1, 1901 (Chicago History Museum & Research Center)

Chicago is a great city. […] Chicago is so large that it is practically impossible for one person to comprehend it all. Thousands upon thousands of Hyde Parkers and South Chicagoans ride back and forth along their many miles of streets and talk in glowing terms of the greatness of their city, yet they have no knowledge whatever of those vast regions stretching away to the west and northwest. They do not know that within the city limits to the north are the grandest rose gardens in the world; they do not know that off toward the western horizon are stretched scores of miles of paved streets and as many miles of trolley wires. […] Few people indeed have the time at their disposal to make a personal examination of the geography of Chicago, and still fewer have the opportunity…to familiarize themselves with Chicago’s population, but there is always one recourse for the ignorant citizen, and that is the directory. […] The more one studies it, the more absorbed he becomes. […] But be that as it may, from the wind-swept prairies of the boundless West, from the smoke laden confines of the Calumet mills and marshes, from the perfume laden gardens and green pastures…from the twenty miles of wave-whipped sands along the shore of Lake Michigan comes the reverberating echo, “Chicago is a great city.” -“It’s a Mine of Wonders,” Chicago Daily Tribune , 18 July 1897

December 1912, Bell Telephone News (AT&T Archives and History Center)

Chicago Telephone Directory Advertisement: 1914-1916 (Chicago History Museum & Research Center)

Chicago Daily Tribune , November 20, 1900, p.12

Surveying Wired Landscapes

by emilygoodmann on Feb 14, 2010

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Surveying Wired Landscapes — Presentation Transcript

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