When the monumental fire of October 1871 struck Chicago, the city, which had been a tiny frontier outpost only four decades earlier, was home to about 330,000 people. The fire destroyed the entire downtown business district and North Side.
Although the devastated part of Chicago was much smaller than the area hit by the Eaton fire in Los Angeles this month, it was far more densely settled. Close to 18,000 buildings went up in smoke, including the City Hall and virtually all important wholesale and retail stores; banks; law firm, newspaper and business offices; hotels; cultural institution buildings; and all the records, inventory, cash, furnishings and other items of value within them. Some 90,000 Chicagoans lost their homes; the equivalent figure for Los Angeles in 2025 would be over a million.
“You can scarcely imagine the desolation,” a traumatized Chicagoan wrote to a friend a few days after the flames died. “If a man wants his mind impressed with what the end of the world will be, let him come here.”
Yet it wasn’t the end of the world, or even of Chicago. The scale and speed of the rebuilding was, if anything, more impressive than the destruction. Within two years, a new and greatly enlarged downtown had emerged. By 1880 the population reached half a million. It was twice that a decade later, at which time Chicago was second in size only to New York among U.S. cities.
Chicago was rebuilt so quickly for the same reasons it burst into a major metropolis in the first place: By the 1830s, it became clear that the expanding nation needed a mercantile, transportation and communications center in just the spot where the city was located, at the southwestern edge of the Great Lakes, between the cities, markets and factories of the East and the natural resources of the West.
The fire did nothing to damage Chicago’s most important asset, its location, not to mention the energy and determination of its people. It remained a splendid place for investors to commit their money and individuals to root their lives.
The paradoxical lesson boosters took from the destruction was that Chicago was indestructible. One of the four stars in the city flag stands for the fire — or more precisely, the triumphant recovery from it.
Reality was not that simple. In its hurry to rebuild, Chicago was insufficiently concerned that flames could strike again. In July of 1874, another fire leveled almost 50 acres of cityscape just south of downtown and threatened to undo all the progress.
Why did Chicago keep courting catastrophe? Partly because of this country’s resistance to regulation — specifically, the belief that real estate owners should be free to do what they like with their property — and paying higher taxes for improved fire protection. Chicago’s fire commissioners predicted the 1871 disaster, but the mayor and aldermen knew that raising taxes to bolster a department that was underequipped and understaffed would be unpopular, and did not press the issue.
It was only because insurance companies threatened to withhold coverage after the second fire that Chicago finally began to act. The insurers demanded that new buildings be constructed of fireproof materials such as brick or stone (1871 Chicago was built largely out of wood); that warehouses and stores be equipped with iron shutters; and that the city reorganize the fire department, lay more and bigger water mains and pipes, install additional hydrants and remove all lumber yards from built-up areas.
Today, Los Angeles is in many respects in far better shape than post-1871 Chicago. The death toll from the fires in Los Angeles County this month, at least 28, is far less than Chicago’s miraculously low estimate of about 300. Its business centers and abundant cultural resources are largely unharmed. Vital paper records (including property records) of the kind Chicago’s fire incinerated are safe and in any case digitally stored. Estimates of the staggering total cost of recovery run into the hundreds of billions of dollars; the Biden administration pledged in its final days to cover the expenses of the initial response for six months. It’s uncertain whether the Trump administration will reaffirm the pledge or send additional assistance, but in 1871, when there was no such thing as government disaster aid, President Ulysses S. Grant could send only his sympathies.
And while it may be hard in this moment of terrible loss to remember, Los Angeles remains specially blessed by its glorious setting as a place to work and live, with all the assets that enabled it to surpass Chicago as the country’s second-largest city 40 years ago.
Compared with Chicago in 1871, Los Angeles does have one obvious disadvantage. Its housing shortage, already a crisis before the fires, has now reached an emergency level. Replacing the lost housing — let alone building more — will be a greater challenge than it was in stricken Chicago, starting with the initial, titanic task of clearing the debris. Chicago hauled much of the rubble that had been its downtown to Lake Michigan, forming the basis of modern-day Grant and Millennium Parks. Los Angeles has no equivalent option, and we are more concerned today with ensuring that post-fire cleanup does not cause new environmental damage.
After clearing the debris, Chicago used a portion of its available funds to give skilled workers who had lost their homes materials to construct about 8,000 small wooden shelters for their families. Other funds went to erecting barracks in different sections of the city for the families of some 1,000 unskilled laborers. Taken together, the shelters and the barracks housed more than 30,000 Chicagoans. These were very provisional solutions that would not satisfy today’s building codes — like much worker housing in the city, these structures had no running water — but they got a lot of people through the fierce Chicago winter.
Rightly, Gov. Gavin Newsom has temporarily suspended California’s environmental review process to speed up the rebuilding of homes. He should resist calls to weaken safety requirements, since climate change and the sprawl of housing into highly flammable areas are heightening the danger of fire. In the rush to rebuild, California cannot afford to ignore another crisis that’s compounding the latest disaster: skyrocketing insurance rates and the increasing denial of coverage at any price. The solutions that have been devised to date, such as California’s FAIR plan, are already pressed to the limit.
On this point, it is encouraging to remember that pressure from the insurance market was precisely what drove Chicago’s renewal. This disaster must spur Los Angeles to find better ways to rebuild entire neighborhoods, not just individual structures, so that the city is less vulnerable in the long term.
In the darkness of their devastation, urban fires illuminate the problems of policy and planning that fuel them. If Los Angeles confronts those problems successfully, as Chicago did 150 years ago, it can come back a safer and stronger city than before.
The post What Los Angeles Can Learn From Another Great American City That Burned appeared first on New York Times.
