What is the best way to wank Chicago?

I want to get around to writing a timeline at some point, and I thought a good way to start would be by writing a short timeline (probably 10-20 pages on Word) about Chicago. And as it's my hometown (well, almost), I want to wank it. Unfortunately, I'm a little short for ideas as to how.

So here's my question.... how do you keep Chicago as the US' second biggest city by 2011, with a population of over 15 million people in the metropolitan area, with a POD after 1850?

I thought about keeping the rail network strong and changing up Eisenhowers interstate highway system, but I don't think that would have a big enough effect. So how would you go about wanking Chicago?

I really appreciate having a hivemind that I can learn things from and get ideas from. This site is a great place to learn.
 
A good initial place to start is to butterfly away the post world war I immigration restrictions. This will give another few decades worth of rapid growth to the northern industrial city, as fresh immigration takes the place of early suburban flight.

Secondly, it would be nice to weaken the process of redlining. Through both federal and private lending policy, urban areas, particularly those inhabited by blacks were given restricted access to, or outright denied loans. These policies favored the creation of new housing in suburban areas, while discouraging both new construction and the maintence of existing housing stocks in urban areas.

Thirdly, I would discredit the theories of modernist planners such as Le Corbusier in the United States. Le Corbusier was enormously influential in the US, with disastrous results. His theories advocated cities made up of vast highways, enormous highrises, and useless green-spaces. When implemented in the US, said urban highways help speed the transfer of people and jobs to the suburbs, they served as barriers splitting up existing communities, and they decentralized the central business district whose tax base the traditional industrial city's tax base depended upon. As for his highrises, one only needs to look at tenements such as Cabrini green to see their failure.

Finally, it would be nice to have Chicago annex several hundred sq miles worth of additional land to preempt the rise of suburbs which would otherwise cage the city in geographically.
 

bguy

Donor
Does the US have to be it's OTL size? If not then how about having Henry Clay elected President in 1844? Presumably that means no Mexican-American War, so Chicago doesn't end up having to compete with Los Angeles, and if President Clay directs a lot of internal improvements to the mid-west that could supercharge Chicago's development. (Especially if someone like Stephen Douglas is eventually elected after Clay and pours even more resources into his home state.)

Otherwise, it is pretty easy to knee cap Los Angeles, so Chicago is the 2nd largest city (just have L.A. lose the California Water Wars), but I have no idea how you get the greater Chicago area to have 15 million people.
 
Car manufacturing in Chicago instead of Detroit: let young Ford emigrate in Chicago in some way...

Keep Nash motors alive, prosperous, and in Kenosha. Ideally you will create a rival automaker based in southern WI/northern IL. Said company and its suppliers would be dependent upon Chicago for capital. Eventually growth will force it, much like GM, to move from its home city to a larger manufacturing and commercial center of which Chicago would be the most logical choice.
 
Chicago could only remain #2 if Detroit, Milwaukee and even Cleveland themselves retain vital economies that can continue to attract financial, physical and human capital. New York is not the only prosperous city on the East Coast. Ditto for LA on the West Coast. For Chicago to be the metropole of the Midwest requires a strong periphery.
 
Thanks guys, these are really great ideas. I think before the Mexican-American war would be a bit too early for a POD, especially since I want to use minimal butterflies. I want to have a world that looks a lot like our own, except with Chicago more influential and powerful. I'll start doing research, and I'll try and get my first timeline started by mid-summer.
 
Chicago could only remain #2 if Detroit, Milwaukee and even Cleveland themselves retain vital economies that can continue to attract financial, physical and human capital. New York is not the only prosperous city on the East Coast. Ditto for LA on the West Coast. For Chicago to be the metropole of the Midwest requires a strong periphery.

The problem is, the great lakes industrial region was left behind by the economic rise of the sunbelt. The vast integrated manufacturing complexes and rail based transportation networks were the products of early 20th century capital and technology.

Newer, more advanced plants could be built cheaper with more favorable tax rates and less regulation in both the South and the West. This transition was added by the billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and modern industry built by both the New Deal, and war industries. It was further aided by indirect subsidies from the interstate highway system which particularly fucked over older metropolis's without mass transit.

Chicago survived largely because it was a financial center in addition to being an industrial one. It still has a vast economic region, but half of it hasn't yet recovered from the mid century decline in manufacturing.

Also Milwaukee isn't as bad off as popular vision portrays it, the city just has a really really bad sense of self esteem and its suburbs hate it with a passion.
 
Thanks guys, these are really great ideas. I think before the Mexican-American war would be a bit too early for a POD, especially since I want to use minimal butterflies. I want to have a world that looks a lot like our own, except with Chicago more influential and powerful. I'll start doing research, and I'll try and get my first timeline started by mid-summer.

You might also like a threadhere. https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=172346&highlight=AHC+Chicago One of the ideas I had was on Thomas Edisongoing to Chicago or thereabouts instead of New York/New Jersey, too. That, in turn, could have butterflies that lead to Brooklyn not joining New York, but unlike the above thread, you don't *have* to have New York second. Still, it would help.

I think if you combine Edison with the above idea on an automaker near there, you could get it to be pretty big. Avoid the Black Sox scandal in baseball (maybe something more blows up with the losing Giants in 1917 becasue Hal Chase is on the team)and you might have the White Sox with a dynasty; anything in sports will probably help in the '20s.

*Keeping* it huge will be a problem, but if it's a big radio or TV market, then it might get some help there.
 
I think if you combine Edison with the above idea on an automaker near there, you could get it to be pretty big. Avoid the Black Sox scandal in baseball (maybe something more blows up with the losing Giants in 1917 becasue Hal Chase is on the team)and you might have the White Sox with a dynasty; anything in sports will probably help in the '20s.

I think I'll have a few PODs, if I'm going to make this work. Edison, an automaker, and one more. The one more can be; have Eisenhower, as a young man/boy, become a great lover of trains. Thus, when he goes to start developing the interstate highway system, he also develops the interstate railway system. Chicago being the hub that it is, that'll help it stay even bigger through the '80s or so. Then, as the industrial decline begins to hit, I can have Chicago avoid it as OTL, except do even better.
 
Cheat and cripple Los Angeles. Say an earthquake destroys the aqueducts they depend on.

You don't even have to go that far. Prevent the Owen's Valley aqueduct from being built, and have Chandler, Huntington, and Sherman's land acquisition/annexation venture end as a failure (ie. what inspired Chinatown) Los Angeles loses over 300,000 acres worth of land. Los Angeles therefore loses its ability to sprawl out towards infinity.

Los Angeles won't be crippled. It will still have hollywood, and it will still be one of America's principal oil cities. However its ability to support heavy industrialization in the early 20th century is greatly diminished, which in turn means that it is unlikely to be THE principal center for war industries, and will therefore not be the center for the modern military industrial complex. The end result will probably be a large city somewhere between San Diego and Houston in population.
 
I came up with this idea -

If you could have an actual movement to shift the capital westward at some point, combined with the Chicago Fire (it was going to happen at some point), an innovative person in the Federal Government could say that the federal government would rebuild the destroyed part of the city as the Western District of Columbia.
 
I came up with this idea -

If you could have an actual movement to shift the capital westward at some point, combined with the Chicago Fire (it was going to happen at some point), an innovative person in the Federal Government could say that the federal government would rebuild the destroyed part of the city as the Western District of Columbia.

Wasn't there a movement to do that OTL? How strong was it? The question is, when? In 1872, St. Louis was far more important than Chicago, and by 1900 or so, it's probably too late to move the US Capitol, from tradition if nothing else.
 
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