Soldier Field

Aside from their sheer size and architectural importance, stadiums matter for financial and political reasons. They can also express civic identity, pride, and meaning. Liam T. A. Ford's thoughtful, seemingly comprehensive history of Chicago's Soldier Field—which is just south of the Field Museum of Natural History and just west of Lake Michigan—examines all of these subjects with perspicacity, rather than with the chauvinism one might expect from a fifth-generation Chicagoan such as Ford, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Richly illustrated (there are over seventy photographs, some of which are stunning), Soldier Field is divided into three sections. The first and shortest examines the stadium's genesis. According to Ford, the stadium was a political outgrowth (led by the Republican mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, among others) of the 1909 Burnham Plan and the City Beautiful movement, as well as the widespread impulse after World War I to honor veterans. “A tribute to the city's war dead,” Ford writes, “it would also bolster Chicago's quest for recognition as one of the world's greatest cities” (p. xii). At the same time, with a change in mayoral administrations, Soldier Field, which was completed in 1926 after two years of construction, became both a symbol of and a means to ensure the strength of the “rising Democratic political machine” (p. 38

Art · Art history · Aside · Democracy · Honor · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Pride · Sociology · Stadium · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Sports and Literature · History · Law

• Multicultural Wilderness

  Open Access•Colin Fisher•Environmental Humanities•2020

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