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This project is dedicated to the Central Manufacturing District (CMD), an industrial hub in the McKinley Park and Bridgeport neighborhoods of Chicago, directly north of the Union Stockyards. Founded by Chicago Junction Railway trustees who wanted to expand the Railway’s clientele beyond meatpacking giants, they transformed a cabbage patch into the first planned industrial park with paved streets, centralized electricity, plumbing, steam heating, and fire protection between 1902 and 1918. Here, they hoped companies would set up shop and utilize the Chicago Junction Railway for import and export of goods.

The CMD was unlike any other industrial center at the time. It was designed for both workers and company executives, with attention to aesthetic attractiveness and state of the art utilities, infrastructure, and even services. Its revolutionary concept and effective execution led to great success. The CMD maintained five tracts across Chicago’s south side by the 1930s and boasted a directory of 300 companies at its peak, including big names, like Wrigley, Westinghouse, and Walgreens. It was America’s first planned industrial park—a model that became commonplace post-World War II. In 1923, the Central Manufacturing District Magazine, the official publication of the CMD, declared, “In the Central Manufacturing District, history is in the making.”

Why it in fact failed to make history is a mystery. Even today, the original tracts of the CMD, the Original East District (purchased in 1902, began development in 1907) and the Pershing Road Development (mostly developed between 1916 and 1918) leave behind a distinct urban landscape: The iconic clocktower at Pershing and Damen, the warehouses along Pershing Road comprise an imposing wall of brick and terracotta that stretches for four city blocks, the row of architecturally cohesive yet individually unique factory buildings along Iron Street. These are just some of the remains of the booming industrial hub. All considered, it is perplexing that the CMD’s past is largely undocumented by historians.

The CMD serves as an example of a privately planned early 20th century industrial community done right. With its privately maintained streets, its own restaurants, barber shop, surgeon, and bank, it would be temping but inaccurate to compare the CMD to a company town. Company towns took control over the workforce’s private lives. No one lived in the CMD proper, although many employees of companies in the CMD lived in the blocks directly west of Ashland and north of Pershing. The CMD only cared about the nearby workforce in so far as abundant labor was a selling point to company executives that the CMD hoped to attract. In fact, everything the CMD had to offer had the intent of enticing prospective executives and maintaining those who had already purchased or rented property in the District. The quality of life improvements the CMD offered to incentivize executives to move in resulted in a work environment far superior to the dark, unsanitary factories where laborers notoriously toiled during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The CMD’s presence improved the McKinley Park/Bridgeport neighborhoods immensely, attracting thousands of new jobs, beautifying the area with landscaping and attractive architecture, and modernizing the area’s infrastructure. Additionally, the CMD formed an activist group called the Pershing Road Commission that fought for the eradication of Bubbly Creek, an open sewer infamous for spreading disease and occasionally catching fire that burned on methane created by rotting animal corpses. After several years of lobbying, Bubbly Creek was drained in 1920 and Pershing Road was extended atop it. The Pershing Road Commission then pushed for the road to be widened, so it could become a major artery on Chicago’s southside, which had poor road infrastructure compared to the northside.

Because of the CMD’s pioneering concept, its architectural beauty, and positive impact on Chicago, its history deserves to be preserved. This website is meant to document change over time in the CMD from geographical and modular perspectives (modular in the sense that I am telling stories about specific locations in the CMD rather than about the development or company as a whole). I do plan to write a comprehensive narrative encapsulating the CMD as a whole and add it as a new part of the website, but I am still in the process of sifting through thousands of pages of source material. In a sense, I am using this webapp to share my experience of looking through the old magazines, photos, advertisements, and maps from throughout the CMD’s history as I put the pieces together. As such, this project is a work in progress. (In addition to the research, the technical aspects of this site will also be updated over time.) Please enjoy your virtual exploration of Chicago’s Central Manufacturing District (1914-today), and be sure to check back periodically.