Dennis McClendon is a Chicago historian and geographer, who makes his living by drawing maps. His design firm, Chicago CartoGraphics, creates a wide variety of maps for the tourism industry and real estate firms, for books such as the AIA Guide to Chicago Architecture and the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the region’s CTA and Pace transit maps, as well as most Chicago-area bike maps. He is well known as an expert on the city’s built environment and transportation, quoted regularly on WTTW’s “Ask Geoffrey” and WBEZ’s Curious City. He’s spoken to a wide variety of audiences, including professional conferences, university classes and colloquiums, Newberry Library programs, architectural lecture series, regional library audiences, and senior centers. A certified Chicago Tour-Guide Professional, he often leads bus, boat, and walking tours of the city's architecture and built environment.
Contact me by email to arrange a speaking engagement or tour. These profusely illustrated lectures can be presented on short notice:
Cartographic Tales of Chicago History
Historic maps of Chicago tell all kinds of intriguing stories about the city's origins and development: vanished creeks and woods, big projects never accomplished, forgotten ethnic groups and neighborhoods, mysterious subdivisions, abandoned industrial areas, vice districts and world's fairs, ghosts of railroad stations and streetcar lines and freight tunnels, reminders of a constantly changing city. Learn about the interesting stories seen in various corners of three dozen maps from Chicago's past.
Legacy of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 vision for the city is still revered but the plan's actual results are often misunderstood or forgotten. This bus tour of the central city will look at the Plan's physical legacies: Navy Pier, North Michigan Avenue, Northerly Island, a straightened river, Ogden Avenue, Congress Parkway, Union Station, Wacker Drive. We'll look at projects that greatly benefited the city, at proposals that later generations reconsidered, and at heroic accomplishments that in the end meant little.
Chicago’s Two World’s Fairs
The World’s Columbian Exposition was the marvel of the age, and marked Chicago’s emergence as a world-class city. More than 20 million visitors were awed by the beautiful buildings, the sublime landscapes, the wonders of electric lighting, the breadth of the exhibits—and the entertainments of the Midway, including belly dancers and the world’s first ferris wheel, 25 stories tall. Forty years later, Chicago did it again, building the Century of Progress along the lakefront, providing a bright spot—and even turning a profit—during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Chicago’s Great Railroad Stations
Chicago once had six great intercity train stations, two in the West Loop and four in the South Loop. Thousands of travelers remember the excitement of starting a vacation or coming to the big city through spaces like Union Station’s Great Hall or the enormous waiting room of North Western Station. We’ll look at the architecture of the buildings, the trains that arrived there, and the services and restaurants that served travelers.
History of Chicago Bridges
Chicago’s bridges are a unique reminder of the city’s geographic situation: a narrow river with low banks was the young city’s busy harbor but it also cut off downtown access on two sides. Engineers developed ingenious new solutions to the need for river crossings, while architects strove to make them more beautiful. The result is a collection of moveable bridges that are a striking part of Chicago’s character.
History of Chicago’s South Loop
The Near South Side has seen more transformation than perhaps any other Chicago neighborhood: from residential to industrial and then back again. The story is made even more intriguing by the various threads of history woven together in the area—the train stations and railyards, the lusty vice districts, the great mansions and grand hotels.
Busting Myths of Chicago History
Lots of what we hear about our city’s history has been heavily embroidered—or just made up from whole cloth. Let’s look at some of the most common myths about Chicago, and the more complex—and often more interesting—truth.
Things Mapmakers Know about Chicago
Chicagoans sometimes imagine they live on a sheet of graph paper, so perfect is the city’s street grid and addressing system. But when you’re close enough to see the details, some fascinating flaws are revealed: the city’s own “local north,” the reasons for mysterious jogs in arterial streets, strange oddities of addressing or street naming.
History of Chicago Transit
The city has been served by a variety of vehicles for local transit: horsecars, cable cars, electric trolleys, trolleybuses, double-deck and articulated buses. Meanwhile the L rumbled overhead or through the subways, and hundreds of suburban commuter trains pulled into downtown terminals each day. We’ll look at how new modes of transit both served and spurred Chicago’s growth, and gave the city its distinctive character.
Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871
The Fire was a pivotal event for the city—a tragedy, to be sure—but one the city quickly rebuilt from with a new sense of strength and inevitablity. It destroyed a quarter of the city and left a third of its people homeless. But the railroads, the lumberyards, the harbors, the stock yards, and much of the industry were all still in place, an economic engine for the continent. The “great conflagration” captured the imagination, and the charity, of the world, and led, in many overlooked ways, to the Chicago we know today.
Chicago’s Motor Row
On Michigan Avenue in the South Loop, a century ago, the city’s most handsome row of mansions, hotels, clubs was replaced within a decade by one of the great centers of the nation’s automobile trade. Architects of these landmark buildings for the horseless carriage met the challenge of inventing a new model of retailing on a scale never before seen.
The Handcrafted Digital Map
The revolution in digital mapmaking has given us a profusion of data that can sometimes overwhelm the principles of good map design. We’ll talk about the challenges of mapping with enormous datasets, and how a composite approach is sometimes the best way to produce good-looking and meaningful maps.
Transit Map Design
A look at how various designers—including me—have approached the special design challenges of maps showing complex public transportation networks.
Beyond Google Maps
Google Maps is not the only way to navigate the modern world—even on your phone. We’ll look at a variety of other online resources—some worldwide reference maps, some on specialized themes—to make us informed travelers and hometown explorers. |
