This miniature construction project seemed easy at first, but the tiny details are ballooning out of proportion.
There’s no way I can replicate the 17,500 buildings that burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. My popsicle stick supply isn’t the problem—it’s the restrictive 1.5 by 1.5-metre plywood foundation that’s forcing me to pick and choose between apothecary, blacksmith, and barber shops. Vegetable market or opera house: how does one decide?
Pink Floyd is the perfect soundtrack for resurrecting a ruined city. My LP copy of Atom Heart Mother doesn’t have a single scratch on it.
I’m lucky to be paid for my work, but there is a downside: the glue fumes. The ventilation in this gallery isn’t very good, but I can’t crack open a window because the wind could upset my whole operation. Besides, I don’t want my fans peeking in before I’m finished—they can wait for the vernissage. If I had decided to build Chicago at home, I would’ve had even less privacy because Nowa Hutans are the nosiest bunch I know.
The plywood is now a grid of pencil marks, blueprints for a highly flammable city. I’ve seen Old Chicago from above, upside-down, and clean through its transparent middle. Someone has to build it, to stoke the old embers.
A few days ago, I realized how I fit into the geometry of the universe.
The fire tetrahedron is a pyramid, the union of four equilateral triangles glued together at the vertices. It’s how all fires start. I rarely believe in universal absolutes—in fact, I usually detest them—but I can’t question this one, especially since I’m such an integral part of it.
Triangle 1: Heat. Transferred by conduction, convection, or radiation. Dancing molecules, swirling liquid or gas, or the toasty vacuum of space.
Triangle 2: Fuel. The combustible greats, none of which I need to name. Anyhow, I’m more interested in rogue materials not supposed to burn.
Triangle 3: An oxidizer, like oxygen, chlorine, iodine, or peroxide.
Make sure, unless you’re prepared to accept the consequences, never to smoke when you’re bleaching your hair.
Triangle 4: Chain reaction. Bingo. A catalyst has to bring these three triangles together, or else they’re useless. The catalyst must be insistent—ergo, human—to ensure continuity, to press for a truly destructive flame. Someone has to flick the lighter, light the match, match the fire’s intensity with their own will to keep it going. It’s an act of violence, sure, but also of creation.
I feel so grounded at the bottom of this pyramid.
With this foolproof formula, fire doesn’t need much time to accomplish its magic. The Great Chicago Fire lasted just twenty-seven hours, and managed to cut a swath of charred land across eight square kilometres of urban development and 120 kilometres of road.
I think I’m going to start with the Aragon Ballroom. It’s a rectangular box relatively easy to re-create. Let’s double up the popsicle sticks for thickness, to soundproof the walls. Big bands bray, and the brass section is a nightly riot. With surgical scissors, I can make everything fit.
There’s a well-known legend about how this fire started. Perhaps you’ve heard it: Catherine O’Leary’s milking cow kicked over a lantern in a hay-filled barn. The journalist who originally published this story later recanted, confessing that he made up the livestock angle to give the story some juice. But is it possible that O’Leary’s cow actually had set Chicago ablaze, and that the confession was the attention grabber? What do you think?
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’d like to stab this from a few angles, if you will permit.
The past and present members of Pink Floyd, I’m now certain, believe the cow story. Just look at the cover art for Atom Heart Mother. A Holstein cow is standing in a field—perhaps the band’s vision of farm heaven—looking back inquisitively, as if to say, “Did I do that?”
Sure, sure, no direct link to Chicago. But when you probe a little deeper, it’s clear that Pink Floyd are a bunch of pyros. Originally, before it was renamed, the title track on Atom Heart Mother was “The Amazing Pudding.” Is it mere coincidence that the Great Fire of London in 1666 started in the bakery of Thomas Farynor on Pudding Lane?
And do you think the triangle on the Dark Side of the Moon album cover could be anything other than an homage to the fire tetrahedron? Please.
Chicago now needs my attention. I’ll roll out the rest of my evidence a little later.
Before I put the roof on the Aragon, I’ll need to make sure the bucket seats are lined up properly. And I’ve discovered that the glue warps the wood when it dries, so I’ll need to prefabricate the seats with a C-clamp from now on, and then drop them in by finger crane just before showtime. The audience needs thumbnails of foam, of course, or they won’t be entirely comfortable.
The Aragon marquee, in the 1:50 scale that I’m using to recreate this fire, is the exact size and shape of a single popsicle stick. I’ll be able to paint the letters on a smooth, uninterrupted surface, and that brings me shards of peace. My fingers are infinitely happy. The tingle moves up.
It’s kind of silly. Ever since humans learned the art of fire—yes, it’s an art, not an obsession or a crime—we have been trying frantically to put it out. We’re confirmed as the fourth triangle of an inseparable pyramid, yet some will spend their last kilojoule denying it, refusing to see that the only way to grow is to lose what’s precious. Fire, bless its blue and white heart, does not choose indiscriminately. It wheedles out the weakest elements in the societies we build and forces us to do it better the next time. It’s intelligent.
Nothing is fireproof. Anything will burn, if the fire is hot enough. And as long as it stays that way, we’ll always be improving.
From the Chicago Herald Tribune, the week of the fire: “Cheer up! In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years’ accumulation, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that Chicago shall rise again with vigor.”
It did. The city bounced back, a frightening tangle of steel, glass, and concrete, each building striving not to be the weakest. By the time Chicago hosted the World’s Fair just twenty-two years later, all the wood was gone. Lumber yards, elevated plank sidewalks, tinder bungalows packed with firewood—vanished.
One dude, however, failed to learn the beautiful lesson the fire had taught, calling his hotel the World’s First Fireproof Building.
That really gets my sheep.
The record has finished, and I’m listening to the tinny thump of the inner groove. Now that I’ve finished the Aragon Ballroom, I have a confession to make: it was built in 1926, long after the Great Fire. Still, I couldn’t resist putting it in my maquette.
Here’s why.
The Ballroom was big-band headquarters for many years until a fire in a cocktail lounge next door—much smaller than in 1871, I assure you—forced Benny Goodman and other greats to play elsewhere. The theatre had a few false resuscitations after that, and eventually gained full strength as a rock venue. The apex? Pink Floyd played the Aragon Ballroom in 1970, the year they recorded Atom Heart Mother.
Now do you see what I mean about their pyromaniac tendencies? It sends shivers up my spine.
If you’ll excuse me, it’s getting late, and I have the rest of the city to erect.
Oh yeah, one more thing: if you think “Comfortably Numb” is Pink Floyd’s best song, then you’re a lightweight, but it’s not your fault. Most people don’t understand that you can’t judge Floyd songs on their own, that concept albums don’t exist in pieces.