January 11, 2007

Library opens 'History of Transportation' exhibit

A new exhibit now at University Library illustrates how Chicago’s choices about developing and using its waterways, roadways, railways and other transportation resources have influenced the city’s colorful history and reflected its unusual character.

Free and open to the public, “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town: The History of Transportation in the City” runs through Feb. 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and Saturdays 8:30 to noon on the first floor of University Library.

Materials in the exhibit, for example, shed light on the ways in which, in 1900, the City of Big Shoulders accomplished one of engineering’s greatest feats — reversing the natural flow of the Chicago River so that disease-causing sewage and pollution went into canals instead of Lake Michigan. 

“Chicago is not a great city that became a great transportation center. It is a great transportation center that became a great city,” says Kay Geary, public services librarian at the Transportation Library and curator of the exhibit of books, photographs, illustrations, maps and posters. The library holds one of the most extensive transportation collections in the world. 

The exhibit also spotlights ways that city planners have been ahead of their time. Materials on the Chicago phenomenon of “snow parking” — that time-honored practice of asserting dibs on a parking space during a blizzard by shoveling it out and marking it with chairs — include criticism by writer and activist Studs Terkel, defense of the practice by Mayor Richard M. Daley and law journal commentary on its legal and philosophical implications.

> For further information about the exhibit or the University’s Transportation Library, call (847) 491-4321