Streetwise Planner Made Order From City Chaos

February 03, 1985|By Patrick Reardon.

In Chicago at the turn of the century, finding Washington Street was easy --too easy.

Finding the right Washington Street was next to impossible.

Because of rapid-fire annexations carried out pell-mell in the late 1800s, the city`s street system was no system at all but a crazy quilt of names and numbers that confused residents and mystified visitors.

``It is remarkable,`` a contemporary observer wrote, ``that the inhabitants find each other as well as they do.``

There were 13 streets called Washington, 13 called Center and 14 called Park. There were 9 Forest streets, 9 Sheridan streets and 10 Oak streets. Seven streets were called 40th, and 8 were called 42d.

In fact, the duplication of names was so bad that there were even five streets named for Schuyler Colfax, a former U.S. vice president, obscure even then, who was not renominated by his party because a congressional investigation had implicated him in corrupt practices.

To make the confusion even more chaotic, many Chicago streets were called by different names in different sections of the city.

The street one block west of Halsted Street, for example, was known variously and simultaneously as Green Street, Lime Street, Dayton Street, Florence Avenue, Craft Street, Reta Avenue and Newberry Avenue.

Then, into the chaos stepped Edward Paul Brennan, private citizen.

It was 1901, and Brennan, who had just turned 35, was bill collector for Lyon & Healy Co. in the Loop.

He held no city job nor any public office. He had no special training nor any financial incentive. But he had a vision of a Chicago where logic determined house addresses and where clarity decided the names of city streets.

So when he went on vacation that year to Paw Paw, Mich., he took with him an armload of Chicago maps.

And when he returned, like a prophet from the desert, he had a plan.

He outlined the plan in a letter and asked his cousin, Ald. Charles Byrne, to present the letter to the city council, and thus began a four-decade crusade that would change the face of Chicago.

Brennan is the reason that State and Madison Streets are the base lines for the city`s numbering system. He is the reason that system is so rational. And he is the reason it is easy to find almost any address in Chicago--135 N. Leamington Ave. or 1129 W. Wellington Ave. or 9669 S. Brennan Ave.

Brennan Avenue was christened in his honor in 1947, five years after his death. Part of the Merrionette Manor subdivision, Brennan is a two-block street of duplexes that is 2300 East, between 96th and 98th Streets.

Marie Jackson has lived on Brennan Avenue for nine years and admitted that she didn`t know who Brennan was.

``I think he`s some guy in politics--was--I feel he`s dead,`` she said.

``He might have been Polish.``

Little-recognized in his own time, Brennan is long-forgotten today. Yet millions of Chicagoans who never have heard of him continue to benefit from his work, and city officials who know nothing of him continue to protect his legacy.

Just last month, to protect the ``outstanding . . . clarity`` of the city`s street name and numbering system, the city council prohibited the increasingly popular practice of changing established street names to honor local heroes or groups.

Ironically, in his 41-year crusade, Brennan coaxed, cajoled and convinced the council to change the names of more than 1,000 streets before the present sensible system of street names, the one being protected, was achieved.

It was lucky for Brennan, and for Chicago, that he lived in a more naive age, before the enshrinement of experts.

In his lifetime, Brennan clipped thousands of newspaper articles about street names and glued them into seven scrapbooks that his family later donated to the Chicago Historical Society.

Accompanying one article is a faded photograph of Brennan. It shows a bald man of 62, with a thick but closely clipped mustache, wearing wire-rim glasses, a high tight collar and, of course, a tie.

It is a 19th Century face, and it was with a sort of 19th Century good-citizen doggedness that Brennan accomplished all that he did.

One city official estimated that in 35 years, Brennan attended 600 City Hall meetings to lobby for his ideas. A 1937 newspaper editorial speculated that a city council resolution honoring Brennan came less from gratitude than from ``a sense of relief at the removal of Mr. Brennan`s tireless pressure``

now that his work was all but completed.

But that work should not have been necessary. It should have been more than easy to find one`s way around Chicago because, even before the city was incorporated in 1837, its streets were laid out on a grid pattern.

Yet the physical clarity of that grid pattern was hopelessly muddied in 1889, when in a move to gain enough land to hold an 1892 World`s Fair to honor Christopher Columbus` discovery of America, the city annexed the Towns of Jefferson and Lake, the Village of Hyde Park and the City of Lake View as well as four other areas.