![]() Kipling described in intimate detail the Union Stock Yards, the nation’s largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city’s vast agricultural hinterland to the nation’s dinner tables. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four fifths of the meat bought by American consumers. Chicago, for instance, became America’s butcher. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. Library of Congress, LC-D4-70163.Ĭhicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. They repeated their statements again and again.” Kipling said American newspapers report “that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.” 1 “I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. “There was no color in the street and no beauty-only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.” He took a cab “and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress.” Kipling visited a “gilded and mirrored” hotel “crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere.” He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. ![]() He described a rushed and crowded city, a “huge wilderness” with “scores of miles of these terrible streets” and their “hundred thousand of these terrible people.” “The show impressed me with a great horror,” he wrote. When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. Industrialization & Technological Innovation The factories even went as far as hiring actors to inhabit their fake rooftop towns, pretending to have neighbourly picnics, tend to their gardens, hang their washing on clothes lines and take strolls down the decoy streets. Hastily assembled using burlap netting, plywood and other materials, their purpose was to hide what lay beneath and divert the enemy by fooling them into thinking their most important wartime factories were little more than quiet residential neighbourhoods. Pictured above: The Douglas Aircraft company in Santa Barbara, camouflaged by a model town designed by landscape architect Edward Huntsmen-Trout. The West Coast became the next presumed target, and in a short period of time, strategic wartime factories became sites for the elaborate construction of entire replica towns, complete with fake houses, roads, cars and even residents. Under this detailed walkable roof of mock suburban landscape, nearly 7,000 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses were being produced for the precision strategic bombing campaign of World War II against German industrial and military targets. Aerial view of the fake neighborhood on top of a Boeing aircraft factory near Seattleįollowing the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japanese submarines were spotted off the San Francisco Bay and near Santa Barbara in 1942. Photographed taking a sunny stroll down a seemingly suburban avenue called Synthetic Street, these ladies are actually on the rooftop of the B17 Bomber factory in Seattle Washington in 1941, camouflaged by nearly 26 acres of suburban American fakery. They were devised by Hollywood set designers, assembled like stage props and “inhabited” by actors, but entertainment was far from the agenda.
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