Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago

by Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Overview

How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending.

Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts.

The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses.

By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501768200
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2022
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Joseph D. Kearney is Dean and Professor of Law at Marquette University. Thomas W. Merrill is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia University. Before entering academe, both authors clerked at the US Supreme Court and lived for many years in Chicago, where they practiced law and became captivated by the history of the city's lakefront.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Lake Front Steal
2. The Lake Front Case
3. The Watchdog of the Lakefront
4. The Struggle for Streeterville
5. Reversing the Chicago River
6. North Lake Shore Drive
7. South Lake Shore Drive and Bridging the River
8. The Transformation of the Public Trust Doctrine
9. The Lakefront Today
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Nicole Stelle Garnett

A fascinating, beautifully crafted historical account of one of America's greatest waterfront cities and the legal doctrines that shaped its development by preserving its greatest natural asset. A must-read for all interested in urban history, property law, and the preservation of public spaces.

Carol M. Rose

In this remarkable book, Kearney and Merrill describe how Chicago came to have one of the world's most glorious urban waterfronts. They masterfully weave together this surprisingly contingent story, relating two centuries of on-the-ground events, influential personalities, and fluctuating legal developments that together created the city's justly celebrated lakefront.

Carl Smith

Thanks to its authors' exhaustive research, clear prose, colorful cast of characters, exceptionally helpful maps, and enviable ability to illuminate for all complex concepts of private and public property, Lakefront is a wonderful read for not only those interested in Chicago but anyone who wishes to understand how urban built environments come into being and continuously evolve.

Richard J. Lazarus

A magnificent and exquisitely told story, replete with scoundrels and corrupt politicians, Lakefront solves the longstanding puzzle of the origins of the Supreme Court's famous nineteenth-century ruling in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois and reveals its no less extraordinary epilogue, including the ruling's unlikely resurrection by 1970's activists to become powerful legal precedent for environmental protection.

Libby Hill

The authors build their fascinating story case by case easily accessible to the lay reader. We learn how, legally or not, agencies, urban planners, individual personalities, the courts, and one railroad shaped today's uniquely beautiful Chicago lakefront.

Hendrik Hartog

The making of Chicago's extraordinary landscape along Lake Michigan required law, lots and lots of law. That is the core insight that shapes Kearney and Merrill's Lakefront. This is a transformative study, rooted in imaginative research into arcane case files and innumerable government records, as well as illuminating mapmaking. It will be essential reading for urban historians, for students of the planning process, as well as for legal historians and for property lawyers. For those most interested in property law, Kearney and Merrill challenge sentimental understandings of the power of public trust doctrine and argue for the significance of possession and vested rights in shaping development. For city planners and others, they make a strong case, though one that will inevitably provoke controversy, that contingency and unintended consequences were more important than aesthetic vision in producing the wonder and the beauty that we admire as Chicago's lakefront.

Stuart Banner

Lakefront provides a detailed history of the making of the Chicago lakefront. Each chapter recounts an episode of local legal history, with the authors briefly and skillfully explaining legal concepts where necessary. This is a thoroughly researched, well organized, and extremely well written book.

Ann Durkin Keating

Lakefront is an excellent book that adds much to our understanding of development along Lake Michigan within the City of Chicago.

Robert C. Ellickson

Grant Park and the Chicago lakefront are among the nation's great public spaces. This stimulating book uncovers the troubled historical, legal, and social roots of these parklands. Consistently painstaking, judicious, and readable, Kearney and Merrill are role models for work in urban history.

Carol M. Rose

In this remarkable book, Kearney and Merrill describe how Chicago came to have one of the world's most glorious urban waterfronts. They masterfully weave together this surprisingly contingent story, relating two centuries of on-the-ground events, influential personalities, and fluctuating legal developments that together created the city's justly celebrated lakefront.

Editorial Reviews

Kearney and Merrill cogently present all of the complexities, including key doctrinal debates about whether the state owned submerged lands over tidal waters or navigable-in-fact waters. The text is lively, with the authors recounting behind-the-scenes activities in the legislature and incorporating newspaper accounts.

Natural Resources & Environment

This highly readable text offers a fascinating story of what happened in courts of law, lawyers' offices, legislative and other official bodies, and offices of major corporations—as well as through the actions of public-spirited citizens—to produce and preserve this wonderful amenity. Lucid prose nearly void of legalese, adequate illustrations, and abundant footnotes ensure a general popularity for this excellent book.

Choice