In Chicago, as in many American cities, the sidewalk is not merely infrastructure but a boundary. Sidewalks mark the aesthetic line between nature and civilization. This blog invites readers to see sidewalks as influential in shaping how cities regulate both the environment and human behavior. They are the city’s environmental hinge, mediating between natural forces and social ideals of a civilized order. Through Chicago’s history, specifically during the City Beautiful movement and the civic interventions that followed, sidewalks have revealed how urban reformers sought to “harden” the city against what they perceived as disorder. Eventually, they physically and symbolically separated the civilized from the natural.
In the nineteenth century, Chicago faced a series of challenges brought on by industrialization, rapid population growth, and recurring public health crises. During this moment, the sidewalk transformed into a site where behavioral expectations and environmental standards for a “clean” society were articulated and enforced. As cholera, tuberculosis, and other epidemics spread through the city, scientists and reformers increasingly attributed these outbreaks to overcrowding and poor sanitation. A major component of their critique was the overall lack of cleanliness in streets and sidewalks. Their recommendations to utilize urban hygiene as a buffer against disease were quickly taken up by municipal governments.
This shift is visible in Chicago’s early ordinances. An 1833 regulation imposed a $2 fine on anyone allowing a pig to roam the streets “without a yoke or a ring in its nose”; by 1842, pigs were banned from the streets altogether. These laws drew a clear distinction between the sidewalk as a controlled, civilized space and the unmanaged presence of animals, waste, and other “natural” elements. Over time, urban regulation expanded from animal waste to bodily waste. The rise of germ theory further solidified cleanliness as central to civic identity. A clean city signaled modernity, order, and moral uprightness. Ordinances regulating conduct in public, prohibiting spitting, urinating, or leaving refuse on paved surfaces, demonstrate how sanitation became linked to civic virtue. Notably, these rules often applied only to sidewalks and other paved areas. Dirt paths, grassy strips, and unpaved streets were subject to far looser regulation, reinforcing a material distinction between the civilized city and the unruly natural world.