It’s sold to the Stratton Grain Company after the reconstruction. Since it’s the peak of Chicago’s grain reign, the site is rebuilt and expanded to hold twice as many bushels.
“That’s where many of our city’s greatest fortunes were made.” “A lot of people made fortunes off the grain industry,” Mahoney explains. Libby Mahoney, senior curator for the Chicago Historical Museum, emphasizes their importance. For the silo workers, there’s a constant fear that any dusty summer day could be their last.įor a while, the silos were lucrative despite constant reconstruction. The grain dust, when mixed with oxygen, creates a volatile gas that will explode at high temperatures. He has been dead for 20 years.Īt this point, it’s time for industrialists to accept that grain silos will just blow up whether you want them to or not. John Metcalf’s design has failed, though he’s not upset. Instead, he builds something that will outlive the grain industry itself – despite constantly catching on fire.Īfter a couple decades of uninterrupted operation, the third explosion hits. His goal is to build something that can last more than 30 years without catching on fire. This is his Titanic, unburnable and incredible and inextinguishable. It can hold one million bushels of grain.
There are driers and bleachers and oat clippers and cleaners and scourers and dust packers and boilers fed by water from the Chicago River. In the new silos, there’s a powerhouse, an elevator and 35 storage silos. His name is John Metcalf, and he adds vents and windows. To solve it, the railway hires an accomplished civil engineer. If the composition of the structure isn’t fireproof, the industrialists assume that maybe architecture is the problem. Within an hour, a million bushels of grain are aflame. A cloud of hot dust tears through layers of sheet iron, chunks of cement torn apart like ice cubes splintering on a kitchen floor.
#INSIDE GRAIN SILO SERIES#
They won’t discover the truth until it blows up before their eyes 73 years later.Ī spontaneous combustion roars on the bank of the Chicago River, the second explosion in a series of chain-smoking resurrections. They do, not realizing that the original container was not the cause of the earlier inferno. The 1832 fire inspired a new solution from grain industrialists: build new silos from concrete. This year, they catch on fire for the first time. A firm punch, with a 35-fingered knuckle. There are hundreds of places like this scattered around the city, but Damen stands out: A towering symbol of Chicago’s prosperity like a firm punch on the skyline. Even in the earliest stage of their development, they cover as much area as a five-story-high football field. These aren’t the only grain elevators in the city, but they are among the largest. The first iteration of the Damen grain elevators stands at an ideal intersection – round towers rising between the Illinois-Michigan Canal and the Santa Fe railway (which, ironically, can access virtually any big city except Santa Fe).
The epicenter of agrarian America, the grain trade is the way to fortune. It’s only grain, but it’s the commodity that will define Chicago’s 19th century. The people of the city are insanely proud of these primitive silos what they hold might as well be gold. Without skyscrapers, the tallest structures in the city are these cylinders, 30 feet high. But before the Damen Silos became Michael Bay’s pyrotechnic playground or the first search result for “urban exploration in Chicago,” they were just the Santa Fe Grain Elevators. These steel pulleys are what makes the place an elevator. With their various arms in eternal freeze frame, it’s difficult to imagine that these monstrous devices once rose to the silos’ peak. In the farthest corner, against the back wall, cloaked in a chilly darkness that not even spiderwebs dare interrupt: a row of massive metal machines, a testament to the place this once was. Since there’s no way for the wind to reach inside the tunnels, they’ll probably stay there forever like footprints on the moon. Your shoes add their own imprints to the existing tesselation of soles. Your feet will land in dust, soft and thin as it clouds around your knees and settles at your ankles. What remains is a narrow entrance framed by plywood and concrete, a place that can only be accessed if you’re willing to abandon the outside world. You’ll know you’ve found the right place when you spot the gaping entry, crumbling edges marking what was probably an explorer’s breach in the cement. You get into the Damen Silos through a hole in the wall.
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