Ann Durkin Keating

Thanks.

Glad to be here.

I'm a Chicagoan.

So I started there.

I studied at the University of Chicago for my graduate degrees.

but I am fascinated with the built environment of cities.

So that's where I got started in all of this.

And I started in archeology and then moved to urban history.

It's on a swamp along the lakeshore at the mouth of a very slow-moving small river called the Chicago River.

And you're right, it takes off.

And it takes off, as you note, Don, because of the railroad and industry.

And it becomes the center for that growth.

So when we think about Chicago, it's a city that really emerges out of the industrial age.

So in a very real sense, in contrast to cities on the East Coast that have their start, as you noted, in the colonial period,

This is a city that really grows on industrialization, on railroads, on immigration.

And that's, you know, that's at the heart of what Chicago is and its built environment right down to the present.

Yeah.

As you note, it's at the intersection of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes.

So the continental divide, it's a very swampy place.

It's hard to imagine that it's a continental divide, but it is to the east from the Chicago River eastward goes into the Great Lakes, into Lake Michigan to the west goes down to the Mississippi River.