Lindsay Bayley asked via Twitter about Chicago zoning before the 1957 ordinance. I’d seen the city’s previous (and first) zoning ordinance, adopted in 1923, only as a library reference book, but I thought it was worth a look online. Sure enough, the Internet Archive offers up the entire document, including all 15 pages of text, hand-drawn maps of the entire city demarcated by use and bulk, and the few fantastic pages of extra-legal zoning envelope illustrations, sure to please the form-based coder in your family:

Even though the zoning ordinance was only in force for a scant six years until the Depression kiboshed construction, so much was built in those years that the bulk standards’ peculiar shapes are still visible throughout the city. Downtown, views really open up above the 264′ ceiling on “palazzo” tower heights, which could be exceeded only by thin spires — hence the two-tiered skyline seen above. In the neighborhoods, hewing closely to zoning’s origins as a means of guaranteeing light & air, larger lots and corner lots were allowed higher FAR and building volumes.

(I find it strange that the second of Chicago’s five bulk districts, circa 1923, was about as permissive as the zoning for present-day downtown D.C. And yet our own restrictive attitude towards height was based, strangely, on Chicago’s practices just one generation prior, in 1890.)

Photo at top of post is of Chicago skyline, perhaps 1958, by Charles W. Cushman, from Indiana University‘s collection