I’m writing a non-fiction book about the making of Chicago and the role of my great-grandfather, Victor Falkenau. A renowned—and controversial—building contractor at the turn of the 19th century, he left a lasting impact on the city as we know it today.

Victor constructed buildings designed by prominent architects like Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. He put up iconic structures such as the Stock Exchange, the Congress Hotel, and the Meyer Building. In his quest to make Chicago the country’s most modern city, he built factories for the Western Electric Company to bring electricity and telephones to Chicago’s residents and businesses. He improved the lot of poor families packed into slums near the slaughterhouses. So great was his vision that, in one of the largest engineering feats ever, he helped change the course of the Chicago river to bring clean water to the city.

Respected and feared, Victor suffered the wrath of union bosses and strikers who threatened his life and his family’s safety. Day after day, union laborers walked out on him, terrorized his non-union workers, and paralyzed the construction industry through violence. As the spokesman for 2500 of the city’s building contractors, union bosses took revenge on Victor for opposing sympathetic strikes and union rules that brought the construction industry, and the city’s growth, to a halt.

At the height of his career, a crisis forced a reckoning of how to make his work add up to the legacy he envisioned.

My Substack page, “Building Modern Chicago” offers findings and insights of the journey researching his life and the growth of Chicago.