Donald Shaw MacLaughlan, born - Chicago, the Wacker Drive - unknown - T-Shirt

A night view of Chicago's Wacker Drive, rendered in dense etched hatching, with a stepped tower lit at its summit and the river city stretching beyond a stone arch bridge.

Visual Elements & Composition

Deep olive black dominates the image, covering roughly three-fifths of the field. Pale grey-green and muted sage describe the lit architecture and the water, while a touch of off-white marks the brightest points of light. The composition is built on verticals: a tall stepped tower rises through a series of setbacks, and the arched bridge sweeps across the lower half, anchoring the scene. The hatching is dense and directional, so the shadows read as solid mass and the highlights stand out clearly.

Meaning & Symbolism

Wacker Drive is a multi-level street in downtown Chicago, built to relieve congestion and bring commercial shipping and passenger traffic together. The image captures that ambition: the tower and bridge stand for civic engineering and the scale of early twentieth-century urban growth. Donald Shaw MacLaughlan, who was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, was known for his intaglio etchings of architectural and topographical views in Europe and North America. His careful attention to structural form and urban atmosphere defines this plate, which records the modern city at night as both a working street and a monument to progress.

Wearing the Wacker Drive Night View

Across the chest, the etched skyline reads as a single, unbroken scene, with the tower near the centre of the shirt and the bridge spanning below it. The dark olive ground keeps the lit tower and river edges sharp, so the night cityscape reads clearly from a few steps away as well as up close.