Commonwealth Edison, the final name of the Chicago utility built by Insull (and still its name today) was decimated by the stock market crash of 1929, taking the life savings of almost all those 600,000 securities holders with it. The Fisk Street Station, Chicago’s first large-scale AC generating plant, was closed by labor unrest in 1942 and again for failure to live up to environmental standards in 2012. Making it, too, part of the story of how America changed around an electric power infrastructure too hardened in its ways to keep up.
