There was a great cover story in the Chicago Reader last week. While quite negative and cynical, there was still a lot of interesting things about Chicago.
The introduction, from the 9/22/06 Chicago Reader:
THIS HAS HAPPENED to every Chicagoan who’s ever left town: you tell someone where you’re from and they bring up the pizza. Or the winter. Or Al Capone—still with the Al Capone! Come on, you want to say, Chicago’s so much more than that. Sure it’s the Sox and the Sears Tower, but it’s also rattlesnake hot dogs and Del Close’s skull. It’s the Mayors Daley and the Jesses Jackson and, hello, future president Barack Obama. It’s Algren and Addams and Alinsky—and Steve Albini and Grant Achatz, and maybe the only place those two would ever end up in a sentence together. And in addition to being ground zero for experimental American cuisine and home to the most active independent music scene in the country, it’s a world-famous incubator of comedic talent and fertile ground for emerging artists of all kinks and persuasions. There’s so much to do and see and learn that list making can’t do it justice.
And what really caught my eye was this segment on Chicago history. This is the slightly edited version and is quite biting in some of it’s observation, all of which I do not agree with.
Chicago has always been a town of immigrants and mostly not of the WASP variety: when the 18th-century trader Jean Baptiste Point duSable, his Potawatomi wife Catherine, and their family became the first regular residents, you might say it was a BFIC (Black French Indian Catholic) town. Chicago’s first businessmen were fur traders who answered to the American Fur Company’s headquarters at Mackinaw on the far north end of Lake Michigan.
In 1836 the city’s canal commissioners designated the lakefront (roughly from Randolph to 14th Street) “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear, and Free of Any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.” And so it has remained—if you don’t count the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, and their expensive parking lots, not to mention the eight-lane Lake Shore Drive or the times the parks are roped off for private parties.
Cincinnati and Saint Louis are in the middle of the country too. How did Chicago outgrow them? In 1856, the Board of Trade found a way to gain trade—it turned handmade farm products into commodities by setting up quality standards for grain. Wheat and corn from individual midwestern farms no longer had to be sold and loaded one sack at a time. Now all grain of the same quality could be stored and shipped in bulk and traded by simply using receipts and futures contracts.
The Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for president in Chicago in 1860, but he didn’t attend the convention.
After the Great Fire in 1871, the city’s commercial elite compounded the disaster by running the Chicago Relief and Aid Society Katrina-style, dispensing too little help too late to too few. The fire had devastated nearnorth immigrant neighborhoods and burned all the bridges connecting them to the rest of town—yet at first the society set up no relief depot north of the river and published information only in English. When a fire victim did get work, the society immediately cut off all help. These lucky souls then endured a week or two of employment but no cash while they waited for their first payday. (The society finished up with a generous surplus, thank you for asking.)
The Haymarket anarchists were convicted—and four of them hanged—not because they threw the bomb that killed eight policemen [actually, it was seven and most were killed by friendly fire] at a labor rally in May 1886, but because they might have said or written things that might have been heard or read by whoever did throw it.
The Chicago River had to be reversed twice, in 1871 and 1900, both times away from Lake Michigan (it didn’t take the first time). The lake cleaned up, and the city’s sewage got carried instead down the Illinois River, which got so gross that by the 1910s it was devoid of oxygen all the way to Peoria.
Daniel Burnham was a great deal maker and architect, but much of his fabled 1909 plan—the one that would’ve ringed the city with green boulevards—was never built. Why is his name all over the place? The idea that crude rude Chicago could be made into an immaculate “White City,” like his setting for the 1893 World’s Fair, was irresistible. As writer James Krohe Jr. puts it, “Burnham and his followers slathered a stucco of North Shore values atop Chicago’s rough exterior.”
Jane Addams was more than a pioneer social worker—more like a predecessor of Martin Luther King Jr. She started with high culture and garbage cleanup on the near west side. She ended up staunchly opposing World War I, as King did the Vietnam War. Both have since been selectively remembered for being nice.
Labor shortages in World Wars I and II drew African-Americans up to Chicago from the old Confederacy, with big assists from the Illinois Central Railroad and the Chicago Defender. Their labor was welcome but they weren’t: in July 1919, a four-day race riot began when a black swimmer was stoned and drowned at the 29th Street beach. The racial prejudice of whites up to and including Mayor Richard J. Daley, the father of the current mayor, kept blacks restricted to crowded south- and west-side neighborhoods for decades, a residential pattern that has continued even as crowding has eased and African-Americans have moved into adjacent southern and western suburbs.
Northwestern’s lakeside campus and the steel mills in Portage, Indiana, have something in common. The mills were built where the most spectacular Indiana Dunes stood until 1963; the Evanston campus was built on the sand brought north for landfill.
Don’t confuse the two Mayor Richard Daleys. Richard J. the Father (mayor 1955-1976) lied to Martin Luther King Jr. to persuade him to leave town in the summer of 1966, built a patronage army, and was never indicted although many around him were. Richard M. the Son (mayor since 1989) illegally bulldozed a lakefront airport, built a patronage army, and was never indicted although many around him were.
The introduction, from the 9/22/06 Chicago Reader:
THIS HAS HAPPENED to every Chicagoan who’s ever left town: you tell someone where you’re from and they bring up the pizza. Or the winter. Or Al Capone—still with the Al Capone! Come on, you want to say, Chicago’s so much more than that. Sure it’s the Sox and the Sears Tower, but it’s also rattlesnake hot dogs and Del Close’s skull. It’s the Mayors Daley and the Jesses Jackson and, hello, future president Barack Obama. It’s Algren and Addams and Alinsky—and Steve Albini and Grant Achatz, and maybe the only place those two would ever end up in a sentence together. And in addition to being ground zero for experimental American cuisine and home to the most active independent music scene in the country, it’s a world-famous incubator of comedic talent and fertile ground for emerging artists of all kinks and persuasions. There’s so much to do and see and learn that list making can’t do it justice.
And what really caught my eye was this segment on Chicago history. This is the slightly edited version and is quite biting in some of it’s observation, all of which I do not agree with.Chicago has always been a town of immigrants and mostly not of the WASP variety: when the 18th-century trader Jean Baptiste Point duSable, his Potawatomi wife Catherine, and their family became the first regular residents, you might say it was a BFIC (Black French Indian Catholic) town. Chicago’s first businessmen were fur traders who answered to the American Fur Company’s headquarters at Mackinaw on the far north end of Lake Michigan.
In 1836 the city’s canal commissioners designated the lakefront (roughly from Randolph to 14th Street) “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear, and Free of Any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.” And so it has remained—if you don’t count the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, and their expensive parking lots, not to mention the eight-lane Lake Shore Drive or the times the parks are roped off for private parties.
Cincinnati and Saint Louis are in the middle of the country too. How did Chicago outgrow them? In 1856, the Board of Trade found a way to gain trade—it turned handmade farm products into commodities by setting up quality standards for grain. Wheat and corn from individual midwestern farms no longer had to be sold and loaded one sack at a time. Now all grain of the same quality could be stored and shipped in bulk and traded by simply using receipts and futures contracts.
The Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for president in Chicago in 1860, but he didn’t attend the convention.
After the Great Fire in 1871, the city’s commercial elite compounded the disaster by running the Chicago Relief and Aid Society Katrina-style, dispensing too little help too late to too few. The fire had devastated nearnorth immigrant neighborhoods and burned all the bridges connecting them to the rest of town—yet at first the society set up no relief depot north of the river and published information only in English. When a fire victim did get work, the society immediately cut off all help. These lucky souls then endured a week or two of employment but no cash while they waited for their first payday. (The society finished up with a generous surplus, thank you for asking.)
The Haymarket anarchists were convicted—and four of them hanged—not because they threw the bomb that killed eight policemen [actually, it was seven and most were killed by friendly fire] at a labor rally in May 1886, but because they might have said or written things that might have been heard or read by whoever did throw it.
The Chicago River had to be reversed twice, in 1871 and 1900, both times away from Lake Michigan (it didn’t take the first time). The lake cleaned up, and the city’s sewage got carried instead down the Illinois River, which got so gross that by the 1910s it was devoid of oxygen all the way to Peoria.
Daniel Burnham was a great deal maker and architect, but much of his fabled 1909 plan—the one that would’ve ringed the city with green boulevards—was never built. Why is his name all over the place? The idea that crude rude Chicago could be made into an immaculate “White City,” like his setting for the 1893 World’s Fair, was irresistible. As writer James Krohe Jr. puts it, “Burnham and his followers slathered a stucco of North Shore values atop Chicago’s rough exterior.”
Jane Addams was more than a pioneer social worker—more like a predecessor of Martin Luther King Jr. She started with high culture and garbage cleanup on the near west side. She ended up staunchly opposing World War I, as King did the Vietnam War. Both have since been selectively remembered for being nice.
Labor shortages in World Wars I and II drew African-Americans up to Chicago from the old Confederacy, with big assists from the Illinois Central Railroad and the Chicago Defender. Their labor was welcome but they weren’t: in July 1919, a four-day race riot began when a black swimmer was stoned and drowned at the 29th Street beach. The racial prejudice of whites up to and including Mayor Richard J. Daley, the father of the current mayor, kept blacks restricted to crowded south- and west-side neighborhoods for decades, a residential pattern that has continued even as crowding has eased and African-Americans have moved into adjacent southern and western suburbs.
Northwestern’s lakeside campus and the steel mills in Portage, Indiana, have something in common. The mills were built where the most spectacular Indiana Dunes stood until 1963; the Evanston campus was built on the sand brought north for landfill.
Don’t confuse the two Mayor Richard Daleys. Richard J. the Father (mayor 1955-1976) lied to Martin Luther King Jr. to persuade him to leave town in the summer of 1966, built a patronage army, and was never indicted although many around him were. Richard M. the Son (mayor since 1989) illegally bulldozed a lakefront airport, built a patronage army, and was never indicted although many around him were.
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