Chicago, Illinois

Chicago, Illinois, is the dominant city of the American Midwest, and the third largest in population in the U.S., with 2,856,016 people. The Chicago-Gary-Kenosha Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (sometimes called "Chicagoland") has a population of 9,157,540. The name "Chicago" originated in 1630, when the Miami-Illinois Indians arrived in the region, and called it after a type of wild garlic that grew in the area.

Geography

The streets of Chicago are based on a grid system with a major north/south or east/west street occurring every mile. The intersection of State and Madison Streets is the origin of the city's address numbering system with each mile accounting for an increase of 800 in the address numbers.

Loop

"The Loop" is a geographic area in Chicago's city center...as well as 97.9FM WLUP, a local rock-n-roll radio station. It is important here to note that "Downtown Chicago" can be a nonspecific term. Residents of the city proper generally call the cluster of high-rise buildings (office and residential) roughly in the north-south "center" of the city bordering the lake, anywhere near where the Chicago river used to enter (and now exits from) Lake Michigan, "downtown". Residents of the outlying suburbs often refer to the city proper as "downtown".

"The Loop", on the other hand is a very specific geographic area in downtown Chicago. The Chicago Transit Authority runs a number of public transportation rail lines throughout the city and suburbs. "The Loop" is a circle (albeit a reasonably squareish circle) of elevated train tracks where all rail lines meet at the "center" (see above) of the city. Due to its elevated tracks and landmark status, the track structure as well as all CTA trains in the city (even subway trains!) are commonly referred to as "The El".

Neighborhoods

Home ownership

Concentrating the family resources to achieve home ownerships was a common strategy in the ethnic neighborhoods. It meant sacrificing current consumption, and pulling children out of school as soon as they could earn a wage. By 1900, working-class ethnic immigrants owned homes at higher rates than native-born people. After borrowing from friends and building associations, immigrants kept boarders, grew market gardens, and even opened home-based commercial laundries, eroding home-work distinctions, while sending out women and children to work to repay loans. They sought not middle class upward mobility but the security of home ownership. Many social workers wanted them to pursue upward job mobility (which required more education), but realtors asserted that houses were better than a bank for a poor man. With hindsight, and considering uninsured banks' precariousness, this appears to have been true. Chicago's workers made immense sacrifices for home ownership, contributing to Chicago's sprawling suburban geography and to modern myths about the American dream.

The Jewish community, by contrast, rented apartments and maximized education and upward mobility for the next generation.

Suburbs

Keating (2004) studied the origins of 233 settlements that by 1900 had become suburbs or city neighborhoods of Chicago. The settlements began as farm centers (41%), industrial towns (30%), residential railroad suburbs (15%), and recreational/institutional centers (13%).

Environment and planning

Danish immigrant Jens Jensen arrived in 1886 and soon became a highly successful and celebrated landscape designer. Jensen's work was characterized by a democratic approach to landscaping, informed by his interest in social justice and conservationism and his rejection of antidemocratic formalism. Among Jensen's creations were four Chicago city parks, most famously Columbus Park. His work also included garden design for some of the region's most influential people, including the Ford and Rosenwald families.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal was first proposed in 1885 by civil engineer Lyman Edgar Cooley, who envisioned a deep waterway that would dilute and divert the city's sewage by funneling water from Lake Michigan into a canal, which would drain into the Mississippi River via the Illinois River. Beyond presenting a solution for Chicago's sewage problem, Cooley's proposal appealed to the economic need to link the Midwest with America's central waterways to compete with East Coast shipping and railroad industries. Strong regional support for the project led the Illinois legislature to circumvent the federal government and complete the canal with state funding. The opening in January 1900 met with controversy and a lawsuit against Chicago's appropriation of water from Lake Michigan. By the 1920s the lawsuit was divided between the states of the Mississippi River Valley, who supported the development of deep waterways linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes states, which feared sinking water levels might harm shipping in the lakes. In 1929 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in support of Chicago's use of the canal to promote commerce, but ordered the city to discontinue its use for sewage disposal.

One of the largest municipal public works projects in U.S. history lies inconspicuously 150 to 300 feet below the streets of Chicago, a city plagued from its inception by pollution and flooding related to Lake Michigan's basin. Engineering techniques pioneered specifically for the project have created mammoth overflow sewers commonly known as the Deep Tunnel and more officially as the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP). Construction began in 1976 after nearly fifty years of financial, engineering, and political maneuvering by local, state, and federal officials. While the project's long-promised rewards were materializing as of 2001, critics asserted that the city approached the problem of flood overflow in its usual grandiose manner, employing large-scale solutions when simpler, less-costly alternatives to TARP, such as curbing wasteful water use and creating green belts, should have been explored.

A major environmental disaster came in July 1995, with 739 heat-related deaths after one week of record high heat and humidity.

Demography

Although originally settled by Yankees, the railroads, stockyards and other heavy industry of the late 19th century attracted a variety of skilled workers from Europe, especially Germans, English, Swedish and Dutch, as well as unskilled Irish Catholics. From 1890-1914 migrations swelled, attracting especially unskilled workers from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Greeks, Italians and Jews. World War I cut off immigrations from Europe, and restrictions in the 1920s slowed the European influx to a trickle, apart from refugees after World War II. During both world wars poor Americans arrived from the South--whites from Appalachia and blacks from the cotton fields due south. The near south side was the first Black area, and it continued to expand, as did the black neighborhoods on the near west side. These were segregated areas (few blacks were tolerated in white neighborhoods), and after 1950 public housing high rises anchored poor black neighborhoods south and west of the Loop.

Old stock Americans who relocated to Chicago after 1900 preferred the outlying areas and suburbs, making Oak Park and Evanston enclaves of the upper middle class. The lakefront north of the Loop saw construction of high-rise luxury apartments starting in the 1910s, and continuing into the 21st century. The high-rises had wealthy residents but few children, since the city had an abysmal public school system, a large parochial system of middling quality for the Catholics, and few upscale private schools. The northern and western suburbs boasted some of the best public schools in the nation. The suburban trend accelerated after 1945, with middle class Chicagoans headed to the outlying areas of the city, and then pouring into the Cook County and Dupage County suburbs. Jews and Irish in particular rose sharply in status, leaving slums and heading north. Well educated migrants from around the country moved to the far suburbs. Beginning in the 1940s waves of Hispanic immigrants began to arrive, with the largest numbers from Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as Cuba and (by the 1980s), other Hispanic lands. After 1965 large numbers of Asian immigrants came, the largest proportion were well educated Indians and Chinese. By the 1970s gentrification began, turning old inner city slums into upscale neighborhoods, which proved attractive to singles and gays.

Education

Chicago is home to the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, DePaul University, University of Illinois, Loyola University Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. It also is home of two liberal arts colleges: Lake Forest College and North Park University. It has a large number of seminaries and theological colleges including the Catholic Theological Union and the Chicago Theological Seminary.

High culture

Museums

On the Chicago Historical Society.

Science and Industry

Following his 1924 retirement as chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck & Company, Julius Rosenwald embarked on a campaign to found a science and industry museum in Chicago similar to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, which he had visited in 1911. Although a city bond issue provided some funds, Rosenwald and his estate spent over $11 million through the mid-1940s. Portions of the Museum of Science and Industry opened in 1933, one year after Rosenwald's death, and the entire museum opened in 1938.

History

Chicago's locational advantage is the link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system. Its first permanent resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, of French, West Indian, and African descent, operated a fur-trading post from 1780 to 1800. The U.S. government erected Fort Dearborn in 1803 three years later. In the War of 1812 it was captured by Indians and the residents massacred.

After 1830, the rich farmlands of northern Illinois attracted Yankee settlers. Yankee real estate operators created a city overnight in the 1830s. Hundreds of wagons per day of farm produce arrived, so the entrepreneurs built grain elevators and docks to load ships bound for points east. By the 1850s the railroads made Chicago a major hub with over 30 lines. The main lines from the East ended in Chicago, and those oriented to the West began in Chicago, so the city became the nation's trans-shipment and warehousing center by 1860. Factories were created, most famously the harvester factory opened in 1847 by Cyrus Hall McCormick. The Wisconsin forests supported the mill-work and lumber business; the Illinois hinterland provided the wheat, as well as hogs and cattle that were slaughtered, preserved in salt and shipped east; by 1870 refrigerated cars allowed fresh meat to ship.

As the city grew, large numbers of Irish Catholics and Germans arrived. Their saloons became the focus of attacks by the Know-Nothing Party, which was anti-immigration and anti-liquor, and called for the purification of politics by reducing the power of the saloonkeepers. In 1855, the new party elected Levi Boone mayor and he banned Sunday sales of liquor and beer, angering the Germans who frequented beer gardens, and Irish who frequented saloons. Law enforcement resulted in the Lager Beer Riot of April 1855, which erupted outside a courthouse where eight Germans were being tried for liquor ordinance violations. After the Civil War, saloons became community centers only for local ethnic men, as reformers saw them as places that incited riotous behavior and moral decay.

Newspapers

Late-19th-century big city newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News - founded in 1875 by Melville E. Stone - ushered in an era of news reporting that was, unlike earlier periods, in tune with the particulars of community life in specific cities. Vigorous competition between older and newer-style city papers soon broke out, centered on civic activism and sensationalist reporting of urban political issues and the numerous problems associated with rapid urban growth. In Chicago competition was especially fierce between the Chicago Times (Democratic), the Chicago Tribune, (Republican) and the Daily News (independent), with the latter becoming the city's most popular paper by the 1880s.

1900-1945

Business

Chicago, along with New York, was the center of the nation's advertising industry. Albert Lasker, known as the "father of modern advertising" made Chicago his base 1898-1942. As head of Lord and Thomas, Lasker devised a copywriting technique that appealed directly to the psychology of the consumer. Women seldom smoked cigarettes; he told them if they smoked Lucky Strikes they could stay slender. Lasker's use of radio, particularly with his campaigns for Palmolive soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, Kotex products, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, not only revolutionized the advertising industry but also significantly changed popular culture.

Labor

After 1900 Chicago was a heavily unionized city, apart from the factories (which were non-union until the 1930s). The unionized teamsters in Chicago enjoyed an unusually strong bargaining position when they contended with employers around the city. Their wagons could easily be positioned to disrupt streetcars and block traffic. In addition, their families and neighborhood supporters often surrounded the wagons of nonunion teamsters and made strikebreaking a very unpleasant endeavor. When the teamsters used their clout to engage in sympathy strikes, employers decided to coordinate their antiunion efforts, claiming that the teamsters held tyrannical power over commerce in their control of the streets. The teamsters' strike in 1905 represented a clash both over labor issues and the public nature of the streets. To the employers, the streets were arteries for commerce, while to the teamsters, they remained public spaces integral to their neighborhoods.

Disasters

On 7 December 1903 the "absolutely fireproof," five-week-old Iroquois Theater was destroyed by fire in Chicago. The fire lasted less than thirty minutes; however, 602 people died as a result of being burned, asphyxiated, or trampled.

The cruise ship Eastland capsized at its pier on a calm day, July 24, 1915, killing over 800 passengers. It was top-heavy because of new federal laws (passed in response to the Titanic) requiring lifeboats.

Crime

By 1900, Progressive Era political and legal reformers initiated far-ranging changes in the American criminal justice system, with Chicago taking the lead. Violent crime rates were high, yet law enforcers rarely convicted killers, more than three-fourths of whom went unpunished. Even in homicide cases in which the identity of killers was certain and the police made arrests, jurors typically exonerated or acquitted killers. A blend of gender-, race-, and class-based notions of justice trumped the rule of law, producing low homicide conviction rates during a period of soaring violence.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rates of domestic murder tripled in Chicago. Domestic homicide was often a manifestation of strains in gender relations induced by urban and industrial change. At the core of such family murders were male attempts to preserve masculine authority. Yet, there were nuances in the motives for the murder of family members, and study of the patterns of domestic homicide among ethnic groups reveals basic cultural differences. German immigrants tended to murder over declining status and the failure to achieve economic prosperity. In addition, they were likely to kill all members of the family, and then commit suicide in the ultimate attempt at maintaining control. Italian men killed family members to save a gender-based ideal of respectability that entailed patriarchal control over women and family reputation. African Americans, like the Germans, often murdered in response to economic conditions but not over desperation about the future. Like the Italians, the killers tended to be young, but family honor was not usually at stake. Instead, black men murdered to regain control of wives and lovers who resisted their patriarchal "rights."

Progressive reformers in the business community created the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC) in 1919 after an investigation into the robbery at a factory showed the city's criminal justice system was deficient. The CCC initially served as a watchdog of the justice system. However, after a suggestion that the justice system begin collecting criminal records was rejected, the CCC assumed a more active role in fighting crime. The commission's role expanded even further after Frank J. Loesch became president in 1928. Loesch recognized the need to eliminate the glamour that Chicago's media typically attributed to criminals. Determined to expose the horrors and violence of the crime world, Loesch drafted a list of public enemies and turned Al Capone into a scapegoat for society's evils.

Black migration

Chicago's black population swelled dramatically during World War I as immigration from Europe was impossible and factories demanded more and more war workers. Whites got the factory jobs, but many opportunities opened for black men and women. Economic conditions for the city's blacks during the 1920s were much better than in the South, but were also characterized by chronic unemployment and low wage rates. Many families lived below the poverty line. These conditions were caused primarily by employers' discriminatory hiring and promotion policies, a surplus of labor at a time of continued black migration from the South, and residential segregation in the African American neighborhoods of Chicago. Consequently, the economic conditions that brought about political radicalization and realignment of African Americans during the 1930s, and which are associated primarily with the Great Depression, were in evidence throughout much of the 1920s. Accordingly, the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s, rather than being seen largely as a phenomenon associated with World War I, takes on greater significance in terms of its economic and political repercussions in black Chicago in the years before the depression.

Polonia

Chicago's Polonia sustained diverse political cultures, each with its own newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers - from the Socialist Dziennik Ludowy [People's daily] (1907-25) to the Polish Roman Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia [Union daily] (1921-39) - all of which supported workers' struggles for better working conditions and were part of a broader program of cultural and educational activities. The decision to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to different alliances and different strategies.

Since 1940

Politics

Holli (1999) argues that the political regime of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley during 1955-76 was unusually stable during an era of national instability because Daley kept firm control of the governmental machinery, which slowed change to a manageable pace and had a deep and profound appeal to Chicagoans. Ethnic and racial squabbling erupted after Daley's death in 1976 and continued through the tenures of the next four mayors, even as the rest of the nation entered a period of greater political stability. After the transitory tenure of interim mayor Eugene Sawyer, the years of political instability ended with the 1989 election of the former boss's son, Richard M. Daley. Young Daley's election marked a return to political calm seen, in the light of equilibrium theory, as inevitable after the tumultuous years that preceded it.

Public housing

The Robert Taylor Homes (RTH), part of Chicago's public housing projects financed by the federal government, opened in 1962. As the largest US public housing project, RTH consisted of 28 high-rises of 16 floors each, providing homes for 27,000 people. By 1965, RTH was already substandard and crime-ridden. Through the 1970s, RTH became predominantly single-mother welfare households. During site selection, the size of the project kept increasing. Federal cost worries forced the use of the high-rise design. Minors so outnumbered adults at RTH from the beginning that gangs, vandalism, and other crimes quickly became endemic. RTH was too large to administer effectively. Substandard systems, including elevators, plumbing, and heating, insufficient police protection, and the demographic burden on local schools were instrumental in RTH's failure.

Japanese

In 1942-43 60,000 Nisei (born in U.S. of Japanese parents) were removed from the West Coast relocation camps and resettled in distant cities. 20,000 came to Chicago. In contrast to their self-contained, West-coast lifestyle, the Nisei in Chicago wanted to more fully integrate themselves in the community. This permitted many to take advantage of their racial "inbetweenness" to fill labor shortages caused by the war. Most Nisei successfully shed their ethnic identity in Chicago, amalgamated into the community and stayed in the city.

Hispanics immigrants

Fernandez (2005) documents the history of Mexican and Puerto Rican immigration and community formation in Chicago after World War II. Beginning with World War II, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers traveled to the Midwest through varying migrant streams to perform unskilled labor. They settled in separate areas of Chicago. These parallel migrations created historically unique communities where both groups encountered one another in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, both groups experienced repeated displacements and dislocations from the Near West Side, the Near North Side and the Lincoln Park neighborhood. At the macro level, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers' life chances were shaped by federal policies regarding immigration, labor, and citizenship. At the local level, they felt the impact of municipal government policies, which had specific racial dimensions. As these populations relocated from one neighborhood to the next, they made efforts to shape their own communities and their futures. During the period of the Civil Rights Movement, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans engaged in social struggles, both in coalition with one another but also as separate, distinct, national minorities. They created organizations and institutions such as Casa Aztlán , the Young Lords Organization, Mujeres Latinas en Acción , the Latin American Defense Organization, and El Centro de la Causa. These organizations drew upon differing strategies based on ideals of nation, gender, and class, and at times produced inter-ethnic and inter-racial coalitions.

Schools

Benjamin C. Willis was superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools (1953 - 1966). During his tenure, the public schools in Chicago, as in many large cities, declined in terms of both the quality of the education they provided and the quantity of resources they received. Willis saw educational leadership as the work of professionals, not of community activists or political leaders. This outlook isolated his administration and undermined his influence. In the 1970s, efforts to desegregate schools through busing led to an exodus of whites from the city.

As a politician and as Chicago's black mayor (1983-87), Harold Washington maintained a distinctive strategy toward reform of public schools. Rather than focus on integration (bringing whites and minorities into the same schools), Washington favored measures to strengthen local schools, especially in minority neighborhoods. He called for more state support to urban schools in place of property taxes and more power to local groups to influence curriculum and the quality of teaching. In 1987 the teacher strike transformed educational problems into a crisis. Washington created the Parent Community Council from local groups and arranged for a summit with their representatives and those of business, school administration, and teachers. His death in 1987 unraveled the deliberations for change that had been taking place. The schools were so beset by violence, teacher shortages and inadequate financing that few disagreed with the brutal verdict of U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett in 1987, "Chicago's public schools are the worst in the nation."

In the late 1990s, the realization that busing had become unrealistic caused Chicago's political leaders and community activists to join together in focusing attention and resources on improving neighborhood schools. Mayor Richard M. Daley seized control of the school system in 1995 and promised drastic reforms. However, the legislature largely left in place elected councils made up of parents and community members at each of the district's nearly 600 schools. At struggling schools on probation, Daley has stripped councils of power, but at others the councils hire principals and oversee a significant portion of each school's budget. Paul G. Vallas, a blunt-talking, bottom-line-driven manager led the system from 1995 to 2001. Vallas presided over a $3 billion construction effort that built 71 schools and renovated 500. He cut 2,000 nonteaching positions and stabilized the district's finances. Given broad executive authority, Vallas ended automatic promotion from grade to grade and greatly expanded summer school, policies that have been copied across the country. Math and reading scores improved, with about 40% of students at grade level in 2001, up from 30% in 1995. In 2001 Daley appointed Arne Duncan, 36, to preside over a school system with 435,000 students, 45,900 employees and a $3.5-billion annual budget. Indicators of progress have stalled.

Reputation

Journalists, novelists, architects, engineers, business tycoons, scientists, poets, sports teams, criminals, and millions of laborers shaped Chicago's national and international reputation. Images and representations are important means by which the city is known and negotiated. During the years of rapid urbanization 1890-1930 the numerous daily newspapers presented the most important and pervasive word versions of the city. Among the significant innovations of Chicago's newspapers in these years that shaped the idea of the city was the emergence of the local color columnist. Groeninger (2005) examines the role of columnists in Chicago newspapers in creating a "city of the mind." After a review of the literature on images of cities, the relationship of newspapers to modern city life in the thought of Robert Park, and the world of Chicago's newspapers at the turn-of-the-century, detailed studies of a number of the most important columnists of the era follow. George Ade's column of the 1890s in the Daily News, "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," presented a view of Chicago from the perspective of migrants from the small towns of the Midwest. In the same decade Finley Peter Dunne's column in the Evening Post, featuring the fictional Irish barkeeper, Mr. Dooley, offered readers a literary version of the Irish working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport. Ring Lardner's Tribune sports column of the teens, "In the Wake of the News," satirized not only Chicagoans obsession with sports, but also the middle-class culture of opera, musical theater, and the newspaper itself. Several columns in the black newspaper, The Whip, offered images of Bronzeville in the 1920s that both reflected and helped shape the experience of African-Americans on the South Side of Chicago. Ben Hecht's "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" column in the Daily News expressed a new, anti-Victorian sensibility in the post-war era, but his most enduring contributions to the image of Chicago were on the stage and in the new medium of film. The columnists who wrote about everyday life in the city were the most distinctive and powerful newspaper voices in shaping the idea of Chicago and the civic personality of the city itself.