Immigration and Migration and the Making of a Modern American City

"Chicago history comes in layers." Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune ¹

Introduction

I live on Cullerton Street in Chicago. It is one of the rare south side streets that interrupted the neatly ordered number system by replacing its number (20th) to honor Edward Cullerton. Cullerton, better known as "Foxy Ed," was an Irish saloonkeeper turned alderman (almost a cliché in Chicago) who served the city for 48 years. ² Foxy Ed along with other Irish politicians during this period of political machines and patronage jobs won the adoration of his constituents through favors and bribes and was re-elected time and again to the endless frustration of municipal reformers. When I think of Foxy Ed as I drive down my street, I begin to imagine the neighborhood as it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where Bohemian (Czech) families lived in cramped, balloon frame houses and built community in order to survive. Today, the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is predominantly Mexican, a migration that began in the 1920s but accelerated in the 1970s, but you can still see the Czech words etched into the cornerstones reminding the residents of the layers of history that surround us. Even the toponym of the neighborhood, Pilsen, a reference to Plzen, a city in the Czech Republic, hints to this Bohemian past.

If we are alert to the signs while wandering through Chicago streets we can see the ghosts that came before. Looking for these ghosts seems to be a habit for many Chicagoans. I want my students to look for these ghosts and even create them in their minds through an understanding of the history of a place. By seeing the neighborhood as palimpsest, something constantly changing but never wiped clean, one can see what came before. Salt on the streets serving as an inadvertent archeologist working to expose the cobblestone below. The Polish words etched at a building's creation still show through despite the attempts of rival gangs to claim the territory their own. The New Life Church awning in the same frame as the Russian language cornerstone declaring its long forgotten orthodoxy. The signs are everywhere and a walk around the city becomes its own layered time machine. I want my students to experience the city this way. As Dolores Hayden states in her book The Power of Place, "from childhood, humans come to know places through engaging all five senses, sight as well as sound, smell, taste, and touch." ³

This unit is about a location in Chicago: the Union Stockyards and its adjacent neighborhood that many refer to as "Back of the Yards." Yet far more than a location, this unit is about place and the making and remaking of meaning that is attributed to the place as immigrants move in and out of the neighborhood. Tim Creswell, in his book Place: a Short Introduction, discusses the challenge of defining place in its many uses within the English language. We seek out our place in the world, feel out of place, and invite people over to our place. In the same vein, Dolores Hayden writes definitions of place are like a "suitcase so overfilled that one can never shut the lid." ⁴ These uses imply a clear importance, a weight, to the word as well as a lack of clarity of its meaning. Perhaps nothing is more important to Human Geography than the interaction of people and space and the creation of the concept of "sense of place." Creswell's definition of place as "spaces which people have made meaningful" and Hayden's "the personality of a location" are both useful to focus our work on this never-ending process of place making. ⁵

Examining the making of place, as Carl Sauer describes the "combination of natural and man-made elements that comprise, at any given time, the essential character of a place," ⁶ (Hayden, 16) will serve as the parchment of our palimpsest. I have chosen three time periods as the layers of understanding: 1900, 1910, and 1920. The main reason for selecting these time periods is due to the access to census records for the same street in the most heavily congested part of the Back of the Yards neighborhood and the availability of Progressive Era reports (both municipal reports and settlement house reports). In addition, this is a period of change from "Old" Immigrants (mostly Irish and Germans) to "New" Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and then to African American labor during and after World War I. Students will examine multiple sources (census records, photographs, maps, paintings, and texts) for each time period to define the place that is the Back of the Yards. In particular, students will study how these different immigrant and migrant groups encountered one another in the Back of the Yards and how the neighborhood changed and remained static over time.