Immigration and Migration and the Making of a Modern American City

Back of the Yards: A Neighborhood

Introduction

The following are two examples of using census records to craft a narrative of the lives of people in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. This was done by identifying the names of people living on the block that I selected as my focus (selected because it was the most densely populated block in Back of the Yards in 1909 according to the map included in the appendix). Once you can identify names from the script, you can search those names in later census records to see if they moved and, if so, where they moved. You can also see changes to the number of children and changes to occupation or education/language. While time-consuming, this kind of reconstruction of the past using primary sources is incredibly rich and will be a part of the work that my students do in understanding the change over time and encounters within the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Anton Metrikis was an anomaly on his block in 1910. He lived at 4510 South Paulina Street and worked as a tailor with his own shop. Alongside Anton lived his wife, three sons, a boarder, and a servant in the small apartment in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago. His tailor shop was mentioned proudly in a 1909 article from a Lithuanian newspaper survey in Chicago. Sharing the building with Anton's family were four other families and 15 boarders bring the total to 41 people living in one frame building. Fifteen of those 41 worked in the nearby packing houses adjacent to the Union Stockyards. By 1920, Anton had seen the birth of another child, a daughter, and moved to a less congested building shared with only one other family away from the densely packed environs of Back of the Yards. His is one story of Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood. ⁸

Peter Bromarczyk's story is different. He and his wife Mary lived in the same building with Anton Metrikis. Peter was a day laborer in the stockyards. In 1900, Peter was 23 years old and his wife was 19. Peter had arrived in the United States in 1896 and Mary followed two years later. They were likely still trying to find their place by settling in the Polish neighborhood that offered them some of the comforts of home. By 1910, Peter and his wife had four children and a sister-in-law living with them two blocks from where they lived the decade before. While the move was small in scale, they did manage to leave the most densely populated block in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. However, unlike Anton Metrikis, Peter remained at the same address a decade later in 1920. He and Mary had three more children and he still worked in the packing house. He had moved into a more skilled position as an egg candler, but he had not in the 20 years since his arrival been able to move geographically and socially as Anton had. His is another story of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. ⁹

History

The swampy wasteland was selected in the mid-1860s by the small but ambitious meatpackers and investors as a central location for cattle and hogs. When the site was chosen, it was outside of the city boundary in what was called Lake Township. The location, despite its swampy drawbacks, was ideal in many ways. First, it was adjacent to the south branch of the Chicago River which connected with Lake Michigan to the East and the Mississippi to the West through the Illinois & Michigan Canal and near multiple railroad lines. Additionally, it was far enough outside the densely settled area to distant the central business district from the foul odors. Land price, access to transportation, and distance from population center were all factors that went into choosing the location. Much more would make this location a place.

When the Union Stockyards opened on Christmas Day 1865, they immediately needed thousands of workers. The available labor pool at the time was largely made up of rural to urban migrants or Irish and German immigrants some of whom had fled famine and political repression years before. The meatpacking industry had not yet benefitted from Frederick Taylor's efficiency drive and many of the jobs on the line were skilled jobs. At the top were butchers whose skill in carving up animals while wasting little to none of their parts would allow these workers to make more money as a way to maintain a consistent force of skilled butchers. As the plants moved their cost cutting focus from the yard to the plant, the role of the butcher decreased. Some of these skilled workers moved into middle-management positions as foremen and managers and moved their families away from the smell of the yards to the growing ring of streetcar suburbs like Englewood, directly south of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. ¹⁰

Industrial work attracted many different groups to the stockyards creating a need for what historian Louis Carroll Wade called "social anchors." ¹¹ The Irish, as in many cities of the North, arrived in such large numbers that they were able to gain some degree of political power and, as a result, better paying patronage positions within the city. The Irish enclave that developed near the stockyards is called Bridgeport and was the center of Irish political power (the Daley family, the ruling dynasty of Chicago, lived in Bridgeport). Germans too created an enclave adjacent to the yards called Hamburg as well as many others on the north side of the city. For both Irish and Germans the center of social life was the church. Irish Catholics built Nativity of Our Lord Parish in 1868 and many more were added later. ¹² For the Irish, religion and nationalism were centrifugal forces to help sustain unity with the city. Other ethnicities, particularly German, were not united under one religion and struggled to create a voting bloc that would give them political power within the ward. Despite the differences, the church offered not only spiritual comfort but provided needed services for the people of the community. Over time these "old immigrants" were able to gain some degree of membership in American society.

By the turn of the century many of the Irish and Germans moved into higher paying positions or out of the stockyards altogether, the next wave of immigrants, largely from Southern and Eastern Europe, were already arriving in large numbers to take their place in the lowest paying jobs. One way for the previous immigrants to gain in stature was by denigrating the new arrivals by calling them "clannish" people who "lived indescribably filth." ¹³ Despite these aspersions, or because of them, these groups also worked to establish the social support network that would help them succeed in this new and hostile industrial machine. They established churches, banks, athletic clubs, and social organizations to create a sense of the old world in Chicago.

Polish and Bohemian were followed by Lithuanian and Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, but all came in search of employment at the packing plants near the yards and, like those before them, needed to live within walking distance of their jobs. The large numbers enabled the creation of new ethnic enclaves to serve the needs of the people and help them in their transition to their new lives in the United States. Churches were the center of community life. There were 15 Catholic Churches in the Back of the Yards neighborhood serving a specific ethnic group. Community organizations and clubs offered new immigrants opportunities to socialize and seek out support. As James Barrett contends in his book, Work and Community in the Jungle, "social life in the community flowed along paths shaped by a strong ethnic identification among the various nationalities. One striking indication of this division was the almost total absence of interethnic marriages." ¹⁴ Even the saloons were separated by ethnicity and did not offer a friendly welcome to anyone outside the group. Such segregation served the cause of community cohesiveness that softened the hard landing that awaited many immigrants new to the city.

Yet, the creation of enclaves did not separate people entirely. In the Back of the Yards neighborhood, Lithuanians and Polish, Polish and Bohemian, and Slovak and Polish often overlapped by block and interaction and encounter were everyday occurrences. David Roediger's entry in the Encyclopedia of Chicago speaks to this: "Workplaces, such as the famously mixed stockyards and garment factories, threw populations together promiscuously. Neighborhoods did likewise, so that the well-studied Italian and Polish districts of the city, for example, were far from only Italian or Polish and sometimes contained only a minority of residents from the group that gave the area its ethnic name and identity." ¹⁵ These were spaces of identity and encounter.

Packing house owners were purposeful in their mixing of ethnicities within the factory in order to exacerbate ethnic tensions and limit the workers ability to organize. Eventually unions took hold in the stockyards despite the abundant labor pool. Unions provided another means for community building within the neighborhood and helped the somewhat rigid ethnic lines begin to fade. Encounters between men and women under the common struggle of labor was a unifying force in the neighborhood. Such unity, however, did not extend to everyone.

Until the eve of World War I, European immigrants and their first generation children were more than enough to fill the stockyard labor needs. When war broke out in 1914, European labor could not continue to feed the industrial machine. Factory owners had to find workers elsewhere and continued to seek out African Americans workers from the South to both meet the labor needs and serve as strikebreakers in times of labor tensions. By the 1920s, this demand became even stronger with the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act which established quotas on European immigration. Mexican immigrants were not included in the 1924 act and were increasingly a source of labor for railroad and steel mills in the Midwest. Beginning in the 1940s and increasing in the 1960s through 1970s, Mexicans began moving into the neighborhood in larger numbers. However, this wave coincided with the closing of the stockyards in 1971.

While work––finding a job, keeping a job, surviving on the pay, trying to move up––was central to the lives of people in Back of the Yards, workers were limited in their agency in this arena. Much of their lives were determined by the decisions of the Packinghouse owners. Because of this, their private lives were places where choices could be made about leisure and interaction. There were many spaces within the community where interactions took place.

One of the unifying spaces for the residents of Back of the Yards was the saloon. Mary McDowell's book states that there was one saloon for every forty voters in the neighborhood. James Barrett maps the saloons and shows the incredible density within the area directly adjacent to the stockyards and packing houses. For many workers the saloon was where you could get a hot meal and a cold beer for lunch. Similar to saloons but serving a mixed gender crowd were dance halls. Dance halls, as Kathy Peiss, argues were an important part of working-class leisure activities. Some dances were sponsored by local organizations or churches and chaperoned by parents and community members who shared a parent's watchful eye while others were run out of saloons by neighborhood gangs who made a profit for themselves. The latter were often places where young people could meet each other away from the watchful eye of first generation parents who brought their traditional beliefs with them to the United States. ¹⁶

Another space of encounter was the University of Chicago settlement. Chartered in 1898 and run by Mary McDowell a sociologist at the university, the settlement offered a variety of activities and opportunities that brought neighbors together. In fact the diversity of the residents was one of the main reasons for the establishment of the settlement house. As Mary McDowell said, "In a community of such widely different social and religious elements there is need for a strong centralizing influence which shall be non-partisan and non-sectarian, yet in the deepest sense religious, drawing men and women together on the basis of a common humanity, emphasizing the fatherliness of God and proving the brotherliness of man by social service." ¹⁷ (McDowell, 8) Residents of the Back of the Yards could take their children to play on the playground, enroll their sons in manual training classes, or partake in lectures on topics that ranged from "The Evolution of the Factory System" to "Shakespeare."

Parks and picnics were another form of interaction and recreation in the neighborhood. As Randy McBee mentioned in her book Dance Hall Days, public parks provided affordable outings for working class families. Benefitting from the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, multiple parks were constructed in the the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Cornell Square Park was built in 1904 and both Davis Square Park and Sherman Park were built in 1905 as a result of reform efforts to bring recreation and beauty to underserved communities in Chicago. Davis Square Park, located near the most densely populated area of the Back of the Yards neighborhood, had a community building with a gym and classrooms as well as a swimming pool. Many events listed in the articles from the Foreign Press Survey were held at parks and in park district buildings. ¹⁸

For the neighborhood children schools were another place of encounter. Schools built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often built in the neoclassical style as a reminder of the foundations of Greek and Roman learning. While a number of parents sought to limit the influence of the new country on their children and chose to send them to their local parochial schools, those with limited means were resigned to the nearby public school. As such, the rosters of students were a reflection of the demographics of the neighborhood. A 1912 report carried out by the University of Chicago Settlement provides a picture of school life during this time period.