You Are There: Chicago 1837-1920

Yesterday's Main Street, Kathy,
January 2, 2025, Creative Commons,
 Flickr.com.

When I was a young child living in Chicago in the early 1950s, my parents brought me to the Museum of Science and Industry. I remember several visits, and each time I would gaze fixedly at one exhibit in particular: “Yesterday’s Main Street,”a representation of a cobblestoned Chicago street in 1910, with storefronts lining both sides.

Yesterday's Main Street, Dainaar,
April 2, 2010, Creative Commons,
Flickr.com.

 For some reason, I never got the chance to walk down the street and peer into the windows as I longed to do. Perhaps this was the beginning of my yearning to know what Chicago was like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when my ancestors lived there.

When I began investigating my family background and found that the Irish Carney/Kearney family line lived in Chicago from 1860 on, I was even more passionate about learning about life in early Chicago. Following the Irish, my German, Greek and Czech ancestors came to make their home in this young city. I wanted to walk the streets my people walked, see the sights they saw every day, hear the sounds that might have soothed or tormented them, and even smell the scents that surrounded them.

Fortunately for me, I came across the book Challenging Chicago: Coping With Everyday Life, 1837-1920  by Perry Duis.

Used by permission of publisher, University
of Illinois Press

The author goes way beyond the surface of sights and sounds. He plunges the reader into the gritty but also glorious world that was Chicago in this time period.  From this book, I learned the risks and the obstacles that challenged my people, but I also learned about the opportunities.

Dr. Duis is a master at painting a picture with words of what it was like to live in Chicago in those early years. Although this is a scholarly work covering the history, social mores, technological advances, and much more of this period and place, it is as readable and engrossing as a historical novel. However be advised, I may be prejudiced as I love nineteenth century Chicago!

In the introduction, Duis tells his readers the purpose of this book: to explain the challenges of living in a new, fast growing city and how its denizens dealt with them:

“The millions of all social classes who flocked to American cities…needed to resort to survival strategies. Urban life was a new experience for most of them. Raised on farms and in small towns, both here and abroad, they were often unprepared for what lay ahead. Many found that cities were far more congested, crowded, dangerous, unpleasant, immoral, and unhealthy than they had anticipated.” p. xii Duis

First, Dr. Duis tells us what forces helped create Chicago and other cities. By the mid 1800s, the industrial revolution  was taking hold in the United States. Farm workers living in poverty in rural America and in Europe began seeking employment in the new factories that were springing up in cities like New York and Chicago and were hungry for workers. To give an idea of the astonishing rate of population growth in Chicago, Duis writes:

“A populace of 4,170 in 1837 became 29,963 in 1850 and 109,260 in 1860, and it was on its way to three times that figure by the time of the Great Fire in 1871.” p. 7 Duis

Here is a photograph of State Street c1893 which shows the congested conditions of Chicago living:

Traffic on State Street, Chicago, U.S.A., Washington, D.C. : 

J.F. Jarvis, publisher, c1893, LC-USZ62-101801, 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

With such rapid growth, there wasn’t much time to pay attention to the environment – the land the people lived on and traversed. People, including the city fathers, were focused on business. But nature was not to be ignored.

From the time before the first Europeans came to the site of Chicago in the late 1600s, the area was plagued by mud much of the year. In their book Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade explain the cause of that mud:

(It)  “…was the result of ancient geologic forces. More than four hundred million years before, the site lay beneath a tropical sea ….Before the waters receded there was deposited on the sea bottom the material (limestone) that constitutes the bedrock of Chicago….Above the limestone, glaciers left layers of impermeable clay that prevented the draining off of surface waters and created a high water table.” p. 3 Duis

  # 69 State Street, South from Lake,

 Views of Chicago, Carbutt, Photographer,

Chicago History Museum, used by license.

It was this high water table that caused the omnipresent mud which challenged Chicagoans when they were attempting to get from place to place on foot. The mud also caused problems for workers as they labored to keep streets open when they sunk into the mud.  p. 5 Duis

But the mud was not the only environmental problem facing Chicagoans. The city leaders thought the cost of pipes and sewers too costly for the new city, so sanitation became a problem. Large numbers of new immigrants living in overcrowded tenements with no waste removal systems led, among other problems, to very dirty streets:

In 1837, the city declared that “No dung, dead animal or putrid meats and fish or decayed vegetables (were) to be deposited in any street, avenue, lane or public square.” p. 5 Duis

Just walking in the city was a nightmare:

“The lack of sidewalks forced pedestrians to walk on the sides of the road, where debris, garbage, stray animals, mud, standing water, and dust impeded daily travel.” p. 5 Duis

Ore docks, blast furnaces & steel mills, South Chicago, Ill.,
International Harvester Co., Chicago, Ill., Geo. R. Lawrence Co. , copyright claimant,
 c1907, C-USZ62-41402,  Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

So thanks to Dr. Duis, I have a good picture of what it was like for my ancestors to try to get to work each day through the mud and trash. I know also where they likely found employment: the new iron and steel mills, the stockyards and meat packing plants, the railroads, and garment making shops. But how did people find these and other jobs?

Birds-eye view of Union Stock yards, Chicago, Ill., U.S.A., 

Meadville, Pa.: Keystone View Company, c1897, 

LC-USZ62-45849, Library of Congress 

Prints and Photographs Division 

Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Chapter 9, “Chicago is Work,” talks about the different ways jobs were advertised: employment agencies, saloon message boards, hiring halls, and word of mouth. In addition to a way of making a living, a Chicagoan had to have a place to go before and after work. Finding housing was yet another challenge.

A basic facet of life is shelter, and I have long wondered the kind of housing my Chicago ancestors had. Different pieces of evidence (including the sad finding that an infant of the Carney/Kearney family was buried in the pauper’s area of Calvary Cemetery, the fact that my people likely left Ireland in the famine years, and the family story that my great grandmother was in an orphanage) attest to the probability that the Carney/Kearney and Duffy families were poor. Perhaps part of the reason I have trouble locating them in the city directories and federal census records is because of their poverty. Duis tells us that many Chicago families moved every May 1^st, but poor families moved even more often, sometimes to avoid back rent they couldn’t afford to pay or in the hope of securing cleaner, less crowded lodgings:

“For the very poor, eviction or the search for more sanitary and safe tenements often led to the transfer of their meager possessions every few months. Their stay in one place was often so brief that they used neighborhood saloons as permanent mailing addresses.” p. 85 Duis

Too bad the saloons didn’t keep ledgers filled with addresses of the neighborhood denizens!

Another challenge for Chicago’s workers was finding food. Due to crowds, increasing commuting distance from work, and unreliable public transportation, working people couldn’t get home for lunch.  Saloon owners saw a way to capitalize on their roles as post box and job message board. Why not serve lunch to bring in customers to eat and, of course, drink? Initially, saloons charged for these noon meals, but when a politician/saloon owner started handing out free oysters (p. 157- 158 Duis), the concept if free food to lure customers spread across the city. Thus, was born, as Dr. Duis tells us, a new concept – the free lunch.

Image from page 208 of “Blasts” from “The Ram's Horn” (1902), 

Chicago, The Ram's Horn Co., Internet Archive 

Book Images, Flickr.com.

But that wasn’t the only thing Chicago gave America in the area of eating. When I was a little girl, my mother took me downtown to a cafeteria. I was mesmerized by all the food choices! This experience inspired the essay below from me in the third grade:

Written by Pat Spears, 1953
 school assignment, John M. Palmer
Elementary School, Chicago, IL

But I had no idea then that my city invented this restaurant phenomenon. In order to reduce the cost of lunch for working women, the Ogontz Club came up with the idea to do away with wait staff and instead, let patrons choose their food from large tables and carry their plates back to the seating area. p. 159

Thus was born our modern day cafeteria. A fellow blogger, Ms. Jan Whitaker, wrote a wonderful poem, “The Cafeteria,” which perfectly captures my fascination with this form of dining.

To conclude, we have taken just a quick visit to the wonderful world of nineteenth century Chicago, courtesy of Perry Duis. But there is more to explore in his historical tour guide, including how early Chicagoans sought to escape the problems of life and spend some moments enjoying what the city had to offer, covered in Part Four: Spare Moments.

One last note, in a press release of the book by the University of Illinois Press, James L. Swanson from a Chicago Tribune review was quoted: “…the illustrations and endnotes are worth the price of the book.” And the notes are indeed a treasure.

categories: genealogy tools

Academic Journals: A Powerhouse of Research

Most genealogy researchers are very familiar with the journals of genealogy societies: local, regional and national. An example of a local society journal is the ChicagoGenealogist, a publication of the Chicago Genealogical Society. The Western New York Genealogical SocietyJournal, published by said society , covers eight counties. A national organization, such as the NationalGenealogical Society, will have a national journal -- the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Many genealogical journals, including the ones above, are classified as academic or scholarly journals. When a writer submits an article to an academic journal, he or she can expect to have the piece peer-reviewed. Because of the rigorous standards that writers in academic journals must adhere to, the quality of the research is very high.

en:State University of New York at Brockport's 

Hartwell Hall, east side, DanielPenfield,

 31 May 2010, Wikimedia.

Peer-reviewed journals follow some established patterns.The Department of Sociology at the College of Brockport posted an article, Reading Journal Articles, on the college website, which outlines the framework that makes up a report of research in an academic journal. The parts of this framework look very similar to the parts of a good research plan; the basic elements of research are all here:

First, the scholarly article begins with an Abstract or summary of the research question: What is the reason for this study? What are the topics/questions being investigated?

Second, comes the Introduction:“What is already known about this topic and what is left to discover?” 

Third, is the Literature Review: “The review of literature is meant to discuss previous work on the topic, point out what questions remain, and relate the research presented in the rest of the article to the existing literature.” 

The fourth part of a journal article is the Methods and Data: What did the author find and how did he/she find it? 

The fifth section is Analysis and Results: What analytic techniques does the author use to tease out information from the data? How does the author interpret the findings?  

The final step in the reporting on research is the Discussion and Conclusion:  How do the findings connect with other data? What other questions can be asked based on the new information? Has this research added any new knowledge to this topic that would be valuable to others?

Many genealogical societies publish scholarly journals that contain information very helpful to family researchers. But academic journals in a variety of disciplines often contain articles of great interest to genealogists.

in the stacks, Anna Creech, April 14, 2005, 

Creative Commons, flickr.com

Where might one look to find these publications? Scholarly journals have long resided in college and other libraries. But in this age of the internet, digital copies are now available for many journals.

Used by permission JSTOR

According to Wikipedia, in 1995 Princeton University led an effort to digitize ten journals at seven libraries in order to save storage space. The project was called JSTOR, “pronounced JAY-stor; short for Journal Storage.” Today JSTOR offers “more than 1900 journal titles” from over 900 publishers. 

To get an idea of the breadth of the journal offerings at JSTOR:

Go to the webpage and follow these steps:

In the upper right of the screen (next to JSTOR logo), click “About.”

On the menu bar at the top of the screen, hold the mouse on “For Publishers” to access a drop-down menu.

Click on “JSTOR Publishers & Content Providers.”

This gives you an A-Z list of the more than 900 content providers whose journals are in the database. You can also find journals arranged by content area: Browse by Subject.

I did a quick search and found these intriguing organizations sure to get a genealogist’s interest up:

Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society

Economic History Society

Georgia Historical Society

Presbyterian Historical Society

University of Arizona Vertical Logo,

 https://brand.arizona.edu/guide/identity,

19 September 2014, Wikimedia.

Now that we know about JSTOR and its treasures, how can we access the journals? For faculty, staff and students of one of the 8,400 institutions that belong to JSTOR world-wide (including many colleges and universities, museums and public libraries), unlimited access is free. If you are an alumna or alumnus of one of these participating universities, you may also have free access. I was greatly pleased to see my alma mater, the University of Arizona, on the list!

How about for un-affiliated individuals? JSTOR has two ways you can gain access: JPASS (costs and has some limits) and Register and Read  (free but has limits.) JSTOR is also offering free access (some limits) to journals “published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere” through a program called Early Journal Content. 

Well, now that we know how to access journals at JSTOR and what kinds of journals we can expect to find, let’s look at the results of a search. One of my family lines is Irish, and they lived in Chicago from the 1850s. I want to learn as much about the lives of these people in the mid to late nineteenth century as I can. In JSTOR, I did a search on “Irish Chicago” and got over 2500 hits.

 But on page 5, I found this listing:

Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons in Boston and Chicago in 1860 David W. Galenson American Journal of Education, Vol. 105, No. 3 (May, 1997), pp. 261-293.

It is important to remember that although this article was not written for genealogists, it has great significance for anyone interested in American history:  life in large cities in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on the lives of immigrants. 

The ghetto, Chicago, Ill., Bird's-eye view of street scene, c1920, 

LC-USZ62-80739, Library of Congress Prints and

 Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Dr. Galenson conducted this study to shed more light on a question that has challenged experts in academia, government, and non-profits: does growing up in poverty in urban ghettos decrease children’s chances of becoming employable, responsible, engaged citizens? As he states in the introduction to the study:

“In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are injured economically by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating.”  p. 261.

As Dr. Galenson noted, this concern with the adverse effects of poverty on immigrant children is not new:

“It was often expressed in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the problem of immigrant children who failed to attend school.” p. 261-262.

The purpose of this study was to “investigate the concern of (George Emerson, prominent Boston educator) and others in the nineteenth century that the children of immigrants who lived in ethnic ghettos were less likely to attend school than their peers who lived elsewhere.” p. 262.

1860 Census Questionnaire,
1860 Image Gallery,
US Census Bureau website.

Of great interest to genealogical researchers is the source Dr. Galenson used for his study: the 1860 Federal Census for Boston, MA and Chicago, IL. He looked at each of the wards in both Boston and Chicago and compared them by wealth and ethnicity – with a focus on Irish heads of household.

Many of us have perused census documents, but it is unlikely that we have done anything like what Dr. Galenson did with the data.  Among the information the 1860 Census asked for were the ages of the children living in the household and if they had attended school at any time during the last year, what ethnicity the people in the household were and if the family income was over or under $1,000 for the period.

Correlating this data for the different wards in Boston and Chicago allowed Dr. Galenson to see the effects of the wealth of a household, and if the household were Irish, on the chances of the children attending school. And what he discovered was startling:

“…in Boston the probability of school attendance was positively related to a ward’s wealth and negatively related to its proportion of Irish residents, but in Chicago the reverse was true.”  p. 270-271.

In other words, if you were a poor, Irish male child in Chicago in 1860, you had a better chance of attending school than a child of similar wealth and ethnicity in Boston.

The rest of Galenson’s study attempted to explain why this difference existed. He found that there was no Catholic School System in Boston, so the public schools in Boston were pretty much the only game in town – “…more than 85 percent of all children who attended school in Boston in 1855 and 1860 went to public schools.”  p. 271 In other words, the public schools had a monopoly on the market. Unless you were wealthy, your children had only one choice – the public school.

In Chicago, on the other hand, the public schools had competition from the Catholic Church. In fact, in 1860 nearly 36% of Chicago children attended private school (mainly Catholic.)  p. 275

Why would it make such a difference on school attendance if a child had the choice to attend a public or a Catholic school? Galenson found the answer in a condition that differed in each city. Boston had a public system that went back to 1635 while Chicago’s “…basis for a city school system was first established by an act of the Illinois legislature in 1837….” p. 283. Along with the much longer history of its public education system, Boston had more nativist sentiment among the administrators who ran the schools and the teachers who interacted with the students.

American citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause? . . . 

A paper entitled the American patriot, Boston : Published by

 J.E. Farwell & Co., 1852, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07575,

 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

 Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Chicago was different:

“In contrast to Boston, Chicago’s early public school system may have also had a different attitude toward immigrants. Chicago’s population was very heterogeneous from its earliest days, as the foreign-born made up 30 percent of its population in 1843 and more than 50 percent in 1850.”  p. 284. 

So what conclusion did Dr. Galenson make as to why Irish boys in 1860 Chicago attended school in greater numbers than their cohorts in Boston?

Irish children in 1860 Chicago had the choice of attending a Catholic School where their ethnicity, social class and religion were respected. On the other hand,  Irish school-age boys in 1860 Boston had only one choice of school -- the public school, where they encountered discrimination due to their poverty, their Irishness, and their Catholicism.   

I learned an incredible amount of history from this academic study – history, economic, sociology, education, immigration – all covered in this article whose author was comparing school attendance of Irish immigrant sons in 1860 Boston and Chicago. And only in JSTOR did I find this resource.

Categories: genealogy tools

Discoveries at the Chicago History Museum Part II

Here I am again in the Chicago History Museum (see my post of  Dec 27, 2012 for Part I.)

After I checked out the Sanborn maps, I took a walk around the Research Center. It is really important to become familiar with the lay of the land, to see what the site you are visiting offers. Although much of the material is kept in closed stacks outside of the main Center room, there are open bookcases along the walls.


As I was looking at some books on a shelf, my eyes were drawn to one title in particular: 

The Slum and the Ghetto: neighborhood deterioration and middle-class reform, Chicago, 1880 – 1930 was written by Thomas Lee Philpott, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas. Just by chance, I had found a reference that would give me new and chilling insight into the NearWest Side where my Irish ancestors lived in the late nineteenth century. I wrote about this area in my post of December 6, 2012 when I showed how Clara Laughlin described that area and time period of Chicago in her novel, Just Folks. Now I would have a view of my ancestors’ neighborhood from a historian’s perspective.

In order to understand how so many people in Chicago and other large American cities were living in crowded, unsanitary, dark substandard housing in the late nineteenth century, known as tenements, (see photo below that shows the wooden tenement buildings built so close together)

The Maxwell Street area in 1906, from the Charles R. Clark Collection, in the folder for "Interpersonal Relations--Manners and Customs--City and town life--Slums--Illinois--Chicago--Near West Side.", used by permission of the Chicago History Museum. 

 we need to look at several factors.  It took a convergence of all of these factors to produce a perfect storm

of squalid living conditions that led to disease and death for a large number of people who lived in the tenements of Chicago.

First, in the latter part of the nineteenth century industrial progress and capacity had grown exponentially and stockyards, meat packing plants and factories of all kinds sprang up in many cities, especially Chicago.¹

The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago, 1870, Photo by Rascher, Charles, Chicago: Published by Walsh & Co., c1878, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

These businesses required thousands of workers to do unskilled labor at very low wages. And where did this labor come from? A great number of Europeans were looking for new opportunities. The photo below shows hundreds of new arrivals from Europe waiting for processing at Ellis Island:

Underwood & Underwood, photographer, c1906. cph 3a23424 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a23424, [Emigrants in "pens" at Ellis Island, New York, probably on or near Christmas --note the decorations,] Library of Congress.

A second factor in the mix that produced tenement slums in Chicago was that during this time economic and political conditions in Europe were driving many poor and low-skilled people to look to America for a better life. But no one in the municipal government of Chicago was actually planning for this influx. So it was left to market forces, in this case land developers and landlords, (see section: Tenement Inspections as Public Health Practice, paragraph 4) to fill the areas in and around the new industrial areas with as many housing units as they could fit and to build them for the cheapest price. This was the formula that resulted in tenement slums: a need on the part of poor people in Europe to escape their living conditions that left them no hope for economic improvement in their countries of origin and a need on the part of industry in Chicago for huge numbers of workers to do low-skilled work at low wages:

Image of eight girls sitting and facing a narrow table, sewing by hand on material held in their laps, during a sweatshop inspection in Chicago, Illinois. The girls are all looking at the camera, 1093. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

A third factor in this already bad situation in the Near West Side happened in 1871. It was the Great Chicago Fire  in which “One-third of the city’s 300,000 residents lost their homes.” ²    

Gibson & Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio), c1871, The Great fire at Chicago Oct. 9th 1871. View from the west side, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92506070/, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Many of these refugees ended up in the tenements, and this added to the already deadly overcrowding.

By the late 1880s, the slum housing of Chicago had become so bad that government officials had to take notice. Social reformers, such as Jane Adams 

Jane Addams, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

who founded Hull House

Hull House Women's Club building on Polk Street, 1905, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

in the Near West Side, began documenting conditions in the tenements while offering language programs, day-care centers, playgrounds, nutritional advice and hope to those who had been relegated to the bottom of the social ladder by low wages in dead-end jobs with no way out.  Philpott describes their plight:

“The great majority of the laborers had no marketable skills. The work they did was hard, stultifyingly dull, and often dangerous. They swept and shoveled streets, dug ditches, sweated over garments, peddled from pushcarts, tended machines. Employment was irregular because of market fluctuations and weather conditions. Laborers went long stretches without work….”³

In 1901,Robert Hunter published a report for the City Homes Association  called Tenement Conditions in Chicago.  Hunter studied blocks around Hull House and documented the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, no access to clean water, absence of light in many of the tenement rooms, among other grievous conditions.  According to his statistical research, Hunter stated that between 35%and 47% of Chicagoans lived in substandard housing.⁴

As mentioned above, in the late nineteenth century, European immigrants came by the thousands to find jobs in Chicago as well as in other American cities. They found low-paying jobs that only allowed them to afford substandard housing in tenements. The immigrants came from not only one country but from many, and they arrived in stages, as Philpott describes: 

“The area around Hull House was a ‘labyrinth’ of nationalities and creeds. Catholics predominated on three sides of the settlement, and the Jewish ‘ghetto’ was to the south. Protestants were scattered through the district….Most Jews were either Russians or Poles….The Catholics…came from more than a dozen different counties….The most numerous foreigners at the beginning were Irishmen, Bohemians, and Germans. They gradually gave way to Italians, Russians, Poles and Greeks. But at any given time in the 1890s people of twenty-six or more nationalities could be found living within three blocks of Hull House.”⁵

My own family history bears out what Professor Philpott observed. First my Irish ancestors showed up on the Near West Side around the 1860s. They lived on Halsted at Hastings. Then the Bohemian contingent arrived in the early 1900s and settled on Blue Island Street.

As we saw above, the immigrants lacked money to demand better housing and they lacked any social cohesion because of the maze of different languages and cultures that were found in the tenements. Instead of cooperation, there was competition and the attitude of “We don’t trust or like you because you’re different from us.” In addition, many of the immigrants who had arrived earlier in the century disliked the more recent arrivals, seeing them as interlopers who just added to the poor, overcrowded living conditions. Photo below shows the crowded conditions of a typical market street in Chicago in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century:

 One of the busiest streets in the world--State St., Chicago, Ill. (18 miles long), N. from Madison St. New York : Underwood & Underwood, publishers, c1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

This isolation into small groups worked against community building. And this was another factor that kept the population of the Near West Side powerless. As Philpott writes:

“A community crisscrossed by so many lines of cleavage seemed to lack all coherence. Nothing the settlement workers encountered in the tenement districts distressed them more than the disorganization and disorder they saw all around them. To Jane Adams it looked as if the entire ‘social organism,’ from the family level up, had ‘broken down’ on the Near West Side.” ⁶

Thus we have seen how the perfect storm of tenement housing developed from six factors:

1.     The explosion of industrial activity in Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century which resulted in the need for large numbers of low-skilled workers to fill the factories and slaughter houses

2.     The influx of poor, low-skilled immigrants from Europe

3.     The lack of a municipal plan to house these new immigrants which left a vacuum: the need for some kind of shelter for the newly arrived workers

4.     The type of shelter devised by businessmen (responding to market forces) who came in and built as many housing units as the land would hold at the cheapest cost

5.     The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which forced many of the homeless to seek housing in the Near West Side which added to the overcrowding

6.     The powerlessness of the poor of the Near West Side in the face of economic and political forces of the times

It would take until 1901 for the reports of reformers and the overwhelming visual evidence of huge areas of the city mired in slums to open up the eyes of both the public and the politicians of Chicago as documented on the history.comwebsite:

“In 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law--which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced--pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities. By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects.”⁷

As I have learned more about the conditions my ancestors endured in the Chicago tenements, I realize once again the debt that I owe these brave people. It was through their sacrifices as they worked to gain a foothold in this country that I have benefited. Thank you to those who came before.

Notes:

1.      Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930, The Urban Life in America Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 7.

2.      Fire of 1871, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1740.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

3.      Philpott  p. 64.

4.      City Homes Association, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/289.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

5.      Philpott, p. 67.

6.      Ibid., p. 69.

7.      Tenements, History.com, online < http://www.history.com/topics/tenements>, downloaded 5 Jan 2013.

Categories: US citizenship

Stepping back to Nineteenth Century Chicago

You’re invited on a trip back to nineteenth century Chicago. We’ll drop in on the Near West Side around Halsted and Maxwell Streets. Your ticket for this adventure is an almost forgotten nineteenth century novel, Just Folks by Clara Elizabeth Laughlin, first published in 1907.

Inside cover of Just Folks, available through InterLibrary Loan

I was introduced to Just Folks when I was preparing for my research trip to Chicago in September of 2012. I was googling sources about life in the 1870s in the Near West Side, the neighborhood where my Carney/Kearney family lived. I happened upon the website for the Northern Illinois University Libraries’ Illinois Periodicals Online(IPO) project. The goal of IPO is to digitize Illinois-based magazines so that the public will have easy access. 

When I googled for “life in 19^th century Chicago,” one of the hits was an article by Robert Bray, “The Chicago Novel, 1890-1915.”  Mr. Bray mentioned two novels that I was quite familiar with from high school and college: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. But Mr. Bray also discussed several novels about life in late 1800s Chicago written by women, one of which was Just Folks. Although the book is hard to find, the complete text of  Just Folks is available on-line.

The main character in the novel is Beth Tully, a young woman who has just arrived in Chicago from a small Illinois town to be a juvenile probation officer on the Near West Side, which is shown in the map below:

1876 map of Chicago from davidrumsey.com, wikimedia

Laughlin’s opening lines plunge the reader into the environs of the Near West Side, mentioning two neighborhood streets, a government building, and America’s first settlement house, Hull House:

“On her way over from the Juvenile Court building, on Ewing Street east of Halsted, Beth Tully stopped at the arched entrance to Hull House….” (p. 1)

This building at 771 West Ewing Street  has the distinction of being the first juvenile court building in the world. Later in this posting, we'll see why this court devoted to juveniles was placed on the Near West Side.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Near West Side was one of the most crowded, poverty-filled areas in Chicago. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was a large contributing factor to the gross overcrowding as people who lost their homes to the flames fled to the Near West Side. Also, before and after the fire, a continuing stream of new immigrants came to this part of town because of the proximity to factory jobs and the availability of low rent housing. 

The housing stock in the Near West Side may have been cheap and plentiful, but there was a downside – people were packed into flimsy tenement buildings that were dark, had no running water, had few privies for the number of tenants, and were prone to fires.

Photo Courtesy Chicago History Museum Archive, Slums Exteriors

Laughlin does a good job of describing the interior of a tenement: 

“The house was of a familiar type, two tenants on each floor and four rooms constituting each tenement. The kitchens were in the middle of the house and off each kitchen was a tiny bedroom. The ‘front room’ of the rear dwellers overlooked the back yard, the alley, and the backs of houses on the next street; and off it was a small bedroom. The front room of the other tenants on each floor …overlooked Maxwell Street; and off it was a small bedroom.” (p.8)

Laughlin captures the overwhelming presence of poverty that permeated every square inch of the Near West Side:

“Beth followed the woman through the ‘front room’…into the kitchen, which was stifling with heat and damp and that peculiar acrid odor – compounded of mustiness and personal uncleanness and stale odors of strong cooking – which every visitor to the homes of the poor knows as ‘the poverty smell.’”  (p. 27)

Now that we are familiar with the scent of poverty in 19^th century Chicago’s Near West Side, we are treated to a word picture by Laughlin of some of the busiest streets in that area:

“(from Henry Street)They went over to Halsted…and walked slowly up to Madison on the east side of the street where, for some occult reason, the five-cent theatre does not flourish. From this comparatively sedate side, they looked over to the gaudy other side where penny arcades and saloons with free vaudeville, and nickelodeons, and gaudy Greek candy parlors, vie with the groggeries (saloons) and the pawnshops in number.” (p. 95)

Following  Laughlin’s verbal description of Madison Street, here is a photograph of Maxwell Street, that is mentioned often in Just Folks, to give you a visual impression of the area:

(Credit: Photo Courtesy of Barnes Crosby and Chicago Historical Society; found on http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/services-shopping/maxwell-street-PLTRA0000133.topic)

Laughlin not only gives us a geographic grounding in the Near West Side, she also gives us a glimpse of the basic institutions in the people’s lives. Just Folks began with the Juvenile Courthouse which played a big part in the day-to-day life of the people because poverty can spawn hopelessness, and without hope the young can turn to crime as a way out.

One institution that worked to bring hope to its neighbors on the Near West Side was Hull House.

Hull House, Smith Hall, view north on South Halsted, 1910, wikimedia, from
The American Memory Collections, Library of Congress

Jane Adams established Hull House in 1889 because she wanted to provide help to the very poor in this area. In Laughlin’s book, Beth Tully thought that she could learn how to help the people by living amidst them rather than on the grounds of Hull House. Through the sentiments of Tully (p.4), Laughlin presents the mission of Hull House from the viewpoint of the people it served: rather than asking what the people wanted, those in charge of the House gave what they thought was needed. And sometimes these were the same and other times they were not.

Another institution that brought hope to its members on the Near West Side was the Catholic Church. In his book The Irish Americans: A History pgs 111-115, which can be found on books.google, Jay P. Dolan discusses the community, educational, and spiritual roles that the church played in the daily lives of its members. And it was the church that helped lift the second generation of Irish children out of poverty by teaching them the mores of America and by giving them the skills they needed to get better jobs in the parish schools, such as at Holy Family Catholic Church: 

Holy Family Church (1857) and St. Ignatius College Prep High School, (not pictured), 1869, Chicago IL, wikimedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Catholic Church was there at the beginning of a person’s life to administer baptism, as Laughlin describes: 

“He was to be christened on Tuesday…in the Holy Family Church.” (p. 215)

Due to the unsanitary conditions, the lack of medical treatment and poor nutrition because of poverty, many young children died very early on the Near West Side. My great, great grandparents, John Kearney and Mary Duffy, faced this tragedy when their son, Patrick William Kearney, died at age two in 1879. The Catholic Church was also present at the end of life when people were given the last rites and buried in a Catholic cemetery, as Laughlin describes:

“…in two days after he was christened, wee Patsy was dead….They owned a single grave in Calvary (Cemetery); in it were the two children that were dead these many years….”  (p. 216-217)

In Laughlin’s book, we have seen where and how people lived on the Near West Side, where they were baptized, worshipped, went to school, and were buried (the Catholics, that is.) One last aspect of life that was still in existence when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1950s was where they played – the amusement park of Riverview.  The Park didn’t actually open until 1904 as Riverview. Before that in the late 1800s it was called German Sharpshooter Park with picnic grounds and swings. Below is the front entrance to Riverview: Postcard photo of the entrance of Riverview Park, Chicago circa 1908. One of my favorite rides at Riverview was Shoot the Chutes Postcard photo of the Chutes ride at Riverview Park, Chicago, wikimedia. where you were carried up a tower in a small boat (kind of like an elevator.) At the top of the tower, the boat came out onto a large slide. And you shot down the “chute.” Postcard photo of the Chutes at Riverview Park, Chicago, wikimedia It looks like the characters in Just Folks also enjoyed riding the chutes:

“…an’ be taking’ ye t’ shoot th’ chutes.” (p. 142)

We have come to the end of our visit to the Near West Side of Chicago in the 19^th century. A branch of my family started their life in Chicago right there, but fortunately the next generation was able to move out from the deep poverty. It was only a move of a few miles north to Chestnut and Wells for them, but it was a huge step in improving their quality of life.

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