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:
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 19th
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:
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 19th 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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