1909 Greektown Chicago -- You are There

One of my most fervent wishes is to get as close to my ancestors as possible. I yearn to look into their apartment windows, listen to their dinner conversation, or shadow them as they go about their daily work. Perhaps what I want most is to sit with them and ask questions:  what made you leave your birth country, where did you settle in the US, what were your communities like in America, and what did you do for entertainment?

I came closer to my ancestors than ever before when I discovered a journal article on JSTOR by Grace Abbott, “A Study of the Greeks in Chicago,”

Grace Abbott, 1878-1939, 1930 Nov. 17, 
LC-USZ62-73282, 

Library of Congress Prints and
 Photographs

 Division Washington, D.C. 
20540 USA

published in 1909. (Note: for more information on JSTOR, please see my post of Sept 30, 2014) Not only did Ms. Abbott live in Chicago during the times my Greek ancestors were there, but she studied Hull House census data gathered from the Greek community and then wrote about her findings. As I read her piece, I found answers to some of my questions about the lives of the Greek immigrants to Chicago, including my great grandfather Peter Flessouras, who came to America in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

From my research, I know that Peter Flessouras came from Pigadakia, a small village south of Tripoli in the Peloponnese area of Greece. (Please see my post of Nov 16, 2015 to see maps of Peter’s Greek homeland.) 

But I didn’t know until I read Abbott’s Study that:

 “Most of the Greeks who come to the United States (were) from the Peloponnesus.” (p. 380) 

This area of Greece has so much rocky terrain that farming is difficult. When my husband and I visited the Peloponnese in September of 2015, we saw this challenging terrain.

View of terraced land once used for
farming in Vatheia, taken
by Bert Schuster, Sept 2015

With agriculture as the principle means of livelihood at that time, the lack of good crop land led to a larger migration from the Peloponnese than from other parts of Greece where the soil was more conducive to farming. This small piece of geographical information partially answered my question to my great grandfather: why did you leave Greece?

Ms. Abbott also reveals an interesting behavior of Greek immigrants: 

“All of them talk of ‘the Athens’ as though it had been their home, but although it belongs to them in a very intimate sort of way, very few of them have ever seen it. For example, out of 424 who live within a few blocks of Hull House 205 came from Sparta, 102 from Tripolis, and 5 from Athens. Moreover, most of those who say they came from Sparta and Tripolis, have not really lived in those towns but in the country villages nearby.” (p. 380)

I can see why my great grandfather might say he was from Tripolis as no one outside of his community would have heard of Pigadakia, 15miles south of there. 

Ms. Abbott provides a fact about the life of my ancestors in Greece that I did not know: 

“There is peasant proprietorship of land in the Peloponnesus and most of those who emigrate have lived on small farms which they owned and worked for themselves.” (p. 385) 

So, my Greek ancestors were not tenant farmers as my Irish and Swiss forebears likely were. 

Perhaps this experience working for themselves helped steer the Greeks into areas of the American economy that would allow them to be more independent than if they went to work in factories.

I have heard from talking with Greek Americans that an entry-level job for Greek immigrants, as for many other ethnic groups who came to America, was working on the railroad. Ms. Abbott confirms this:

 “Like other foreigners most of the Greeks must first serve an apprenticeship in the gangs that do the railroad and general construction work for the country.” (p. 386) 

Steam shovel doing construction work for the Western

 Pacific Railroad, Thompson, P. J., 1906, LC-USZ62-29487,

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

 Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

But the fierce desire for independence and an entrepreneurial spirit which the Greeks brought from home combined to make their time on the railroad

 “…shorter than with most nationalities.” (p. 386) Within a short while “…he has learned some English and has accumulated enough money to venture on a small commercial enterprise for himself. He becomes a peddler, perhaps later owns a fruit-stand and finally an ice-cream parlor.” (p. 386)

Since there were no farms in early 20^th century Chicago, Greek farmers adapted to their new conditions by peddling food instead of growing it. Some photographs from the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division show how peddling foods was not unfamiliar to Greeks. (Note: I came across these photos on the internet but did not know their source. I sought the help of Maureen Taylor who is known as "the photo detective" for her skills in photo identification. Thank you, Maureen, for identifying the source of the following two photos.)

Poultry pedlar in Greek costume, Athens, Greece, c1895,

 LC-USZ62-65904, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

 Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Areopagus and Theseion, N.W. form Athens, toward sacred way to

 Eleusis, c1907 Jan. 31, LC-USZ62-66122, Library of Congress

 Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Peter Flessouras described himself as a peddler and huckster on several birth records of his children and on the 1910 Chicago, Cook, IL federal census. However, unlike many of his cousins, he did not progress to become the owner of a grocery, a candy store or a restaurant. Here is a photo that could have been my great grandfather:

Street peddler pushing his cart past Kentron Cafe and Mouzakiotis

 Music Store on Halsted St., courtesy of the

National Hellenic Museum, Chicago, Illinois

Another question that tugs at my mind: what kinds of institutions did the Greeks build in their new American communities? Again, Ms. Abbott provides an answer:

 “The largest settlement of Chicago Greeks is in the nineteenth ward, north and west of Hull House. Here is the Greek Orthodox Church, a school supervised by the priest in which about thirty children are taught a little English, some Greek, much of the achievements of Hellas…here too, is the combination Greek bank, steamship ticket office, notary public, and employment agency, and the coffee-houses, where the men drink black Greek coffee, play cards, speculate on the outcome of the next Greek lottery, and in the evening sing to the accompaniment of the Greek bagpipes or -- evidence of their Americanization -- listen to the phonograph.” (p. 380)

As part of the Hull House papers, period photos were taken that add to the data collected from door-to-door interviews conducted by census collectors trained by Hull House. Fortunately, some photos from the Hull HouseYearbooks of the early decades of the twentieth century are online, thanks to the University of Illinois at Chicago. These add to Ms. Abbott’s description of the activities that the Greeks pursued after hours:

A Group of Greek Wrestlers – Hull House Gymnasium,

6375.JPG, Hull House Yearbook, 1927, p. 39,

http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/ref/collection/uic_hull/id/284

Greek Woman's Club, 6360.JPG, 

Hull House Yearbook, 1910, p. 24, 

http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/ref/collection/uic_hull/id/275

In conclusion, genealogists seek ways to connect with their ancestors. Since we are physically unable to talk with those who have passed away, one tool that enables us to “visit” the times our ancestors lived is through contemporary written and photographic materials. Journals from our target time period can be very useful in building a picture of vanished lives. JSTOR provides a way to access many such journals. 

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.

Categories: genealogy tools