South Side Story

SOUTH SIDE STORY Nick Yablon Robin F. Bachin. Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 448 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00. “My God, what a place!” the young doctor exclaimed. “The refuse acres of the earth.” —Robert Herrick, The Web of Life (1900)1 This bleak assessment of the far South Side uttered by Dr. Sommers, the protagonist of Robert Herrick’s novel, would have been echoed by many of Chicago’s civic leaders of the period. The passage of an amended annexation bill in 1889—over the objections of some elite, anti-urban Hyde Parkers—had brought an extensive swath of land into the city limits, multiplying Chicago’s size more than fourfold. If the redrawing of city boundaries on a map was controversial, even more challenging tasks lay ahead: improving the physical landscape and constructing a larger civic identity on the ground. Some of the furthest outposts remained wastelands—in Herrick’s words, “bare, vacant, deserted.” Real estate lots on the far South Side were little more than “squares of land and marsh, cut up in regular patches for future house-builders” and “cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either side of an embankment.”2 An economic depression had intervened, deferring the settlement of these subdivisions and allowing the cement sidewalks to crumble and weeds to grow. And at the center of this desolate landscape—indeed, its principal cause, in Herrick’s view—were the ruins of the World’s Columbian Exposition.3 After closing its gates in early 1894, the White City remained standing, its future uncertain. The debris of its neoclassical buildings provided Herrick with an ideal setting for the illicit courtship between Dr. Sommers and a married woman, Alves Preston, who eventually shack up in an abandoned fairground booth that resembled a “time-stained” Greek temple.4 It has become a familiar historiographical move to dramatize the aspirations and contradictions of fin-de-siècle American culture by revisiting the scene of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some of the most important Reviews in American History 33 (2005) 224–232 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press YABLON / South Side Story 225 cultural and urban histories of the past two decades present the “White City,” typically in their final chapters, as the backdrop for the closing act of some epic historical drama. In Alan Trachtenberg’s Incorporation of America, the Exposition represents the decisive victory of a centralizing impulse inherent in corporate capitalism, proclaimed by the total integration of Olmsted’s landscape and Burnham’s buildings.5 In William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, it embodies the actualization of Chicago’s magnetic force over her agricultural hinterland, evident in the way the Exposition itself lured visitors from neighboring states eager to view its exhibits of both urban and agricultural progress.6 And in Ross Miller’s American Apocalypse, it signals the city’s overcoming of the traumatic memory of the Great Fire twenty-two years earlier, a memory that had been repressed in the rebuilding boom of its immediate aftermath but was now finally confronted and put to rest.7 For both its contemporary enthusiasts and for these more recent scholars, the Exposition provides a satisfying denouement, a “climax” or “fitting conclusion of an age,” even if that age is now viewed as one of conflict and contradiction.8 Instead of offering the White City as a concluding vision—however specular or ephemeral—of fulfillment and completion, Robin Bachin’s Building the South Side introduces the Exposition in its very opening pages. For the historical actors in her narrative, it represented an embryonic ideal that remained to be realized. Whether they took that ideal to be the elitist one of moral uplift embodied in its Beaux Arts architecture, the scientifically informed progressivism on display in its ethnographic and industrial exhibits, or the democratic commercial culture of the adjacent Midway, those actors would struggle for the subsequent three decades to render it in some more durable and concrete form. Bachin’s narrative thus emerges out of the figurative ruins of the Exposition, the ruins of a civic vision that diverse groups of Chicagoans felt compelled to recover and reconstruct, even in the midst of economic depression, labor unrest, and growing racial tensions. The photograph of the Midway’s original Ferris wheel on the cover of Bachin’s book thus corresponds to Herrick’s description of that “unsightly wheel” which continued for some time to rear up over the South Side, “an inert, abortive mass in the violet dusk.”9 Efforts to recreate the kind of coherent and cohesive civic identity momentarily simulated by the planners of the White City, but on the larger scale of the South Side—a region encompassing growing populations, diverse ethnicities, and shifting neighborhoods—assumed several different forms. Bachin’s narrative thus resembles a kind of guided historical tour of that region. We begin in Hyde Park, at the gates of the newly founded University of Chicago, which philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, along with scholars and administrators such as William Rainey Harper and Baptist ministers led by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed, were envisioning as a civilizing influence over neighboring communities. In the second chapter, we are introduced to the 226 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2005 social reformers, many of whom were the female students or instructors of “domestic science” at Chicago and who were envisioning a similar potential in the women’s dormitories founded by the university and in the new settlement houses loosely affiliated with it. In the third chapter, we are taken to outdoor sites of recreation such as local neighborhood parks and urban playgrounds, which Progressives were promoting as loci of civic interaction informed by Chicago professor John Dewey and his pragmatist theories of recreation. In the fourth chapter, the tour takes in the larger civic landscapes created by urban planners such as Daniel Burnham, who famously repudiated “little plans” for their lack of “magic to stir men’s blood” and was instead wanting to create expansive parks and beaches spanning the breadth of the city and its lakefront (p. 169). Turning to the new “baseball palaces” such as Comiskey Park in the fifth chapter, we discover entrepreneurs advertising their professionalized version of recreation as a way to bring together South Siders of divergent class and ethnic, if not racial, backgrounds. And in the final chapter, we arrive at the tightening “Black Belt.” There, “race leaders”—frustrated by their exclusion or restriction from many of those civic spaces and by the influx of brothels and gambling dens that had been expelled from other neighborhoods—were seeking to construct their own civic spaces out of the cultural resources of jazz, boxing, and cabaret, in the process attracting white visitors and “slummers.” The creation of a civic culture, Bachin argues throughout, was thus a negotiated process—“open and contested”—as each of these different groups sought to produce a civic culture in its own image (p. 307). These conflicting efforts and goals were not simply the result of differing class or ethnic backgrounds; they bespoke deeper philosophical differences about what actually constituted a “civic culture” and how it should be organized. Should it be modeled on a financial trust, centralized around some kind of corporate body or focal point—the Gothic spires of the University of Chicago in William Rainey Harper’s Plan of 1892 or the Beaux Arts civic center at the intersection of the grand boulevards in Burnham’s Plan of 1909—with neighboring communities arrayed as discrete units or subsidiaries around it? Or should civic culture be envisaged along more socially progressive and pluralistic lines, as an open, interactive, even “organic” project, emanating not from a single, traditional institution such as a university or an administrative center, but from smaller, alternative public institutions such as settlement houses, playgrounds, YMCAs, and neighborhood field houses, all dispersed throughout the communities of the South Side? These were not merely matters of organization; such questions raised the larger problem of how one conceived the very subjects of civic culture, namely its citizens. Should they be regarded as passive recipients of reform and uplift handed down from above by scientifically informed experts? Or should they be involved as active participants in the formation of this civic culture, contributing local knowledge YABLON / South Side Story 227 based on their lived experiences and working co-operatively across class and ethnic boundaries with social reformers on the shared terrain of settlement houses and playgrounds? The commercialization of leisure at the turn of the century raised further questions. Should a civic culture not be predicated on the exclusion, or at least the restriction, of the corrupting influences of private enterprise and the profit motive—as embodied, perhaps, in Herrick’s vision of a neoclassical Exposition building “dumped by the roadside to serve as a saloon”?10 Or could one in fact embrace the new commercial spirit exemplified by Comiskey’s “baseball palace” as the only truly viable basis for an inclusive and dynamic civic culture? So fundamental were the disagreements over each of these issues, that even Bachin’s cautious assessment of the formation of a civic culture as a “contested process” begs the question of whether it was a single process at all. Bachin defines “civic culture” not necessarily as something that actually existed, but merely as “the desire to foster a shared sense of local identity and social engagement that had the potential to transcend boundaries of ethnicity, race, religion, and class” (p. 6, emphasis added). However, one begins to suspect that her actors, if congregated in one room, would have subjected even this modest definition to lengthy debate. For all their differences, though, the subjects of Bachin’s narrative would at least have agreed on one fundamental point: the decisive dimension of social existence was that of space. The physical environments of certain spaces—saloons, brothels, and slums—were held responsible for creating the social problems of degeneracy, vice, and poverty. And the production of new spaces—university campuses, urban parks, settlement houses, and local playgrounds—was seen as the key to reforming society and building a civic culture. Space, in both instances, was an active agent rather than a neutral backdrop or empty vessel. While this kind of spatial determinism or “environmentalism” has been identified largely with Progressive reform and was articulated as a full-blown theory of “human ecology” by late-nineteenth-century pioneers of domestic science such as Ellen Richards, Bachin detects its traces across a number of non-Progressive sites, from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Building and Grounds, which developed elaborate spatial strategies to keep their female and male students apart, to Charles Comiskey’s faith in a newly designed stadium as an instrument to achieve cultural legitimacy while maintaining local ethnic allegiances (pp. 83, 84). And the “culmination” of this spatial emphasis by the 1920s, Bachin suggests, would be the University of Chicago’s own “school” of sociology, with its conception of the city as a laboratory in which to investigate processes of immigration, adaptation, and community formation as they unfold in space (pp. 107, 299–301).11 How Bachin’s own understanding of space corresponds to, or departs from, that held by her subjects remains unclear. In some respects, she appears to share their prioritization of space. One line of argument taken up in the 228 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2005 introduction, but not followed through in the rest of the text, is that “civic cultures” or “public spheres” (two concepts she uses interchangeably) should be understood not as purely discursive conceits (as in the work, she claims, of historian Philip Ethington), nor as performative constructs (as in Mary Ryan’s work), but as phenomena that also assume a physical form in the built environment.12 However, Bachin’s spaces lack the productive potential ascribed by contemporaries of the Progressive Era. On the contrary, they appear to be inert reflections of already existing cultural categories and assumptions about knowledge, gender, and the body. The Gothic architecture of the university campus thus “reflected Harper’s goal of providing multiple fronts for the dissemination of knowledge”; the design of the common rooms in a settlement house “reflected” Victorian notions of “refinement”; and the building of playgrounds “reflected a growing movement among urban residents to recognize the benefits of strenuous activity” (pp. 46, 115, 146). Whether spaces “reflect,” “embody,” or “express”—all metaphors that recur throughout the book—the implication is that they are nothing more than effects of culture. And Bachin’s other preferred metaphor of urban space as an “arena” for competing groups also fails to do justice to the complex, dialectical relationships between the spatial and the social.13 The more serious problem with her spatial argument, however, is its failure to conceptualize the larger space of the South Side. Her chapters focus on six discrete sites located south of the Loop—the university, the university’s settlement house, neighborhood playgrounds, city parks, a professional baseball field, and the entertainment district of the “Black Belt,” respectively. Although a strength of the book is the way it brings together subjects that have largely been confined to separate histories of philanthropy, education, social reform, urban planning, sport, and commercialized leisure, thereby allowing us to see the overlapping networks among their advocates, it never moves beyond these sites to the larger status of the South Side within the urban conglomeration of Chicago. The South Side as a whole, we are left to assume, is nothing more than the sum of these six parts. This is not necessarily a matter of including additional sites, although powerful civic institutions such as public libraries, retail stores, and railroad stations are conspicuously absent from this book, while movie theaters and amusement parks receive only a passing mention.14 Rather, what is needed here is a larger topographical analysis of the South Side as a distinct “place,” in order to justify the decision to focus the book at that level, instead of on the smaller scale of a neighborhood or the larger scale of city, metropolitan region, or nation state. Without such an analysis, the reader is bound to wonder what, if anything, the South Side meant to contemporaries. Her discussion of Grant Park (near downtown) implies that it encompassed everything up to State Street—or, even more expansively, the entire territory bounded only by the (already YABLON / South Side Story 229 polluted) waters of the Chicago River, Lake Michigan, and Lake Calumet. But her omission of Pullman’s model industrial town to the south and the fading millionaire’s mansions of Prairie Avenue to the north suggests a more restrictive definition. Nor is it clear how the South Side might have been considered distinct or different from those other sectors of the city, the North and West Sides. From the fragments of her evidence, one might indeed make the counter-argument that it never came to represent a meaningful entity at all. The University of Chicago did not perceive itself exclusively as a South Side institution, as it reached northward to make contact with donors and institutions, and beyond that to a national and international stage to stake its claim as a leading research institution. Similarly, her evidence reveals that even the work of urban planners was rarely bounded by the category of the South Side: the landmark Park Report of 1902 was citywide in scope and the even more ambitious Burnham Plan of 1909 famously redesigned the entire landscape of Chicago from the ground up (pp. 141–2). Several organizations in her narrative, such as the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Chicago Civic Federation, and the Municipal Art League, all straddled the river. And two of her social institutions, the settlement house and the playground (pioneered in New York and Boston, respectively) made their first appearances on Chicago’s West Side: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House (1889) and its playground (1894) (p. 147). And of course, while Comiskey Park was firmly entrenched on South Wentworth Avenue, even the White Sox have had some supporters on the North Side. These efforts were all “civic” in the original sense of the word, namely that which encompasses the inhabitants of a whole city. To defend her decision to limit her study to the South Side, Bachin would have had to demonstrate how the city did in fact come to be segmented north and south, and here she would have needed to engage more directly with issues of race. In its north-south stratification, Chicago has defied not only the east-west orientation of many older capitalist metropolises (with the “fashionable classes” typically settling upwind, as in the West End of London, and the western arrondissements, or “Beaux Quartiers,” of Paris), but also the concentric models posited by its own sociological school, according to which the social classes and occupational functions of the city should be arranged in zones radiating outwards from the center.15 Chicago might be compared most productively, not with Paris or London, but with cities whose development has been determined by larger geopolitical, ethnic, or religious divisions, invariably marked by some physical barrier: the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin; the “Peace Line” between Protestant and Catholic Belfast; the “no man’s land” between Jewish and Arab Jerusalem (marked by a wall before 1967, and since then by the desolate Gabriel Sherover Promenade). In the case of Chicago, the division is largely one of race, a crucial issue that Bachin marginalizes. African-Americans are present in her earlier chapters 230 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2005 only as a conspicuous absence: as a group largely excluded from attending the university or even residing in Hyde Park and entirely prohibited from field houses and major league baseball teams (pp. 57–61, 160–1, 206). The relegation of the “Black Belt” to the final chapter implies— perhaps inadvertently—that ghetto formation was not necessarily the crucial factor in the development and identity of the South Side. Chicago’s internal boundaries—between north and south and between black and white—are marked, however, in less explicit or visible ways than those of other divided cities. A study of the formation of the South Side would therefore necessitate an examination, not only of racially-restrictive real estate covenants (noted by Bachin, as by other urban historians, such as George Sanchez, Tom Sugrue, and Arnold Hirsch), but also of the subtle ways in which a segmented urban space has been produced and configured through less legible inscriptions.16 This might lead the historian to the history of mass transit, something that is entirely absent from Bachin’s book. Seemingly minor decisions to extend streetcar or elevated railroad lines in certain directions, to disregard neighborhoods’ requests for new lines, or to dismantle ones that had already been built, could have deep and lasting effects. Thus, the first elevated or “El” track, constructed in 1892, did not bisect downtown and integrate the North and South sides (as in many other cities), but stretched only southwards from Congress to 39th Street—a pattern reinforced on subsequent lines with the construction of the Union Loop in 1897 (later abbreviated to the “Loop”). While that 1892 El line continues to operate today, having been lengthened to 63rd Street the following year to provide access to the Columbian Exposition, a cross-town extension to the lake front was in fact discontinued immediately after the Fair—lingering in Herrick’s account as the haunting, “abandoned electric-car track, raised aloft on a high embankment”—with the effect of isolating Hyde Park from the African-American neighborhoods that would eventually adjoin it.17 In addition to such transit decisions, one would need to attend to local planning permissions that erected physical barriers between neighborhoods and transformed thoroughfares into dead ends. Such minute, almost imperceptible modifications to the grid of the city subverted its claim to geometric neutrality—according to which every point would be equal and correlative with every other, and all hierarchies and boundaries dissolved—by introducing discontinuities, blockages, and other subtle irregularities.18 Finally, supplementing these micro-spatial analyses, the historian would also need to attend to the ways in which the South Side has been constructed in urban fiction. Tellingly, Robert Herrick makes an appearance in Bachin’s book not as a Chicago novelist, but only in his guise as the English professor who helped codify the mission of the University of Chicago (pp. 23, 80–1, 87). Readings in the emerging literature of the city might in fact reveal how the South Side—despite encompassing Irish, Polish, and other ethnic neighborhoods, YABLON / South Side Story 231 in addition to the more exclusive Hyde Park—was persistently figured in racially coded ways. Ultimately, the task of building some kind of civic culture to bridge the racial, class, and ethnic boundaries of the South Side remain unfinished at the end of Bachin’s book. Like many other historians of the Progressive Era, but for more local reasons, Bachin chooses 1919 as her closing date.19 During that year, the South Side repeatedly appeared in the national press as a volatile flashpoint where societal contradictions could no longer be contained. SouthSider “Big Bill” Thompson’s re-election for a second term as mayor on April 1 “seemed to indicate . . . a defeat for the interests of progressive reform” and a triumph for corruption (p. 302). The appearance during the election campaign of a racial division among voters (with African-Americans overwhelmingly backing Thompson) came fully to the surface four months later when, on July 27, the trespass of a black swimmer on the white beach at Twenty-sixth Street was met with violence from white gangs that developed into a full-scale “race riot” throughout the “Black Belt.” Racial tensions were briefly eclipsed by labor conflict in September, as the steel mills of south Chicago became one of the main battlefronts in a national strike waged to gain union recognition. Meanwhile, not even sports could provide relief from the troubles of 1919: on October 1, the White Sox shocked their loyal fans by losing the opening game of the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, a shock exceeded in the coming months by the scandalous match-fixing revelations that undermined the very integrity of baseball as a civic institution. But despite their apparently epochal significance, Bachin reads each of these events as vindicating progressivism rather than indicating its consignment to the dustbin of history. In their own way, the election campaigners for “Big Bill” Thompson, the organizers of black and white steel workers, and the members of the post-riot Chicago Commission on Race Relations each sustained the progressive principle of building broad-based, interracial and interethnic coalitions. Even if the World’s Fair of 1893 was by now a distant memory, they still appeared to adhere to its vision of civic collectivity. In that respect, they too might have echoed the sentiments of Dr. Sommers’s lover, Alves Preston, in Herrick’s Web of Life. Returning to the White City later in the novel, Sommers and Preston witnessed the fire that finally destroyed the rotting exhibition buildings in the summer of 1894. Watching the remaining pillars of the Peristyle as the flames burned through them, Sommers lamented that its ideals will also be “burnt out,” only to be reassured by Alves that they will “remai[n] in the heart, warming it in dull, cold times.”20 Nick Yablon, Department of American Studies, University of Iowa, is working on a manuscript, “American Ruins: An Archaeology of Urban Modernity, 1830–1920” (under contract to University of Chicago Press). 232 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2005 1. Robert Herrick, The Web of Life (1900), 59. 2. Ibid., 59, 60. 3. In his unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Myself,” Herrick traces the long-term blight of much of the South Side of Chicago to the overbuilding and overdevelopment of the fair. Herrick, “Myself” (n.d.), 49, Robert Herrick Papers 1887–1960, box 3, folder 10, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. 4. Herrick, Web of Life, 57, 265. 5. Alan Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982), 208–34. 6. William Cronon, “White City Pilgrimage,” in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991). 7. Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (1990), 195–250 8. Cronon, “White City Pilgrimage,” 341; and Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 209. 9. Herrick, Web of Life, 171. 10. Herrick, Web of Life, 57. 11. Robert Parks, for example, has posited the “great city” as a “laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably be studied.” Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment,” American Journal of Sociology 20 (1915): 612. The subsequent fate of this Progressivist notion of space would be worth exploring. One might trace its demise to the Hawthorne Experiments of the late 1920s, a series of studies conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in the suburbs of Chicago by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo. Mayo began from the premise that environmental factors such as lighting levels determined productivity, only to become convinced that psychological factors (including the very fact of being observed) were far more important. See Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (1993). 12. Phillip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (1994); and Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (1997). 13. See Edward Soja’s influential call for a more dialectical approach to issues of space, in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989). 14. On these topics, see especially Abigail Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (1995); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990), 101–20; and Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1998). 15. Recognizing the inadequacy of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s concentric model, the Chicago real estate economist, Homer Hoyt, sought to map American cities in terms of wedge-shaped “sectors.” See especially Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (1939). The “Black Belt,” according to this switch of metaphors, would become a “wedge.” 16. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (1983); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996); and George Sanchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56 (September 2004): 633–61. 17. Herrick, Web of Life, 60. 18. For drawings of such disruptions in the urban grid, see Mario Gandelsonas, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City (1999). See also James A. Throgmorton and Barbara Eckstein, “Desire Lines: The Chicago Area Transportation Study and the Paradox of Self in Post-War America,” in The 3Cities Project Electronic Book: Literary and Visual Representations of Three American Cities, 1870s to 1930. Retrieved March 27 2005, from <http://www.nottingham. ac.uk/3cities/throgeck.htm>. 19. If 1919 clearly marks a “watershed,” fully justifying the decision to end the book there, it is less clear why it should begin in 1890 (p. 298). The passage of the annexation bill and the founding of the Hull House Settlement took place in 1889, while the University of Chicago was founded in 1892, but no such significant event appears to have taken place in 1890. 20 Herrick, Web of Life, 175.