If you're in Chicago next week...

What should you visit and what will you see?  Here are some tourist tips from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs at www.enjoyillinois.com.  And a list of "top spots" no tourist should miss.

Skyscraping

The building of skyscrapers began in Chicago.  The word was first coined to designate "a very tall building" in 1883, and the first building named a skyscraper was William LeBaron Jenney's Home Insurance Building of Chicago (1883-5) which was located on the corner of Adams and LaSalle.  The ten-story building was demolished in 1931. See a heighth diagram from PBS.  See a detailed description from Chicago Architecture.  See a biography of William LeBaron Jenney from Chicago Landmarks.

Some other links that relate to skyscrapers in Chicago from then to now:

Listing of skyscrapers in Chicago and  Heighth diagram of Chicago Skyscrapers on Skyscraper.

Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre, "Engouement planétaire pour les gratte-ciel," Le Monde (May 28, 2008).

"Gratte-ciel: des tours toujours plus hautes !" from www.techno-science.net (July 25, 2004).

The Black Metropolis in 1945

Relationships between whites and blacks have often been sources of tension in Chicago, continuing along with the population changes brought by the “Great Migration.” Between 1916 and 1970 the population of African Americans increased by 500,000. Before 1916, African Americans constituted approximately 2% of the city’s population (approximately 15,000 in 1893), rising to 33% by 1970 (approx. 1,111,887 in 1970). War industries required more workers by 1916 and 1942, and advertised enticing employment opportunities. But upon arrival in Chicago, African Americans were to discover an increasingly bleak housing situation, due to restrictive covenants defining the areas where they were allowed to live. Rents were high and the landlords did not bother to maintain buildings. Living conditions were so bad that St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s study, The Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945) gave a detailed account of the segregation the Black Belt in Chicago perpetuated, that included descriptions of housing conditions. 

The book was based on research conducted by the Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s. As could be expected, in anticipation of what would become a full-blown Civil Rights movement in the 1950s that forced people to take sides based on their acceptance—or denial—of the presence of a race, reviewers were already divided about the book’s impact and value. Rosalind Lepawsky, reacting to Richard Wright’s introduction, which called the book a “landmark of research and scientific achievement,” wrote in her 1946 review: 

"…Black Metropolis is more of a compilation of, than an addition to, existing knowledge about the American Negro. It is not so much an explanation of Negro class and caste as it is an effective indictment of Negro suppression and white supremacy."

 

Remarkable however is the way Black Metropolis impacted the locals: shortly after it was published, the Parkway Community House held a series of public forums to discuss the issues the book had raised.  But more important, the work behind Black Metropolis was a contributing factor for African American artists, as Richard Wright had suggested in his introduction to the work:

"Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come; there is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story. But I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me. I encountered the work of men who were studying the Negro community, amassing facts about urban Negro life, and I found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other. The huge mountains of fact piled up by the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago gave me my first concrete vision of the forces that molded the urban Negro’s body and soul. (I was never a student at the university; it is doubtful if I could have passed the entrance examination).

Chicago is the known city; perhaps more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world. Chicago is a new city; it grew to be bigger in one hundred years than did Paris in two thousand." 

Some Links about Black Metropolis

The Black Metropolis Research Consortium

Chicago's Black Metropolis: Understanding History Through a Historic Place (Lesson Plans)

Black Metropolis, The Last Half Century by Depaul University

Dunbar meets Douglass in Chicago

We weep for him, but we have touched his hand,
And felt the magic of his presence nigh,
The current that he sent throughout the land,
The kindling spirit of his battle cry.
O’er all that holds us we shall triumph yet,
And place our banner where his hopes were set!
— Paul Laurence Dunbar, excerpt from the poem “Frederick Douglass”

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the nation’s first professional African American poet to be recognized by whites as well as blacks. His talent was evident from High School (where all the other students in his class were white), and he wrote the song used at his graduation ceremony held June 16, 1891.  As a black youth, he could only find a job working as an elevator boy in Dayton, Ohio, the city where he grew up. But he managed to publish his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy (1893) and went to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, initially to peddle the volume in the street to people passing by. There he met the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was then the U.S. Minister to Haiti and the commissioner of the Haitian exhibition. Douglass hired Dunbar as a clerk at the Haitian pavilion, and arranged for Dunbar to read his poems at the Colored American Day celebration held there. This gave Dunbar an opening and he met other African American writers and artists, such as Charlotte Forten Grimké, James Carrothers, James Campbell, and Will Marion Cook. 

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Some Links
Learn more about Frederick Douglass and his role in motivating African Americans to fight for justice:
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/part4.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1539.html

The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, D.C.
http://www.nps.gov/archive/frdo/freddoug.html

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR: Some Links
Read poems from Wright State University’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection

Visit the University of Dayton’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Website

The Ohio Historical Society sponsors the Dunbar House, last residence of the poet, in Dayton.

An Egyptian perspective on Chicago

  

The Egyptian author (and dentist)  Alaa Al Aswany (also transcribed as El Aswany) is best known in the Western World for The Yacoubian Building (2002) which was produced as a film in 2006.  The book was translated into English before it became available in French.

Al Aswany's Chicago (2007) was translated into French (2007) before it became available in English (in the UK in fall 2007).   The book arrives in the US in October, as the Chicago Reader noted (February 18, 2008).  Experiences in the book are possibly related to the author's three years residence in Chicago during the 1980s while studying at the University of Illinois Medical School.

Read Reviews:

Marie-Laure Delorme, "Alaa El Aswany, Guerre et peurs," Journal du Dimanche (October 16, 2007).

Stephanie Merritt, "An Author With Bite," The Observer (September 9, 2007).

John R. Bradley, "Chicago: A Modern Arabic Novel," Financial Times (February 16, 2008).

Doug Johnstone, "Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany," in the Times (August 30, 2008).

Mark Rubbo in Readings (Melbourne, Australia; September 2, 2008).

Ed King in the Telegraph (September 7, 2008).

Sameer Rahim in the TLS (September 12, 2008).

Other Links:

Interview with Al Aswany in Egypt Today (August 2004).

Interview with Al Aswany in National Geographic (September 2006).

Read a passage from the French translation of Chicago here.

Biographical information about Al Aswany from Evene.fr.

Interview with Al Aswany, with photos, from Evene.fr (October, 2007).

One blogger's unfavorable review here.

Some Links: the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893

About the World's fair, called the Columbian Exposition to commemorate "the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landing in America," from the Chicago Historical Society. There is also a bibliography page.

Article "World's Columbian Exposition (May 1, 1893-October 30, 1893)" from the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

About the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Another website devoted to the World's Columbian Exposition from the University of Virginia, including a Virtual Tour.

Serious and less serious exhibits, including Houdini, were part of the fair, as explained on American Experience by PBS.

What the buildings at the fair looked like from Boston College's A Digital Archive of American Architecture.

A photo of the fair, from the Smithsonian archives, on Flickr.

Videos about the fair (to download) from Urban Simulation Team at UCLA.

A page devoted to the Fair and Urban Planning.

Documentary films exist:  Magic of the White City Expo (2005, narrated by Gene Wilder)

Some Links: Jane Addams & Hull House

See biography of Jane Addams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 on Nobelprize.org.

Entry on Jane Addams from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Biography of Jane Addams from the Hull-House Museum on the University of Illinois campus at 800 S. Halsted.

Visit the Hull-House Museum's Web pages.

Recordings, "Hull-House History On Call" (with transcripts visible on the page) from the Hull-House Museum about Jane Addams and Hull-House, including one, "Bill Ayers on why Jane Addams was so 'dangerous'" that mentions Nelson Algren and Al Capone.  

Studs Terkel and Florence Scala talk about the demolition of the Hull-House Settlement.

Take a virtual tool of the Hull House Museum here, and see some other photos of Chicago, as well.

There is a Jane Addams Hull House Association and a Jane Addams Peace Association.

A guide to teaching Jane Addams to 4th and 5th graders by Julie Carlson.

About Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement on www.pollutionissues.com.

Some Links: Haymarket, 1886

Basic information from the Illinois Labor History Society.

Basic information from PBS, Chicago: City of the Century.  About the "Eight Anarchists."

Podcast about Haymarket by James Green and Howard Zinn from WGBH (May 7, 2006) and NPR. James Green's Death in the Haymarket (2006) was reviewed in The Nation, the New York Times (May 7, 2006), and also by Le Mouvement Social (Université de Paris I). 

Read the first chapter of James Green's Death in the Haymarket (2006).  Listen to shorter (7 minute) NPR podcast of James Green talking about his book.

About the Haymarket Affair 1886-1887 from the Library of Congress.

The Dramas of Haymarket by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.

May 4, 1886, the Haymarket Tragedy from the Chicago Public Library.

"Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons's Last Words to His Wife" from History Matters.

Homicide in Chicago: 1886, Haymarket Affair from Northwestern University.

The Haymarket Riot Trial (State of Illinois v. Albert Spies, et al., 1886) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Haymarket Martyrs Monument at Forest Home Cemetery.

An article published in 1986 from Revolutionary Worker Online.

An analysis from libcom.org.

And, in French, about May 1, 1886.

Artist Mary Brogger was commissioned by the City of Chicago to create a commemorative monument.

Some Links: The Great Chicago Fire, 1871

Watch a video that "re-creates" the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, from PBS, American Experience, Chicago: City of the Century.

Watch information from This Day in History, October 8, 1871.

The Chicago Historical Society in partnership with Northwestern University maintain an excellent site:  The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory.  The site was given an excellent review in the Journal for MultiMediaHistory 1.1 (1998).

An excerpt from Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City, Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874 (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

An excerpt from Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shame of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

The Chicago Tribune hosts a topics page about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

There is a very brief entry by Karen Sawislak for the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Vicki Beckam's interactive webpages:  The Great Chicago Fire: A Webquest for Detectives.

Spoof paper The Onion relates sports news to the 1871 fire (January 25, 2007).

Some links: Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

BASIC

See a short introduction to Sandra Cisneros on www.salon.com, then listen to Sandra Cisneros read the first pages of The House on Mango Street here. 

Watch a video about Sandra Cisneros, with music and lyrics in Spanish here.

Learn more about Sandra Cisneros on her website.  The Modern American Poetry site also features a biographical note. 

 The novel is described on PBS's The American Novel.  There is also a good introduction from the University of Warwick.

About Cisneros and her book Caramelo (2002) with podcasts from NPR.

REVIEWS

2002, from The Romer Review.

STUDY GUIDES

Questions & Study guide for The House on Mango Street on publisher Random House website.

Excellent lesson plans for teaching The House on Mango Street to 9th graders at Skyline High School by Mary Scott can be found on Urban Dreams.

An interactive feature about the novel for students in grades 9-11 can be found here.

About the Politics of Gender in The House on Mango Street from Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute here.

One college student develops a webpage about the novel.

CRITICAL STUDIES

"The Borderlands of the Chicano Bildungsroman" here.

Crawford-Garrett, Katherine, "Leaving Mango Street: Speech, Action and the Construction of Narrative in Britton's Spectator Stance," Springer, 2008.

Cruz, Felicia J., "On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street," Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (Winter 2001), p.910-946.  On MUSE.

Doyle, Jacqueline, "More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street," Melus 19.4 (Winter 1994) p.5-35.  On JSTOR.

RELATED

Learn more about the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago, called Pilsen, located at 18th Street and Halstead Street from The University of Illinois Neighborhoods Initiative.  Other information about Pilsen can be found on Chicago Neighborhood and City guide.

Learn more about Chicano authors from the Baltimore Sun.    See a teacher's guide to U.S. Latino literature here.