{"product_id":"block-by-block-neighborhoods-and-public-policy-on-chicagos-west-side-historical-studies-of-urban-america","title":"Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Historical Studies of Urban America)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBook info:\u003c\/strong\u003e Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Historical Studies of Urban America) (Hardcover, 320 pages) – University of Chicago Press, 2005. Language: English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America. Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the \"flight\" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.  \n        From the Back Cover   \u003cbr\u003eIn Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman examines the responses of whites in the West Side communities of Chicago to the racial transformation occurring in their neighborhoods in the decades following World War II. Seligman's account illuminates that deterioration in these areas in fact began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. This book is essential to understanding how the \"flight\" of whites to the suburbs, and even the 1960s riots, were responses to developments in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Seligman's deeply researched and well-focused study of race and residence in postwar Chicago usefully stretches the discussion in three directions. Geographically, she provides a real service by concentrating on the city's understudied West Side. Second, she carries the story down to the mid-1970s, significantly extending our field of vision. Finally, she removes the housing issue from its traditional policy vacuum. These are all welcome developments that will generate questions to engage scholars for years to come.\"—Arnold R. Hirsch, author of Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A fascinating account of Chicago's West Side in the postwar era. Based on a wide range of sources Block by Block tells the story of a city in flux and residents trying to cope with changes occurring all around them. The emergence of a West Side ghetto is seen within the very real national and local political limits of the Daley era.\"Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side\u0026gt;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A creative reinterpretation of the postwar urban crisis, Seligman's book challenges the one-dimensional portrait of Chicago's West Side. Her multiplicity of stories and experiences makes this a very rich urban history. Original and useful, Block by Block is an important contribution to postwar urban historiography.\"My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965\u0026gt;\u003cbr\u003e           About the Author   Amanda I. Seligman is assistant professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. \u003cbr\u003e           Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.   BLOCK BY BLOCKNeighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West SideBy Amanda I. SeligmanTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESSCopyright © 2005 The University of Chicago\u003cbr\u003eAll right reserved.\u003cbr\u003eISBN: 978-0-226-74663-0\u003cbr\u003eContentsACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................ixACRONYMS IN TEXT..................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION Block by Block......................................................1CHAPTER ONE Chicago's West Side..................................................13CHAPTER TWO Housing Codes........................................................39CHAPTER THREE Conservation and Urban Renewal.....................................69CHAPTER FOUR A Chicago Campus for the University of Illinois.....................99CHAPTER FIVE Public Schools......................................................119CHAPTER SIX Blockbusting.........................................................151CHAPTER SEVEN Keeping African Americans Out......................................163CHAPTER EIGHT Keeping Whites In..................................................183EPILOGUE Reconsidering White Flight..............................................209ACRONYMS IN NOTES.................................................................223ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS..............................................................225NOTES.............................................................................227INDEX.............................................................................297[TC1\u003cbr\u003eChapter OneChicago's West Side\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e In March 1950 residents, businessmen, and activists from the Lawndale and Crawford neighborhoods gathered at the Chicago City Council for a hearing on the proposed construction of public housing apartments on Kildare Avenue between Seventeenth and Nineteenth streets. The audience \"heartily applauded speakers\" testifying in opposition to the project. Like whites in other parts of Chicago, they were hostile to the prospect of public housing residents moving into the neighborhood. In this case, they articulated their objections by arguing that the public housing site was long designated for a park. Dr. Andrew Toman, son of the area's late alderman, testified that the health of children who lived in crowded neighborhoods required the provision of public play areas. The incumbent alderman pointed out that his ward housed forty thousand children who were currently served by only one small park. In addition, real estate professionals objected that the site, an excavated clay pit, was too unstable to support residential construction. A banker claimed that he would refuse to finance mortgages for any private housing on the site. He concluded, \"Lawndale-Crawford has long been the step-child of the city of Chicago, and it's about time that the other aldermen in the city council give our local alderman a little support in the betterment of the community.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Other midcentury white West Siders shared this sense of beleaguerment, from time to time bemoaning the area's role as \"the city's step-child.\" The West Side was surely part of Chicago, but it rarely received the kind of attention-positive or negative-that might have inspired residents to feel the city government regarded their future as critical. Founded primarily as residential and industrial suburbs, the West Side neighborhoods were annexed into Chicago proper over the course of the nineteenth century. West Side residents received city services and paid city taxes, but rarely exercised a proportional share of political power. The West Side's long-standing lack of influence in Chicago affairs laid the foundation for area residents' relative powerlessness in the postwar period. When they mobilized to confront impending decay and the in-migration of African Americans, they had few historical precedents to suggest that they would achieve their goals. But, at the same time, the relative stability and modest prosperity of the neighborhoods gave little hint that by the last decades of the twentieth century, the West Side would be notorious as one of the most devastated African American urban centers in the United States. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago were neither the best nor the worst in the city. For Russian Jews, North Lawndale was a symbol of upward mobility, of escape from the teeming slums of the Near West Side. For other Chicagoans, the prime appeal of neighborhoods like North Lawndale and West Garfield Park was their proximity to blue-collar industrial jobs. For the most part, West Side neighborhoods remained outside the attention of other Chicagoans. They lacked the glamour of the emerging centers of commerce and wealth on the city's Near North Side and sections of the South Side. They were neither as lurid as the city's notorious vice district, the Levee, nor as promising as the lakefront park system planned by architect Daniel Burnham. In the twentieth century, Bridgeport, a South Side Irish neighborhood in many ways comparable to the West Side areas, became home to a multigenerational political dynasty that dominated the Democratic Party and Chicago politics. While a few West Side natives played prominent roles in the city's political machinations, their influence did little to enhance the West Side's prestige or condition. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChicago in the Nineteenth Century\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chicago's West Side neighborhoods were settled in the middle period of the city's development. The city's original center, just north and south of the main branch of the Chicago River, remained the major focus of land use and speculation for decades after its foundation in the 1830s. Chicago initially grew northward and southward, with just a little additional settlement immediately to the west of the river's branches. Only after the Great Fire of 1871 did Chicagoans cast their eyes westward; the West Side neighborhoods of North Lawndale, West Garfield Park, and Austin filled with buildings and people between 1880 and 1920. After World War II, undeveloped areas within Chicago's boundaries, on the Northwest and Southwest sides, were built up with new housing. The desirability of West Side areas, which once seemed a haven of quietude and modest opportunity, waned by comparison. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chicago's history as a settled area dates to the arrival of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black fur trader of French Canadian and Haitian descent, who lived at the mouth of the Chicago River between the 1770s and 1800. The Potawatomi who occupied northern Illinois regarded the Chicago area as suitable for passage and temporary stays, but too swampy to settle permanently. In 1673 French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet recognized Chicago's potential as a commercial hub for North America, envisioning the excavation of a portage between the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers that would enable continuous water transport between the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers. In 1803 the young United States government established Fort Dearborn to protect the land around the Chicago River ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, but the military abandoned it during the War of 1812. Rowdy settlers and traders returned to the area permanently in the 1820s. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The town of Chicago was incorporated in 1833, after the Potawatomis' defeat in the Black Hawk War sealed their departure to areas west of the Mississippi River. With the arrival of the city's first permanent white residents, Chicago's future as a center of commerce manifested immediately. The city's first mayor, William B. Ogden, regarded his family's investment in Chicago land as a mistake until he realized how profitably he could resell the property. The tribulations of land speculation drove Chicago's economy for the first decade after it became a city in 1837, as investors anticipated the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Irish immigrants who went to Chicago to build the canal settled at its eastern terminus, in the area that became the Bridgeport neighborhood. Native-born migrants from New England and Ohio comprised the balance of Chicago's burgeoning early population. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The arrival of the railroads in 1848, the same year the canal opened, transformed Chicago into the hub of transcontinental transport. Both easternandwesternrailroadlinesterminatedinChicago,makingitthenation's most significant transfer point for goods being sold cross-country. Chicago became a center not only of transport, but also of local production and new forms of financial speculation. As historian William Cronon has detailed, Chicago's trade in grain, lumber, and meat drawn from the city's hinterland made traffic in commodities more important to the city's economy than the thriving real estate market. The construction of enormous grain elevators between the Chicago River's branches and the railroads made possible the sale of huge volumes of western corn and wheat to the East Coast and also inspired the sale of commodities futures in Chicago. Dealers sold the rich forests of Wisconsin and Michigan from acres of lumber yards along the south branch of the Chicago River, enabling the construction of wooden structures throughout the North American plains. Finally, the invention of the refrigerated railroad car allowed the transportation of slaughtered meat across great distances. In response, in 1865 Chicago's meatpackers established the Union Stock Yards south of the city limits. This area, which exported more meat throughout the United States than any other place, was annexed into the city in 1889. Manufacturers also began to locate in Chicago; Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper, built a factory for his machines just north of the main branch of the Chicago River. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e People poured into Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century to try their hands at the city's new enterprises. Although migrants clustered by ethnicity, few lived in complete isolation from people of different origins. Chicago's small African American population, which was not segregated until the Great Migration of the World War I era, scattered into pockets on the South, North, and West sides of the city. German immigrants headed to the North Side, where they built small homes and businesses. Irish immigrants mostly settled on the South Side but also established \"Patches\" on the city's North and West sides. Chicago's elite, who owned the real estate and ran the companies of the city's capitalist engines, built fashionable homes on the South Side, on the 2200 blocks of Indiana, Prairie, Calumet, and South Park avenues. A few of the rich also ventured west across the Chicago River toward Union Park. By the time of the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago was considerably built up and densely populated to the north and the south. Chicagoans of different classes had begun to discover the possibilities of investing in the Far West Side neighborhoods but had yet only sparsely settled it. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Neighborhoods\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e In American cities, geographical designations mean different things to different people. In the late twentieth century, the \"West Side\" colloquially referred to those areas west of Chicago's downtown that were occupied by African Americans. For clarity, the areas that were immediately adjacent to the downtown were sometimes called the \"Near West Side,\" and the neighborhoods of West Garfield Park and Austin, farther from the Loop, were sometimes collectively called the \"Far West Side.\" North Lawndale, West Garfield Park, and Austin correspond to \"community areas\" within the West Side. Sociologists based at the University of Chicago drew the boundaries of the community areas in the 1920s. They were trying to create a map with permanent borders, in order to facilitate the study of populations and neighborhood characteristics across time. Members of the Chicago school of sociology understood cities to consist of \"natural areas,\" whose overall character and class composition remained stable, even as their particular racial and ethnic populations changed. To demarcate boundaries, the sociologists and their staff interviewed venerable residents, researched local history, and observed phenomena such as railroad tracks that served as \"natural\" boundaries. In some cases, such as West Garfield Park, the delineated community areas corresponded fairly well to local conceptions. Other names, such as \"New City,\" seemed more capricious. Despite the inadequacies of the community-area approach, much of the scholarship produced in subsequent years observed the general outlines demarcated in the early twentieth century. Statistical data are usually presented by community area, and many Chicago-area archives organize their collections under these headings. For the postwar period, the community-area names \"North Lawndale,\" \"West Garfield Park,\" and \"Austin\" reflected a general consensus on the ground. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The three neighborhoods at the heart of the West Side-North Lawndale, West Garfield Park, and Austin-emerged as separate communities. Their populations were distinct; they became part of Chicago at different times; and their infrastructures connected up with one another only after their development was well under way. North Lawndale, which in the postwar years became the point of entry for African Americans migrating from the South, was one of two main centers of Jewish life in Chicago in the early twentieth century. West Garfield Park, a small self-contained neighborhood, was the site of the West Side's most prominent commercial district, which centered on the intersection of Madison and Crawford (Pulaski). Served by a few large Catholic parishes from early in its history, West Garfield Park remained a majority Catholic community after World War II. Austin, the largest of the three areas, marked the western edge of the city and housed more than 100,000 people. Austin's nineteenth-century residents established a wealth of Protestant churches; with the arrival of more working-class residents in the early twentieth century, Catholics became the most populous religious group in the area. By the 1920s these three distinctive neighborhoods had grown together into the West Side. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e North Lawndale \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e North Lawndale was founded as a suburb of Chicago. Within a few years of the appearance of the first clustered settlement, several roughly simultaneous developments made the area urban in legal fact, while the neighborhood's character remained \"semi-suburban\" until the twentieth century. First, the portion of North Lawndale east of modern-day Pulaski Road was annexed into Chicago in 1869, well before it was built up or had much population. Second, the purchase of land in the eastern portion of North Lawndale for the development of the West Side park system, including Douglas Park, spurred speculative interest in the area. Finally, the devastation of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 drove the city's population and industrial concerns outward in search of new locations for settlement. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The community areas later known as North Lawndale and South Lawndale grew out of two suburban developments. The first was Lawndale, a speculative subdivision built by A. C. Millard and E. J. Decker and reportedly named by Decker's daughter. In 1871 Millard and Decker platted the Lawndale subdivision, bounded on the east and west by Homan and Hamlin, and on the north and south by Twenty-second and Twenty-sixth. By 1873 several dozen houses dotted the area. Millard Avenue functioned asthesubdivision'smainstreet,containingseveralstores,afour-storyhotel, and the area's first church. Residents founded a variety of community institutions, including one of the earliest Women's Clubs in the city. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The second original subdivision within North Lawndale was Crawford, an area named for one of the first farmers to own large tracts of local land. In 1848 Peter Crawford, a Scottish immigrant, purchased 160 acres of land bounded by what later became Crawford, Kostner, Cermak, and Twenty-sixth streets. Crawford encouraged service from the Burlington Railroad by providing a strip of land for a depot in 1863 and donated land for the area's first school, the Crawford Academy. The development of the area accelerated after 1880, when the Crawford family sold off parcels of their property for small farms, which were further subdivided and resold. Chicago's annexation of the Crawford area in 1889 brought the remainder of the North Lawndale community area into the city. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Both Lawndale and Crawford lay at the southern edge of the area that later became the heart of North Lawndale. In the initial stages of their development, they were largely isolated from one another. An early resident remembered, \"Lawndale and Crawford, in the old days, were absolutely separate communities. The folks here now can't appreciate it. There was a little group in Crawford and a larger one in Lawndale and a sidewalk in between.\" He described the layout of the settlements: \"In the olden days, Crawford and Lawndale might have been likened in area to a dumbbell-I am not referring to the quality of the people but to the shape of the area.\" As more people came to the area in search of industrial jobs, the space between the two villages closed, causing them to \"gr[o]w together.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Lawndale's industrial work opportunities increased dramatically after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which devastated the city's downtown and North Side. The McCormick Reaper Company, whose original factory was destroyed in the fire, relocated to Twenty-seventh and Western; the placement of this new factory, technically within the Lower West Side community area, encouraged the migration of employees into the neighboring Lawndale area. Company executives later moved into Lawndale. Both Northand South Lawndale, surrounded by rail roads and their service yards and dotted with large swathes of property covered by industrial concerns, became centers of manufacturing activity. Living in the area saved workers the expense of commuting and facilitated job changes. Chicagoans of German and Irish extraction predominated among the area's new residents, occupying two-flat buildings; Polish and Czech migrants joined them later in the nineteenth century. The opening of the Western Electric plant in the neighboring suburb of Cicero in 1903 also stimulated migration to North Lawndale. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e(Continues...)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003eExcerpted from BLOCK BY BLOCKby Amanda I. Seligman Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.\u003cbr\u003e All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\u003cbr\u003eExcerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.\u003c\/p\u003e      ","brand":"Amanda I. Seligman","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46069007548650,"sku":"9780226746630","price":98.75,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5301\/6298\/files\/515ZonRHxlL._SL1500.jpg?v=1781196122","url":"https:\/\/textbookme.store\/products\/block-by-block-neighborhoods-and-public-policy-on-chicagos-west-side-historical-studies-of-urban-america","provider":"TextbookMe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}