Author : Anthony Dzik
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 101 pages
File Size : 22,66 MB
Release : 2009-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0578027275
A geographical study of an urban village on Chicago's West Side in the 1960s. Book examines the social, commercial, and industrial geography of the neighborhood bounded by North Avenue, Pulaski Road, Chicago Avenue, and the Belt Line Railway (Kilpatrick Avenue).
Author : Amanda I. Seligman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 41,96 MB
Release : 2005-05-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0226746658
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.
Author : Anthony J. Dzik
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 43,55 MB
Release : 2013-04-03
Category : Great Plains
ISBN : 9781481966887
If you think that the Great Plains are flat and uninspiring, this book will change that percept. Geographer Anthony Dzik presents some of the most awe-inspiring sedimentary landscapes of mid-continent North America. Here are the "canyonlands" of northwest Kansas, the rain pillars of Nebraska, the chalk pillars of the Cretaceous Sea, the Swiss cheese-like lumps of Montana's Medicine Rocks, the sparkling Gloss Mountains of Oklahoma, the "Grand Canyon of Texas," the badlands where Teddy Roosevelt rode the range, Hell's Half-Acre, and many other spectacular deviations from "flatness." In terminology familiar to professional natural scientists (but easily understood by laypersons), Dzik deftly describes the geologic, climatic, and biogeographic processes that fashioned the horizontal sedimentary strata into weird and wondrous landscapes. Over 150 full-color pictures, maps, and charts are part of the package. While not really a guidebook, driving directions and suggested hikes and scenic drives are provided for most locations discussed in the book.
Author : Irving Cutler
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
Page : 132 pages
File Size : 18,94 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 9780738560151
For nearly half a century, the greater Lawndale area was the vibrant, spirited center of Jewish life in Chicago. It contained almost 40 percent of the city's entire Jewish population with over 70 synagogues and numerous active Jewish organizations and institutions. This book will bring back memories for those who lived there and retell the story of Jewish life on the West Side for those who did not.
Author : Carlo Rotella
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 14,80 MB
Release : 2019-04-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 022662403X
An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there. Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.
Author : Arnold R. Hirsch
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 12,75 MB
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 022672865X
First published in 1983 and praised by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Thomas Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto is the rare book that has only become more piercingly prescient over the years. Hirsch’s classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when the city dealt with its rapidly growing Black population not by working to abolish its stark segregation but by expanding and solidifying it. Even as the civil rights movement rose to prominence, Chicago exploited a variety of methods of segregation—including riots, redevelopment, and a host of new legal frameworks—that provided a national playbook for the emergence of a new kind of entrenched inequality. Hirsch’s chronicle of the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the Great Migration of Southern Blacks in the mid-twentieth century makes startingly clear how the violent reactions of an emergent white population found common ground with policy makers to segregate first a city and then the nation. This enlarged edition of Making the Second Ghetto features a visionary afterword by historian N. D. B. Connolly, explaining why Hirsch’s book still crackles with “blistering relevance” for contemporary readers.
Author : Linda Gartz
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 37,9 MB
Release : 2018-04-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 163152321X
Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors. The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape—even as their own relationship cracks and withers. After her parents’ deaths, Gartz discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents’ marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods. Told through the lens of Gartz’s discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter’s fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.
Author : Charles A. Rini
Publisher :
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 33,42 MB
Release : 2013-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781432795061
I consider myself lucky to have grown up on Racine Avenue in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago's near west side. It was the late 1940's, the beginning of an exciting new era and, in my opinion, the perfect place and time to be a kid. More and more families were buying their first TV, their first car and some of the lucky ones even were getting central heating, eliminating the need to pour fuel oil into the stoves used to heat their homes. Like many Italian families, ours was top heavy with aunts, uncles, cousins and close friends we considered as extended family. Whether it was Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter or the rare St. Joseph's Table, our house would be bursting at the seams with family and friends. Of course, being Italian, each holiday came with time-honored traditions which had to be followed to the letter. Dad, being a home movie fanatic, thoroughly documented these special times in his endless reels of 8 and 16 mm film. Dad was a worker for the Bureau of Sanitation in Chicago and was the bread winner in our family, but Ma was its heart. She cleaned, cooked, took care of us kids and kept Dad in-line, all while working a full time job. How she did it, I have no idea. As kids, our top priority was having fun. Whatever the season, we were outside as much as our parents and daylight would allow. We played hard and we played rough. Sure, we scraped our knees, got cuts, bloody noses and, on occasion, had to make a trip to the emergency room at St. Joseph's Hospital to set a broken bone or, in my older brother's case, have his tongue sewn back on. We took all it in stride. If that was the price we had to pay, so be it. Schools back then had little tolerance for kids who acted up. There were rules to follow and we were expected to obey them. If one of us caused trouble, it was a guaranteed trip to the principal's office or, in some cases, getting suspended for a few days. Recently, I visited the various neighborhoods where I grew up on Chicago's west side. Memories of family, friends and events always come to mind but never as strong as they did when I visited Racine Avenue. Here they over-powered me and sent me back to my days as a kid in this wonderful, old neighborhood. After Dad got up in years, and wasn't able to drive anymore, he was always asking my brothers or me to take him back to his childhood home in Joliet, Illinois. When we would arrive he'd jump out of the car and a big smile would appear on his face. He'd then proceed to start showing my brothers and me all his old haunts. I used to wonder why visiting his old neighborhood in Joliet affected Dad the way it did. It has taken a lifetime, but now I think I understand. I finally decided I had to write a book detailing my life on Racine Avenue and the other neighborhoods we lived in. Each move meant leaving old friends, making new ones, starting new schools and a host of other challenges that seemed overwhelming. I can remember there were some great times and other times that weren't so great. However, in looking back, I wouldn't have changed it for the world.
Author : Amanda I. Seligman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 21,11 MB
Release : 2016-09-06
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 022638585X
Whether focused on flower gardens, street crime, or aesthetic conformity, urban block clubs are unusual quasi-institutions that can establish or maintain a neighborhood s appearance, social dynamics, and quality of life. But what is a block club? And how does it function? Is it a definable institution, with codifiable practices and expectations, or is it merely an assemblage of like-minded citizens who happen to live near one another? What makes one such group effective and long-lasting, while most evaporate after a few years of communal activity? These are some of the questions that Amanda Seligman addresses in her deeply researched study."
Author : Bernard O. Brown
Publisher :
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 50,17 MB
Release : 1978
Category : History
ISBN :
