Download or read book They Built Chicago written by Miles L. Berger and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A House for the Struggle written by E. James West and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multiple Award-Winner! Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies) Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals) Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint. Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.
Download or read book Human Built World written by Thomas P. Hughes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-05-13 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
Download or read book Chicago Skyscrapers 1871 1934 written by Thomas Leslie and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed tour, inside and out, of Chicago's distinctive towers from an earlier age For more than a century, Chicago's skyline has included some of the world's most distinctive and inspiring buildings. This history of the Windy City's skyscrapers begins in the key period of reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1871 and concludes in 1934 with the onset of the Great Depression, which brought architectural progress to a standstill. During this time, such iconic landmarks as the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field and Company Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Palmolive Building, the Masonic Temple, the City Opera, Merchandise Mart, and many others rose to impressive new heights, thanks to innovations in building methods and materials. Solid, earthbound edifices of iron, brick, and stone made way for towers of steel and plate glass, imparting a striking new look to Chicago's growing urban landscape. Thomas Leslie reveals the daily struggles, technical breakthroughs, and negotiations that produced these magnificent buildings. He also considers how the city's infamous political climate contributed to its architecture, as building and zoning codes were often disputed by shifting networks of rivals, labor unions, professional organizations, and municipal bodies. Featuring more than a hundred photographs and illustrations of the city's physically impressive and beautifully diverse architecture, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934 highlights an exceptionally dynamic, energetic period of architectural progress in Chicago.
Download or read book Slaughterhouse written by Dominic A. Pacyga and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the South Side to tour the Union Stock Yard, people got a firsthand look at Chicago's industrial prowess as they witnessed cattle, hogs, and sheep disassembled with breathtaking efficiency. At their height, the kill floors employed 50,000 workers and processed six hundred animals an hour, an astonishing spectacle of industrialized death. Pacyga chronicles the rise and fall of an industrial district that, for better or worse, served as the public face of Chicago for decades. He takes readers through the packinghouses as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside. He shows how the yards shaped the surrounding neighborhoods; looks at the Yard's sometimes volatile role in the city's race and labor relations; and traces its decades of mechanized innovations.
Download or read book We Built This City Chicago written by Tamra B. Orr and published by Fox Chapel Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ·Reading Level: Grades 3-6 ·Includes historical and current pictures of Chicago, chronology of events in Chicago (spanning 1673 to today), suggested reading, glossary. ·Features maps of the land and city. ·Learn the history of the land where Chicago is now located, the World's Fair, the Winnebago Native American tribe, the influx of Germans that created the city, the Great Chicago Fire, the Chicago River and more than 550 parks, and interesting sights to see when visiting the windy city like Wrigley Field, the Willis Tower, and Shedd Aquarium.
Download or read book Southern Exposure written by Lee Bey and published by Second to None: Chicago Storie. This book was released on 2019 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Exposure is the definitive guide to the often overlooked architectural riches of Chicago's South Side by architecture expert and former Chicago Sun-Times architecture writer Lee Bey.
Download or read book The Chicago School of Architecture written by Carl W. Condit and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1964 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoroughly illustrated classic study traces the history of the world-famous Chicago school of architecture from its beginnings with the functional innovations of William Le Baron Jenney and others to their imaginative development by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Chicago School of Architecture places the Chicago school in its historical setting, showing it at once to be the culmination of an iron and concrete construction and the chief pioneer in the evolution of modern architecture. It also assesses the achievements of the school in terms of the economic, social, and cultural growth of Chicago at the turn of the century, and it shows the ultimate meaning of the Chicago work for contemporary architecture. "A major contribution [by] one of the world's master-historians of building technique."—Reyner Banham, Arts Magazine "A rich, organized record of the distinguished architecture with which Chicago lives and influences the world."—Ruth Moore, Chicago Sun-Times
Download or read book Stacked Decks written by Robin Bartram and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-08-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling look at the power and perspectives of city building inspectors as they navigate unequal housing landscapes. Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact—housing inequality. In Stacked Decks, she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods. Stacked Decks illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.
Download or read book Chicago 1890 written by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago's first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city's modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city's toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country. An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago's defining events--including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World's Columbian Exposition, and Burnham's Plan of Chicago--by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city's cultural and political crosscurrents. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism's inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period's popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury's chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper's vaunted status was never as inevitable as today's skylines suggest.
Download or read book Studs Terkel s Chicago written by Studs Terkel and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author shares his memories of growing up in Chicago and anecdotes about the city and its inhabitants.
Download or read book Downtown America written by Alison Isenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downtown America was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song—a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one. Downtown America cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a dynamic new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors—the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions—what it should look like and who should walk its streets—pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values. Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Readers of this work will find anything but a story of inevitability. Even some of the downtown's darkest moments—the Great Depression's collapse in land values, the rioting and looting of the 1960s, or abandonment and vacancy during the 1970s—illuminate how core cultural values have animated and intertwined with economic investment to reinvent the physical form and social experiences of urban commerce. Downtown America—its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past—will never look quite the same again. A book that does away with our most clichéd approaches to urban studies, Downtown America will appeal to readers interested in the history of the United States and the mythology surrounding its most cherished institutions. A Choice Oustanding Academic Title. Winner of the 2005 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Winner of the 2005 Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American Planning History. Winner of the 2005 Historic Preservation Book Price from the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation. Named 2005 Honor Book from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Download or read book The Welsh Who Built Chicago written by Dilys Rana and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Welsh settlers who made their way to the shores of Lake Michigan in America's heartland became key contributors to the growth and development of what was to become the country's second largest city: Chicago. From 1883 on - when there was little more than an Indian trading center on that spot and a population of only 350 - Chicago grew more rapidly than any other urban center on the planet. By 1893, a mere sixty years later, it had evolved into a vibrant, modern metropolis with over one million citizens.A strong and identifiable Welsh community developed within the city as a number of Welsh churches, active benevolent and cultural Welsh societies, and a plethora of Welsh events brought citizens of Wales together in unity and fellowship. Their crowning achievement was the grand spectacle of the largest Eisteddfod (traditional cultural and music festival) to be held outside Wales during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Cambrian Benevolent Society of Chicago alone - founded by and for Welsh citizens of the city in 1853 - boasted a membership of 2,000 at that time.The contributions of the Welsh to the city's growth have been largely overlooked, due maybe to their comparatively small numbers. But they were undoubtedly here, weaving unquestionably vital threads within the fabric of the young city. A selection of stories of their life journeys from the old country to the heart of a new America are revealed within the pages of The Welsh Who Built Chicago
Download or read book Constructing Chicago written by Daniel M. Bluestone and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the architectural history of nineteenth century Chicago, looks at Chicago's parks, churches, offices, and civic buildings, and looks at the image of Chicago they created
Download or read book Sin in the Second City written by Karen Abbott and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history–and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awaited their arrival. Courtesans named Doll, Suzy Poon Tang, and Brick Top devoured raw meat to the delight of Prince Henry of Prussia and recited poetry for Theodore Dreiser. Whereas lesser madams pocketed most of a harlot’s earnings and kept a “whipper” on staff to mete out discipline, the Everleighs made sure their girls dined on gourmet food, were examined by an honest physician, and even tutored in the literature of Balzac. Not everyone appreciated the sisters’ attempts to elevate the industry. Rival Levee madams hatched numerous schemes to ruin the Everleighs, including an attempt to frame them for the death of department store heir Marshall Field, Jr. But the sisters’ most daunting foes were the Progressive Era reformers, who sent the entire country into a frenzy with lurid tales of “white slavery”——the allegedly rampant practice of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into brothels. This furor shaped America’s sexual culture and had repercussions all the way to the White House, including the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With a cast of characters that includes Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., William Howard Taft, “Hinky Dink” Kenna, and Al Capone, Sin in the Second City is Karen Abbott’s colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters, their world-famous Club, and the perennial clash between our nation’s hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers, Sin in the Second City offers a vivid snapshot of America’s journey from Victorian-era propriety to twentieth-century modernity. Visit www.sininthesecondcity.com to learn more! “Delicious… Abbott describes the Levee’s characters in such detail that it’s easy to mistake this meticulously researched history for literary fiction.” —— New York Times Book Review “ Described with scrupulous concern for historical accuracy…an immensely readable book.” —— Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal “Assiduously researched… even this book’s minutiae makes for good storytelling.” —— Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Karen Abbott has pioneered sizzle history in this satisfyingly lurid tale. Change the hemlines, add 100 years, and the book could be filed under current affairs.” —— USA Today “A rousingly racy yarn.” –Chicago Tribune “A colorful history of old Chicago that reads like a novel… a compelling and eloquent story.” —— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Gorgeously detailed” —— New York Daily News “At last, a history book you can bring to the beach.” —— The Philadelphia Inquirer “Once upon a time, Chicago had a world class bordello called The Everleigh Club. Author Karen Abbott brings the opulent place and its raunchy era alive in a book that just might become this years “The Devil In the White City.” —— Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine (cover story) “As Abbott’s delicious and exhaustively researched book makes vividly clear, the Everleigh Club was the Taj Mahal of bordellos.” —— Chicago Sun Times “The book is rich with details about a fast-and-loose Chicago of the early 20th century… Sin explores this world with gusto, throwing light on a booming city and exposing its shadows.” —— Time Out Chicago “[Abbott’s] research enables the kind of vivid description à la fellow journalist Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City that make what could be a dry historic account an intriguing read." – Seattle Times “Abbott tells her story with just the right mix of relish and restraint, providing a piquant guide to a world of sexuality” —— The Atlantic “A rollicking tale from a more vibrant time: history to a ragtime beat.” – Kirkus Reviews “With gleaming prose and authoritative knowledge Abbott elucidates one of the most colorful periods in American history, and the result reads like the very best fiction. Sex, opulence, murder — What's not to love?” —— Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants “A detailed and intimate portrait of the Ritz of brothels, the famed Everleigh Club of turn-of-the-century Chicago. Sisters Minna and Ada attracted the elites of the world to such glamorous chambers as the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, complete with a reflective floor. And isn’t Minna’s advice to her resident prostitutes worthy advice for us all: “Give, but give interestingly and with mystery.”’ —— Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City “Karen Abbott has combined bodice-ripping salaciousness with top-notch scholarship to produce a work more vivid than a Hollywood movie.” —— Melissa Fay Greene, author of There is No Me Without You “Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.” —— Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng “This is a story of debauchery and corruption, but it is also a story of sisterhood, and unerring devotion. Meticulously researched, and beautifully crafted, Sin in the Second City is an utterly captivating piece of history.” —— Julian Rubinstein, author of Ballad of the Whiskey Robber
Download or read book Chicago s Block Clubs written by Amanda I. Seligman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you’re tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties. In Chicago’s Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago—from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department’s twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle—but too small for the city to keep up with—city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood’s particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city—especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can—and cannot—accomplish when they work together.
Download or read book Fabulous Chicago written by Emmett Dedmon and published by Garrett County Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the best-selling history of an American city like no other -- and of the vibrant people who built it. The Yankees who came west to gamble fortunes on the Board of Trade, the Swifts and Amours, Fields and McCormicks, and the new immigrants who worked in their stockyards, stores and railroads -- together and at odds they built Chicago out of the prairie mud, and built it again when the Great Fire destroyed it. This is a story of political turmoil, of corruption, of social striving and reform: the Haymarket Massacre, the Pullman Strike, Jane Adams of Hull House, and the notorious Al Capone. The entrepreneurial giants, the gangsters and mayors of legend, the poets, like Sandburg and MacLeish, and architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright -- all belong to Chicago, and populate this incredible book. From the Everleigh Club brothel to the patriotic song of George F. Root, Fabulous Chicago is a history that is alive with the unbelievable spirit of one of the world's great cities.
