In the 1850s and 1860s Chicago streets consisted of garbage, manure, and dirt. Horse-drawn omnibuses–our first form of mass transit–traveled down State Street on wooden planks as far south as 12th Street. The trip was risky in wet weather. According to transit historian David Young, if an omnibus slipped off the planks, it could take workers days to dig it out of the mud. Roving gangs of youths moved faster. “When they were not brawling or vandalizing public property or stealing from gardens,” writes historian Perry Duis, “they were pawning stolen goods or selling them to junk dealers.”
It’s not clear exactly what Kunstler thinks the “demands of civility” are. But it is clear that Chicagoans were buying their way out of the distasteful parts of urban life long before the invention of cheap cars or home-mortgage-interest deductions. Duis, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, tells some of the relevant stories in his new book, Challenging Chicago: Coping With Everyday Life, 1837-1920, showing that time and again, when they had a choice, Chicagoans preferred not to embrace the city but to insulate themselves from it.
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By the 1890s the city’s streets no longer depended on planks for solidity, but that didn’t make them clean. Tens of thousands of workhorses deposited about one million pounds of manure and 25,000 gallons of urine on the streets every year. As late as 1914 the city health department annually picked up more than 8,000 dead horses from the streets. And new perils were proliferating. Electric wires hung overhead. First cable cars, then streetcars traveled the neighborhoods with menacing speed. Foot and vehicle traffic downtown was congested beyond belief, and much of it consisted of unpredictable newcomers hawking goods and chatting in Italian, Polish, Yiddish.
Those who could afford a horse and buggy were able to move throughout the city, cocooned in a portable semipublic space. Cars, when they came along, offered even greater mobility and more privacy. Far from being antithetical to the city, they fit right into the established pattern of buying one’s way out of the possibility of unpleasant or threatening encounters.
Not everyone could be rich, but everyone could be ethnic. Ethnic neighborhoods enabled almost all classes to choose their day-to-day company. But that lasted for only a generation or two. When inhabitants got the money to move farther afield to places that offered more options, they did. (Racism long denied prosperous African-Americans this opportunity, which shaped their communities differently.) Already in the late 1800s preelectric street railways enabled workers “to move out of the increasingly dense, congested, and more expensive downtown area to residential subdivisions sprouting up on the outskirts of town,” writes Young. In the late 1940s it was the same story, just a different prime mover. In their book Chicago’s Southeast Side: Images of America, Dominic Pacyga and Rod Sellers include a photograph of a large, jammed parking lot at U.S. Steel’s South Works. They remark that “the automobile made it possible for mill workers to live outside the neighborhood, even in the suburbs, and to commute to work.” For many the old neighborhood wasn’t an end in itself–it was a way station.
The elevated rail loop, built between 1894 and 1897, was an anticongestion measure, in that it allowed trains to circulate smoothly above downtown. Arguably it was the single most important piece of transportation infrastructure in Chicago history, yet Charles Yerkes found it necessary to deceive property owners about what he was doing even as he constructed it. “The entire system had to be built over streets, and to comply with the Adams Law [requiring the consent of two-thirds of property owners] he was confronted with prohibitively expensive bribery,” writes Young. “Acquiring downtown buildings and demolishing them for a right-of-way was out of the question.” So Yerkes built each of its four sides under a different pretext. The north leg, for instance, was sold as a mere eastward extension of the Lake Street el. The freight tunnels–another attempt to alleviate congestion by adding an extra level to downtown–were constructed in secret for four years around the turn of the century before word got out.
Chicago’s Southeast Side: Images of America by Rod Sellers and Dominic Pacyga, Arcadia, $18.99.
