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eople who like peace and quiet fare badly when the empire does well. The roar of construction machines, the resurfacing of the streets, the mushrooming of paper condos where solid brick homes once lived, the roar of blenders making “power drinks” for cell-phone holders, the grinding of espresso machines, and even the all-too-cheerful
vrroom
of the vacuum cleaner in my quaint B&Bâall were loud reminders that Chicago, and America, were doing well. To the detriment of the rest of us who remember, sigh, the glories of tranquility.
My friend Anne, a young theater director, found this nice B&B for me near Halstead and Clark Streets, in a neighborhood known familiarly as “Boys Town,” and soon to be namedâofficiallyâGay Town. The name of the B& B was Villa Toscano, but far from reposing amid the peaceful hills of Tuscany, it sat between infernal roadwork machines tearing up the street.
6
“It's the new prosperity,” sighed my innkeeper. “Would you like a glass of wine? I have some excellent Merlot.”
Three days before I arrived, Anne's new landlord had told her that her rent was going up $350 to “bring it in line with the market.” Anne is going to move, and so are all the other artists in her building and in the neighborhood. It's an old story: Artists revive a rundown neighborhood and then develop
ers move in and price the artists out of their homes. Boutiques and B&Bs mushroom and the tourists pour in. It happened in New York's SoHo. It happened in New Orleans's Lower Garden District. It's happening in Chicago.
I had a plan: I wanted to avoid the obvious tourist charms of Chicago. Stay away from Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile. Avoid the lovely Lake Michigan beaches. Set foot in none of the grand museums. No ethnic festivals, those orgies of faux-peasant cuteness that abound in the Midwest. No cultural events “under the Picasso,” which are city-sponsored affairs to promote optimism. Eat in none of the nouveau eateries. Touch no arugula.
Around the world, Chicago is known for three things other than those listed above: Al Capone's mob, Chicago blues, and the Labor Struggle. I wasn't up for the Capone tour because I'd sort of lost interest when Geraldo Rivera opened the gangster's vault and found nothing inside. As for the blues, we have them at home in New Orleans, and I hear them all the time.
What I hoped to see were the sites commemorating Chicago's long and distinguished history of labor struggle. How did this “broad-shouldered city,” “hog-butcher to the world,” as Carl Sandburg called it, remember its past? How did it commemorate the Haymarket Riot? The Pullman Strike? The Steel Massacre of 1937? The Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968? Chicago had been a vast laboratory for progressive ideas. It had shaped America. I wanted to see the places where this history had taken place, and I was curious to see if there was still a radical Chicago where these ideas continued to be debated. Ideas, unlike buildings, are never finished.
Danny Postel was just the man for the job. The young editor of the journal
Lip
, was an enthusiast.
7
The latest
Lip
featured such articles as, “What, Me, Racist?,” an interview with antiracist activist Tim Wise, “America's Indonesian Killers,” and “My Day as a Dominatrix.” That seemed radical enough for me, and my guide made sure that I was not disappointed. He picked me up at the Villa Toscano, and for the next two days we covered what felt like one thousand miles, visiting radical Chicago history past and present.
“The South Side,” Danny declared grandly, “is the cradle of Chicago civilization. Totally below the radar. No mention by the tourist bureau.” In fact, so little mention was made of it that one Rand McNally map of Chicago,
the “Easy Finder,” did not even have the South Side on it. The El train, which used to service the South Side, had been removed. An iffy bus system took its place.
Our first destination on the South Side was a factory building in Hyde Park. Here, Danny told me, some of Chicago's most serious radicals labored on a number of projects. The building was near the steam plant of the University of Chicago, but finding the entrance was not so easy. After circling the massive brick structure several times, we entered through an open door into a crowded wood shop. A carpenter in there turned off his saw and explained that the shop was one of many community-based projects in the factory. All the wood was scavenged from demolitions and the loose boards were turned into furniture. He guided us through piles of boards and unfinished bookcases to a bicycle shop. Hundreds of cannibalized bicycles shared space here with chairs made out of tire tubes and wheel frames. I sat in one and it was very comfortable. This business was run by poor neighborhood children who came here to work on bicycles for themeselves and for resale. Like the woodshop, it was part of something called the Resource Center, an organization dedicated to recycling and community activism.
8
On the other side of the bike shop, we met three Danish young men who asked us if we wanted to see the Superflex. I didn't see why not.
The Superflex, which they had brought with them from Denmark, was a plastic ball that sat in the middle of an empty loft with pipes coming out of it.
9
Inside the ball, a combination of organic materials, such as dung and agricultural waste, produced “biogas,” a cheap form of energy capable of heating and lighting a house. The Danes were on a world tour to promote biogas. Some of their Superflex balls were already operating in subequatorial Africa, lighting up hundreds of homes.
“Biogas plants are built by dreamers for poor people,” Bjorg explained simply.
We invited them to tour radical Chicago with us.
We climbed a perilous staircase and arrived in an office filled to the rafters with books and manuscripts. This had been our destination all along.
Here was the editorial office of
The Baffler.
10
Tom Frank, one of the editors, was a distinguished historian and writer who, like Danny, consented to be a guide. The latest issue of
The Baffler
was itself a radical site. The theme was “The Folklore of Capitalism.” There was an article on Sinclair Lewis and eternal Babbitry, an expose of Amway, and an analysis of working-class amnesia that proved, beyond a shadow of doubt and with charts, that today's workers remember nothing of the past of the labor movement.
Tom was a maelstrom of activity with round professorial glasses. Before we could start our tour, he insisted on watering his garden plot behind the building. He was growing cabbages, brussels sprouts, lettuce, and tomatoes. The plot was one of several in a large community garden tended by poor folk from the South Side who often had barbecues and get-togethers here. While Tom watered he explained that the South Side was still safe from the frenzy of urban renewal that had seized other parts of Chicago.
“Too many poor people,” he laughed.
We commandeered the van of the Danes and headed for the East Side, toward some of the mightiest steel mills of America. They were mostly silent now, victims of the seventies depression in the steel industry. Their looming hulks were surrounded by high fences. We passed the huge abandoned high-rises of the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest housing project outside the former USSR. They were in the process of being demolished.
“Where are the people going to live?” asked Bjorg.
Danny and Tom both shrugged. Danny said, “Nobody cares about that.” Tom added, “The rich are taking back their city.”
Tom pointed out the vacant lot and park where the famous World's Fair of 1893 had taken place. A forlorn gold statue of a woman without any identification rose stiffly from an intersection.
“All that's left,” said Tom, “She's supposed to represent Progress or something.”
We passed through neighborhoods named Hegewisch and Pilsen, once German, Czech, and Polish enclaves, now mostly Mexican. The idle steel mills framed the houses like dead volcanoes. Police cars went by, sirens blaring. An immense car graveyard flashed by. Finding Republic Steel, where the Massacre of 1937, had taken place was not easy. We drove around and
around, until Tom, who had visited and written about the place, spotted Avenue O. There, at the intersection of Avenue O and 115th Street, was the driveway for Republic Steel.
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A grassy area with listing benches surrounded a curious steel sculpture shaped like a lopped-off pyramid with some strands of stiff metal spaghetti rising out of it.
“This is it,” Tom said.
There was no “it,” since there was nothing written on the object to indicate what it was for. But at this very spot, in 1937, the company's security had opened fire at a picnic by striking workers and killed ten of them as they attempted to flee. The massacre caused outrage around the world and led to changes in the industry.
Site One on the Tour of Uncommemorated History.
We drove over the Calumet River, past more hulking reminders of an industrial past that was irretrievably gone. A few barges rusted in an industrial canal. White gypsum piles rose on the banks. A sign painted on an overpass said TRAINING THE COMMUNITY ON TOURISM. Right.
We reached Pullman, a company town that had been wholly owned by George Pullman, the maker of luxury railroad cars.
12
In Pullman's paternalistic town, workers were lodged and fed, with rents and food deducted from their paychecks. The town was segregated by class: the foremen lived in the bigger houses on the outer edge of the town. There was a grocery store, a bank, a general store, a post office. Things were going well until the depression of 1893, when Pullman began laying off workers and cutting wages. The Railroad Workers Union entered the scene under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, a young labor leader who went on to become one of the founders of the Socialist Party. The resulting strike and the sympathy strikes that followed came the closest to a general strike ever in the United States. When Pullman's appeals to the Illinois National Guard to crush the strike failed, President Cleveland authorized the use of federal troops. It was the first federal intervention in a labor dispute. The Pullman Strike, known also
as the Debs Revolt led to Debs's jailing and his defense by the young Clarence Darrow, who later became famous for his defense of evolution teaching in the Scopes Trial. Debs ran for the presidency from jail and got one million votes.
So much history! The Pullman Historic District, a quaintly renovated area with a small hotel and a friendly park, gave no hint of any of it. The Florence Restaurant and Hotel was closed. There were four holes in a gray slab of stone where a plaque had been removed. There was a social-realist mural of some happy workers, but otherwise there were no other markers or monuments of any kind. A few brochures lying about in dusty boxes outside the hotel made short shrift of the Pullman Strike, choosing to emphasize instead the quaintness of the surroundings. Tom was distressed. He had visited Pullman two years before and, at that time, the hotel had been open. It looked as if even the nonthreatening history was in danger of disappearing.
“It says that we are in Pullman but we are not,” Tom said pensively. The remark could have stood for all of the Chicago history we were trying to visit. We were in Chicago but we were not.
An old man walking his dog stopped and looked at our bewildered little group. “Anything you want to know?”
I asked him if anyone remembered the Pullman Strike, maybe from his father's or grandfather's stories.
“I'm 83 years old. I know about it. But the young'uns seventy or so, they just watch the TV.” His name was Mr. Ed Berger, and that's all he'd say.
The Danes were pretty amazed. “In Denmark we have plaques and statues for everything,” said Bjorg, who seemed to be the spokesman for the group. The other Danes were taciturn but they nodded in agreement nonetheless.
The next stop was the site of the Haymarket Riot of 1886.
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On the third of May of that year, an unknown person threw a bomb just as policemen were trying to break up a mass meeting where anarchists were speaking. In the ensuing riot, both demonstrators and policemen were killed. Eight anarchists were arrested and condemned for the bombing on very little evidence. Four of them were hanged in 1887. The execution aroused the anger
of revolutionaries around the world. May Day, the International Workers' Day, began as a commemoration of Haymarket. It is now celebrated everywhere in the world except in the United States, where Labor Day is not in May. In 1889 the city of Chicago commemorated the event with a statue in honor of the policemen killed, depicting a helmeted officer with his hand raised over the inscription, “In the name of the people of Illinois, I command peace.” One year after the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968, an underground radical group, the Weathermen, blew up the statue. It was restored and returned to its pedestal, only to be blown up exactly one year later on the same anniversary. Only the pedestal remained, but in 1996, Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., the son of the elder Daley who battled the demonstrators in 1968, had this last reminder of Haymarket removed so as not to mar the view to the new convention center.