ATDTDA (2): "Was it still Chicago?" (38.29)

[Tim Strzechowski]

"Stay here in Chicago if you like, it's all the same to me.  This neighborhood we're in right now might suit you perfectly, and I know I'll never come here again." [...] Lew looked around.  Was it still Chicago?  As he began again to walk [...] everything was on the skew, narrow lanes radiating starwise from small plazas, tramlines with hairpin turns that carried passengers abruptly back the way they'd been coming [...] (p. 38).
 
 
Badger, R. Reid.  The Great American Fair:  The World's Columbian Exposition & American Culture.  Nelson Hall: Chicago, 1979.
 
Without question the years 1871 to 1900 were transitional ones for Chicago, years in which the city, while in the process of becoming a great modern metropolis, also retained something of an attachment to its former turbulent frontier days before the Civil War when hard drinking sailors and lumberjacks rioted all night in the gambling joints, saloons, and brothels along the river.  Even as the city began to take on the more settled character of the older cities of the East, men continued to carry knives and wear pistols in the streets.  Not without some reason had Chicago earned the title of the wickedest city in the land before the great war.  The city's reputation as a wide-open, lawless, half-frontier town continued into the nineties.  Randolph Street between State and Clark still remained the gambling row and was known for many years as "Hairtrigger Block."
 
[...]
 
Increasingly more apparent after 1880, however, were the growing social and economic tensions resulting from the forces of change in the city's life.  Chicago's politics, reflecting these conflicts, became dominated by the rise of city bossism, ethnic loyalism, and sporadic counter protests against mal-administration, municipal dishonesty, and social injustice.  The rise and long careers of two of the most notorious and colorful of Chicago's precinct politicians, John "Bathhouse" Coughlin -- Alderman of the extremely powerful First Ward which encompassed most of the downtown business wealth and underground corruption -- and "Hinky Dink" Kenna -- the Bath's straightman and manager -- illustrate in their slightly exaggerated case the confusion of forces and conditions which challenged and shaped urban politics in the late nineteenth century (35).
 
[...]
 
As the city grew physically and demographically and expanded commercially under the impulse of the numerous new possibilities for economic enterprise, Chicago's less prosperous and seamy side grew as well, providing an ironic comment on the civic pride and optimism of her citizens.  The stench from the manure and decaying animals near the stockyards was at times overwhelming and the Chicago River was polluted with "grease so thick on its surface that it seemed a liquid rainbow."  Foreign observers were often shocked and repelled by the smoke gushing from the overcrowded factories, the screeching and clanging of the trains and streetcars at all hourse, and the crushing rush of downtown commercial life.  "The dominant characteristic of the exterior life of Chicago is violence," concluded an Italian visitor in the early nineties, to which he added that "during my stay of one week, I did not see in Chicago anything but darkness: smoke, clouds, dirt, and an extraordinary number of sad a
nd grieved persons.
 
[...]
 
Within the ever more apparent slum districts the conditions (economic, social, and esthetic) reflected an even more sinister and bleak side of the city's life.  By the 1890s nearly 50 percent of Chicago's people lived in dwellings housing more than ten persons and by 1893, Chicago's slum population, estimated at 162,000, like the city's total population, was second only to New York (p. 36).
 
[...]
 
Chicago's history between 1870 and 1920 contains the major forces, conflicts, and directions of the national culture during the period.  "Suffice it to say," concluded Thomas J. Schlereth in a recent article, "that none of the national struggles, problems, and achievements during these fifty years were missing from the region that James Bryce once called 'the most American part of America.' "  Chicago was a new American city of the nineteenth century, a western city, which had grown "phoenix-like" from the great fire of 1871 to become the second city of the nation.  Built upon commerce and business opportunity, its leading citizens were businessmen -- not military heroes or politicians or descendents from old and venerable families.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Chicago epitomized the major forces that were shaping the nation (39).