Chicago: A Biography Dominic Pacyga (University of Chicago Press)
A biography? You’re treating Chicago like a person?
Even after teaching the history of Chicago for 30 years, I wasn’t aware of the paranoia about anarchism that has been in the city, from the Haymarket on, till about 1968. That struck me. Lucy Parsons, the wife of Albert Parsons, who was hung after the Haymarket affair [in 1886], was still getting blamed for things in the 1920s. She lived till 1941, and every time there was some sort of labor agitation, they looked for Lucy Parsons.
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And you were living in Back of the Yards then?
There’s a lot of myths about the Dan Ryan —you know, “it’s a racial wall.” And every time somebody quotes that in the book they quote Don Rose or Leon Despres, who had very little to do with the decision. So I decided that I would look, and I found no smoking gun. I’ve got a map in the book that shows the route of the Dan Ryan and the neighborhoods around it—what percentage they were black in 1950. That’s 12 years before it opened.
Eight thousand one hundred families were moved for the expressways—if you figure five per family that’s 40,500 people. A lot of neighborhoods and institutions, just bowled over. Big, big federal money, big local money was moving things around in the 50s and 60s. When you look at it, it kind of shocks you— how big these movements were, and how they transformed the city.
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