South Side of Chicago

“ The evenness of the plain has saved Chicago from most of the vast expense incurred by some American cities (notably Boston and San Francisco) in the extension or levelling of their sites and the removal of obstructions unfavourable to their development. The business district is concentrated in a small area of the South Side, just below the main river and between the south branch and the lake. A number of the railway terminals, almost all the great wholesale and retail houses, the leading hotels and public buildings are crowded within an area of about 1.5 sq. ”

“ This modest dwelling existed through vicissitudes many and terrible. When built, it stood in a vast solitude. North of it were thick woods which covered the whole of what is now Chicago's proud "North Side." In front of it lay the narrow, deep and sluggish creek which forms the main river; and, with its two long, straggling branches, gives the city its inestimable harbor, [N] with « 56 » twenty-seven miles of dock frontage. Beyond it, stretching indefinitely southward, lay the grassy flat now the "South Side," the business centre and wealthiest residence portion. ”

“ With its suburbs, Chicago stretches nearly 30 miles along the shore of Lake Michigan and reaches irregularly inland about 10 miles. The city limits inclose an area of over 191 square miles, which the two branches of the Chicago River cut into three parts, known as the South, [58] West, and North sides. The three divisions of the city are connected by bridges and by tunnels under the river.
Though business is spreading to the West Side, the central business section is still on the South Side and extends from the Chicago River beyond Twenty-sixth Street. ”

“ What a reputation for beauty Chicago would secure if visitors touring the city would see crowds of idle, insolent Negroes lounging on the South Side boulevards and adding beauty to the floricultural display in the parks, filling the streets with old newspapers and tomato containers and advertising the Poro-system for removing the marcelled kinks from Negro hair in the windows of the derelict remains of what had once been a clean, respectable residence. ”

“ The causes which produced three villages surrounding a common business centre will continue to operate. The west side will continue to expand with cheap houses, or even elegant residences on the park avenues—it is the glory of Chicago that such a large proportion of its houses are owned by their occupants, and that there are few tenement rookeries, and even few gigantic apartment houses—over a limitless prairie; the north side will grow in increasing beauty about Lincoln Park; and the south side will more and more gravitate with imposing houses about the attractive south parks. ”

“ There are four settlements in Chicago in or near the neighborhoods of colored people. The pioneer was the Frederick Douglas Center on the South Side of Chicago, founded to promote a better understanding between white and colored people and to help remove the arbitrary disabilities from which the latter suffer in their civil, political and industrial life. ”

“ In this general neighborhood, from Thirty-ninth to Fifty-ninth streets and from State Street to Lake Michigan, hostility toward Negroes has been plainly and even forcibly expressed through organized efforts to oust them and prevent their further encroachment. The situation is peculiar. This is the part of the old South Side in which most of the Negro population of Chicago has settled. The so-called "Black Belt" has been overcrowded for years. Old and deteriorated housing and its insufficiency have been steadily driving Negroes out of it in search of other homes. ”

“ But in Chicago the survey of the School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1917 reported that in the south division only 4 per cent of the apartments and houses occupied by colored persons were owned by the occupants and on the west side only 8 per cent. In South Chicago and in the stockyards district, where the highest percentage of ownership was found, 18 per cent of the colored families owned their homes. ”

“ Houses are cheaper there than on the South Side; and although the general level of ordinary workingmen's homes compares favorably with that on the South Side, there are few abandoned residences formerly occupied by wealthy persons now available for Negroes. There has been little friction within this area, in which 9,221 whites and 6,520 Negroes live. West Side Negroes, laborers for the most part, are generally home-loving, hard-working people, desirous of improving conditions for their children. ”

“ The psychological factor of residential property values is such that they may change very rapidly with the advent into a homogeneous neighborhood of a few families of a different nationality or social status. Between Twelfth and Thirty-first streets in the South Side Negro residence area, once the most fashionable white residence section, property values based on residential uses slumped utterly, and then later began to increase because of industrial uses. Such a change is often due to an encroachment upon a residential district of commercial or industrial enterprises. ”

“ On the South Side, where most of the Negro population lives, the low quality of housing is widespread, although there are some houses of a better grade which are greatly in demand.
The ordinary conveniences, considered necessities by the average white citizen, are often lacking. Bathrooms are often missing. Gas lighting is common, and electric lighting is a rarity. ”

“ This is a story of Chicago, which is a first cousin of New York, although the two are not on chummy terms. It is a story of that part of Chicago which lies east of Dearborn Avenue and south of Division Street, and which may be called the Nottingham curtain district.
In the Nottingham curtain district every front parlor window is embellished with a “Rooms With or Without Board” sign. The curtains themselves have mellowed from their original department-store-basement-white to a rich, deep tone of Chicago smoke, which has the notorious London variety beaten by several shades. ”

“ The four-room dwelling was found to prevail among the Slovaks of the Twentieth Ward, the Lithuanians of the Fourth Ward, the Greeks and Italians in the neighborhood of Hull-House, the various central and southern European nationalities who work in the South Chicago steel mills and live near-by, and among the Jews, Bohemians, and Poles of the West Side. ”

“ Invariably the large vice districts have been created within or near the settlements of colored people. In the past history of the city every time a new vice district was created downtown or on the South Side, the colored families were in the district moving in just ahead of the prostitutes. ”

“ In numerous cases Negroes created a market for property when there was none. A prominent white business man long resident on the South Side told of a row of houses on South Park Avenue and Grand Boulevard that were vacant for years until sold or rented to Negroes: they could not be sold at all until they took on a value because Negroes were ready to buy them. ”

“ When many properties are thus thrown on the market low prices are the certain result.
When in recent years, Negroes moved into the Hyde Park district, animosity was aroused, and numerous bombings of property occupied by Negroes followed. One of the oldest South Side real estate dealers, quoted in the Daily News' series of articles in the summer of 1919, expressed the tense feeling of an association there that was seeking methods to drive out and keep out the Negroes:
We want to be fair. ”

“ On the South Side near Thirty-first Street there was a case where a man lodger occupied one bedroom, the other being used by the parents and their eight-year-old daughter—four persons in a four-room flat. ”

“ Home for the Aged and Infirm.—The Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People on West Garfield Boulevard is supported almost entirely by contributions from Negroes.
Indiana Avenue Y.W.C.A.—The Indiana Avenue branch of the Y.W.C.A. on the South Side is under the general direction of the Central Y.W.C.A. of Chicago. Its directors are Negro women. Many girls are directed in their activities by volunteer group leaders from the community. The Industrial Department secures employment for Negro girls. ”

“ Chicago has a physical peculiarity that radically affects its social condition, and prevents its becoming homogeneous. It has one business centre and three distinct residence parts, divided by the branching river. Communication between the residence sections has to be made through the business city, and is further hindered by the bridge crossings, which cause irritating delays the greater part of the year. ”

“ The prominent characteristics of Chicago are an overhanging pall of smoke; streets crowded with quick-moving, busy people; a vast aggregation of railways, vessels, elevators and traffic of all kinds; a polyglot population drawn from almost all races; and an earnest devotion to the almighty dollar. Its name came from the river, and is of Indian origin, regarded as probably a corruption of "Cheecagua," the title of a dynasty of chiefs who controlled the country west and south of Lake Michigan. ”

“ On the other hand the far-famed hospitality of its people to prophets of every school of thought, and the spirit of enterprise which welcomes every new idea, attracts eccentrics and adventurers whose trumpetings are loud enough to mislead superficial observers into the notion that Chicago is the crank’s paradise. If a fault at all, this amiable toleration leans to virtue’s side. Rightly to appreciate the depth and breadth of Chicago’s influence we must follow its trade to the remotest corners of the earth. ”

“ Plunging in the electric cars through the river subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London, are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism. ”

“ Confined to a long parallelogram, and limited as to light and air, neither comfort nor individual taste can be consulted or satisfied. Chicago is a city of detached houses, in the humbler quarters as well as in the magnificent avenues, and the effect is home-like and beautiful at the same time. There is great variety—stone, brick, and wood intermingled, plain and ornamental; but drive where you will in the favorite residence parts of the vast city, you will be continually surprised with the sight of noble and artistic houses and homes displaying taste as well as luxury. ”

“ Now there are in the neighborhood of 25,000. There are several streets with elegant business blocks, finished or being completed, of four, five, and six stories in height, comparing favorably with those of any Eastern city in architectural design and finish. The heart of the city reminds one of Chicago the spring after the great fire, and the people seem to have the same pluck, and energy, and confidence that so marked our people at that time. Some of the private houses on the steep, hugely-bowldered slope of a high hill on one side of the city are models of elegance. ”

“ In time of plenty a great American city like Chicago goes on showing a more or less cheerful face to the world while in nooks and crannies down side-streets and alleys poverty and misery sit hunched up in little ill-smelling rooms breeding vice. ”

“ But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of succession and a weary bread-line. ”

“ The inference that the north is the most eligible of the sides one finds to be violently combated by the residents of the south and the west, and he finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashionable quarter, as in every other city, Chicago has three claimants for that distinction. Each of these quarters has its centre and its dependencies, and between each two there is a large area either unoccupied, or occupied with dwellings very much humbler than those that line{150} the avenues that are severally the boasts of the competing sides. ”

“ Chicago is becoming modest. Perhaps the inhabitants may still be able to conceal their modesty, but nevertheless they feel it. The explanation is simple. The city has grown not only beyond the most sanguine expectations of those who indulged in the most inflated hope of its future, but it has grown beyond what they said they expected. This gives the citizens pause—as it might an eagle that laid a roc’s egg. ”

“ A special interest in Chicago at the moment is because it is forming—full of contrasts and of promise, palaces and shanties side by side. Its forces are gathered and accumulating, but not assimilated. What a mass of crude, undigested material it has! In one region on the west side are twenty thousand Bohemians and Poles; the street signs are all foreign and of unpronounceable names—a physically strong, but mentally and morally brutal, people for the most part; the adults generally do not speak English, and claning as they do, they probably never will. ”

“ Chicago was originally built on a flat prairie, which was but slightly elevated above the lake, and characterized by sand and swamp; but the grade of a large portion has been raised, block after block of buildings being lifted to the required level, streets elevated, and vast areas of solid masonry substructure laid.
Nature made of the lake-shore a level line of sand. The city's lake-front is protected south from Twelfth Street by the Illinois Central Railroad, and north from Twelfth Street to Chicago Avenue by the Government Pier, which protects the harbor. ”