Chicago History

In the closing pages of Catherine Adel West’s Saving Ruby King, two men and two women can hear police sirens approaching, drawn by reports of a gunshot in the house where they stand. Usually, in a novel like this — a book about family dysfunction and violent secrets and quests for redemption — this climactic scene…

  If you want to know Chicago, you gotta know the grid. If I tell you I live at 6220 North Paulina Street, you know that my two-flat is 62 blocks north of Madison Street, or just under eight miles, the rule of thumb being eight blocks to a mile. Where’s Paulina? 1700 West. When you hear that,…

    Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, weakest, most damaged of the poor — is identified with New York City. After all, it was at the southern tip of Manhattan in worn-out slums (now deeply…

  Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is suitably gritty and oppressive, but probably not ugly enough. I’m not sure it would be possible for this kind of illustrative work to capture the visceral angst of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his extended family, new to Chicago, new to the Stockyards,…

Friends called Johnny Hernandez “Slugger,” he was such a good baseball player. In the fall of 1946, the thirteen-year-old, a recent graduate of St. Francis of Assisi elementary school on Chicago’s Near West Side, went on a Boys’ Club camping trip to Indiana.  City boy that he was, Johnny saw some swans and got the idea…

  A hallmark of the black nationalism movement in the 1960s was the idea of African-Americans patronizing African-American businesses. This approach with its pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps subtext has been a prominent tenet for many African-American leaders ever since.  But its roots go far back, nearly to the time of the Civil War. Indeed, in the early 20th…

  The Pueblo boy with “thick hair…the color of a night river” is called Wolf. He appears several times in the first half of Renny Golden’s The Music of Her Rivers, her gathering of radiant poems about lives on the hard edge of America (University of New Mexico Press, 87 pages, $18.95). In “They Named Me…