Tour Cost:: $40 each. Includes transportation, tour materials,
and small donation to Chicago Center.
The West Side is often overlooked by visitors to Chicago. While more “gritty” than other areas of the city, West Side has a wide diversity of vibrant ethnic communities. From the trendy neighborhoods in West Town to the excitement of Pilsen, this tour will cover the array of socioeconomic conditions and urban responses: communities in transition is most definitely the focus here.
Tour Organizers: Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture.*
*About the Chicago Center: The Chicago Center was founded in the late sixties when a group of college professors and students came to Chicago to create a hands-on learning environment. The organization incorporated as a non-profit in 1970 and was known as the Urban Life Center until 2006. Recognized nationwide as a leader in experiential education, the organization took Chicago Center as its new name, to reflect their commitment and relationship to one of North America’s most dynamic cities. Chicago Center’s mission is to equip college students and other participants to learn from diverse urban communities through innovative programs, seminars and internships. The Center expands the traditional classroom with a community-based, first-voices pedagogy that prepares its students for greater self-awareness and global citizenship.
Tour cost: $25 per tour/ $40 for both. Includes transportation and tour materials.
TOUR #3
Burnham’s City Beautiful Tour of Chicago - SAME as Tour #2, except for time!
Thursday, April 1, 2:30 - 4:00 pm.
Maximum of 25 per tour.
Tour cost: $25 per tour/ $40 for both. Includes transportation and tour materials.
Daniel Burnham, an architect and urban planner of the City Beautiful school, left an indelible stamp on the city of Chicago. Burnham was motivated by a desire to keep the city appealing to upper and middle-class residents and to provide cultural uplift for the lower class and immigrant population. His efforts in this regard were manifest in the “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a variety of buildings in the loop, and the celebrated 1909 “Plan of Chicago,” written with Edward Bennett. Burnham’s thumbprint is still visible on the city - and still included in urban and regional planning discussions.
Take one of two tours (or do both): Tour One - Navy Pier and downtown; Tour Two - Jackson Park (the site of the Columbian Exposition) and the South Side. Tour One focuses on the Plan of Chicago and its continuing influence in Chicagoland; Tour Two focuses on Burnham’s vision for the future of the city and the history of Chicago as a “dual metropolis.” The tours will occur sequentially with a hotel stop between them.
Tour Organizer: Holly Swyers, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lake Forest College.
TOUR #4
Black Metropolis Tour
Friday, April 2, 8:30 am – 11:00 am.
Maximum of 36 per tour.
Tour Cost: $35 each. Includes transportation and tour materials.
Chicago is well known as a city divided along race lines. This tour focuses upon the African-American experience in two neighborhoods of vibrant cultural energy: Bronzeville and “back of the yards.” Discover the “other” Chicago.
Tour Organizer: Erik Gellman, Department of History and Philosophy, Roosevelt University.
TOUR #5
Discovering the Chicago School
Friday, April 2, 9:00 am – noon.
Maximum of 36 per tour.
Tour cost: $25. Includes transportation and tour materials.
The Chicago School of Urban Sociology produced some of the most memorable studies of urban life in the 1920s. While many of the neighborhoods have been lost to the aggressive urban renewal programs of the 1960s and the 1990s, there is still much to be seen.
The Gold Coast and the Slum: In many respects the near north side neighborhoods are much as described by Harvey Zorbaugh in the 1920s. Artists’ lofts and galleries may be found in Tower Town; high-rise apartments are located along the Gold Coast; several blocks away is tenement housing and the remains of the older SRO rooming houses described by Zorbaugh as the “world of furnished rooms;” beyond that is the area known as Little Hell. This area figured prominently in Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang and is also the neighborhood where “Stanley,” the delinquent jack-roller, lived for the first seventeen years of his life as recorded in Clifford Shaw’s The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story.
Cabrini Green Public Housing Projects and Marshall Field Apartments: Before the introduction of public housing, wealthy philanthropists developed private low-income housing, as seen in the vaguely art-deco Marshall Field Apartments built in 1928. Cabrini Green was built not just in the midst of Little Italy, but at the precise coordinates of Little Hell (North Avenue and Clybourne) which, even in the 1920s, had the city’s highest incidence of murder. The project earned a well-deserved reputation for being one of the country’s worst public housing projects.
Polish Peasant in Europe and America: The Milwaukee-North Avenue area was the central axis for the Polish community in Chicago in the first decade of the 1900s when W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki began work on what would become The Polish Peasant. Although not usually connected with the Chicago School studies, it is clear that Thomas was the pivotal figure in the Chicago School: It was Thomas who recruited Robert Park to the university, and students were instructed in the collection and use of personal documents throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Although Thomas and Znaniecki discuss the social disorganization of the immigrant community, they emphasize the reconstruction of immigrant cultures in the urban metropolis.
The Hobo: The title of Nels Anderson’s study may obscure its relevance for urban research at the beginning of the new millennium. Subtitled The Sociology of the Homeless Man, Anderson begins by differentiating among some seven different types of homeless men; the hobo is but one of these characteristic types. His descriptions of hobo life are based upon personal experience. Especially interesting are his maps showing the various urban institutions which concentrate in the area around Madison and Halsted Streets.
The Ghetto: Louis Wirth’s dissertation presents a study of the historical development of the Jewish ghetto in Europe and, in the second half of the book, a study of Jewish immigration and the formation of the Jewish ghettoes in Chicago. We have a description of the Halsted Street ghetto in the 1920s as well as the expansion of the ghetto into “Deutschland” along 22nd Street and Independence Boulevard, where the Marx Brothers would perform in Yiddish theaters in the 1930s.
Tour Organizer: Ray Hutchison, Urban and Regional Studies, UW – Green Bay
TOUR #6
Tour of Chicago’s North Side
Friday, April 2, 9:30 am – noon.
Maximum of 13 per tour.
Tour Cost:: $40 each. Includes transportation, tour materials, and small donation to Chicago Center.
The transformation of North Side communities from River North and Cabrini Green to Boystown, Uptown, and Devon Street will be part of a comprehensive look at gentrification, development and displacement north of the Loop. Known mostly for Lincoln Park and Wrigleyville, the North Side is a complex cornucopia of cultures, religions and nationalities which extends far beyond the stereotype of the Gold Coast and yuppies. See more info in Tour #1 description.
Tour Organizers: Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture.*
*About the Chicago Center: The Chicago Center was founded in the late sixties when a group of college professors and students came to Chicago to create a hands-on learning environment. The organization incorporated as a non-profit in 1970 and was known as the Urban Life Center until 2006. Recognized nationwide as a leader in experiential education, the organization took Chicago Center as its new name, to reflect their commitment and relationship to one of North America’s most dynamic cities. Chicago Center’s mission is to equip college students and other participants to learn from diverse urban communities through innovative programs, seminars and internships. The Center expands the traditional classroom with a community-based, first-voices pedagogy that prepares its students for greater self-awareness and global citizenship.
Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture.*
