The Barn House by Ed Zotti Read Free Book Online

of the medieval plague years. 15
    In 1894, William Stead, an English preacher and reformer, published If Christ Came to Chicago! It was somewhat derivative of Riis’s book in terms of subject matter, describing as it did the only slightly less appalling state of the lower classes of Chicago, but Riis had nothing on Stead for style. Sample: “For the [police] station is the central cesspool whither drain the poisonous drippings of the city which has become the cloaca maxima of the world.” Shorn of flourishes, however, Stead’s message was much the same: The urban poor live in such wretchedness as you, gentle reader, can scarcely dream.
    Some middle-class reformers were repelled as much by the foreignness of city dwellers as by their poverty. Riis, for one, had little good to say about Italians (“content to live in a pigsty”), Chinese (“a constant and terrible menace to society”), or the inhabitants of “Jewtown” (“money is their God”). Stead, notwithstanding his rhetorical excesses, was more tolerant, writing sympathetically about the enterprising rogues who served as precinct captains in the Chicago political machine, which he felt functioned as a sort of social services agency, at least for those who voted the right way. On the whole, however, the genteel view of urban life during this period can be characterized as: Ooh, ick.
    The answer, in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth, was the suburbs. In 1886, the architect Daniel Burnham, the indefatigable urban booster whose landmark Plan of Chicago would be published in 1909, moved his family from the city’s south side to the affluent suburb of Evanston, snootily asserting that he could “no longer bear to have my children run in the streets of Chicago.” Evanston had been founded as an independent town (it had grown up around Northwestern University), but after the Civil War real estate developers, recognizing a market when they saw one, began building bedroom suburbs specifically aimed at businessmen commuting to downtown. One of the more influential was Riverside, Illinois, southwest of Chicago. Laid out between 1868 and 1871, Riverside had several things going for it: (a) It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had earlier designed Central Park in Manhattan and in Riverside introduced the curving street pattern (in contrast to the standard nineteenth-century gridiron) that eighty years later became standard suburban practice; (b) it was built around a station on a commuter railroad that took workers to and from their jobs in the city; and (c) it was far enough out to be safe from the encroaching megalopolis.
    Point (c) was where the developers of Southeast Ravenswood had screwed up. (They neglected point (a), too, but that was less crucial.) They had built their subdivision too close in, failing to take account of the likelihood of annexation.
    Although the fact is little remembered today, all three U.S. cities that reached the 1 million mark by 1900—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—got that way largely through annexation. Philadelphia had been first, annexing the surrounding county in 1854 and increasing its land area by 2,000 percent. Chicago was next—in 1889, wanting to bulk up for the World’s Columbian Exposition then four years away, the city annexed 120 square miles of hinterland and quadrupled its area. Last up was New York, then consisting solely of Manhattan, which merged with the independent city of Brooklyn and what became the boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island in 1898-99, giving the city a population of more than 3 million, after London the largest in the world. 16
    Annexation had obvious benefits for Chicago, but was perhaps less advantageous for Southeast Ravenswood. Once it had been a suburb, with all that that implies. After 1889, it was just another neighborhood in Chicago.
    Real estate development in Southeast Ravenswood