Chicago History Museum

I really enjoyed our visit to the Chicago history museum there were so many interesting exhibits there I felt like I could have spent days trying to soak in all the information. I was really excited to see the dioramas that are supposedly famous, I felt almost silly reading a history about the dioramas that are about the history of Chicago. It just goes to show that event the smallest things about a city can make it great and memorable. One of the exhibits had a feature where you could pick out words and then at the end you would take a picture to go with whatever word you ended up picking. This reminded me of our previous visit to millennium park where the art students helped the artist take video of peoples faces to be a permeate art piece in the center of Chicago. Chicago’s rich history also encompasses the people of the city and however small their contribution to it, the history’s museums recognition of that by making peoples pictures permanent additions to the exhibit is very important.

      My favorite exhibit at the museum was the Out in the City one about the LBGT movement. It was really informative about the history of the gay movement in Chicago. I find it really important that an exhibit that really celebrates people who may live a different life is incorporated into the museum. It speaks to tolerance in the city. Before in class we talked about racial divide that still remains within the city. People being informed about different races and different cultures and lifestyles of various people within the city works towards making the city a more united front. The more educated people are about others may help to solve unspoken segregation within the communities. Mixed income housing is an example of how people in the city can move towards becoming more diverse but remaining a close community. Overall the museum offered a wide array of exhibits that really encompass how large and how much history a city can truly have. It was a good way to end a term about the city by remembering that there is so much knowledge that can come out of studying urban life. 

Is Chicago's "Tourist Bubble" Worth It?

The city was right to invest the money into the tourist-oriented attraction that they did at the time. Those investments and projects were started and funded when the tourist business was booming. The economy has gone through ups and downs during the last 20 years and there were times when people had the money to travel and the attractions drew people into the city. When tourist enters into the city they spend money in hotels and in different businesses around the city. It’s a good investment to build attractions that bring economic growth into the city. The problem with this as well is time over the last 20 years things like economic downfall have hit the world meaning that more people think twice about traveling. There have also been major events that no one could have planed for like 9/11 that effect peoples views of big cities and travel. Even the constant up and down of gas prices prevents people from leisurely traveling into the city. So are the attractions like Millennium Park worth the investment? The answer is yes if the city residents of Chicago use the attractions as much as tourist or on a semi-regular basis. But whose to say what the next 20 years will bring maybe one day well be really glad we have a huge bean sculpture in millennium park.

Though the attractions are good for the city in bringing in money to local businesses and the city in ways of transportation departments and hotels it does not help the everyday economic needs of the city. Tourists don’t pay taxes. It sounds simple but it is a complicated point to say while tourist add to the economy of the city they harm it in a way too. The more people in the city that do not live in the city or own property the more the city pays for thinks like public free events and clean up of streets and parks. Money that was spent on building tourist attractions could have been spent on things more beneficial to the city like schools, public works, public housing, and medical care. Those are things that help out the people who are actually residents of the city or pay city taxes.  

Chicago's Racial Divide

            I think that a large part of the reason that there is still a racial divide in the city of Chicago and around the United States is the difference in income levels among the races. Even though the city is supposed to be an equal employment center there is a lot of equality that still exist in the job market.  There are still many companies that feel that they can pay black and women lower wages then white males. The companies may not be performing this discrimination on purpose but as a potential employee is looked at, things like experience and schooling are a factor. So if it is harder for you to get a job as a minority it become increasingly difficult for you to move up in the work for once you have entered into a lower level position because of discrimination. Also minority groups are often brought up with the same advancements as the majority. Children of immigrants will have a hard time paying for schooling and housing in good districts because they came here with parents who may not have been able to find well paying jobs.  This is where income level comes into play. I feel more families live in segregated areas not because they want to be near people of the same race but because they are forced into segregated areas because they cannot afford to live anywhere else. You see a lot of mostly black neighborhoods in the city of Chicago this is not because they don’t want to move into other areas of the city but because blacks in the city traditionally make lower wages then whites in the area and are faced with discrimination when job hunting to improve their financial situation.  Suburbs are faced with the same problem people who can afford to live in neighborhoods do those who can’t afford to live in the area cant. I volunteer with a non-profit housing organization that is bases in the south. They get scrutiny because people believe they only build houses for minority groups. This is not the case, however they build housing for families with low incomes and minority groups are often the families that are in need the most.  The mixed income housing developments like those in the old Cabrini green area are a start to helping to end racial segregation but I feel there is no way to end racial segregation without guaranteeing that all minority groups no longer face job discrimination and immigrant families don’t enter into the united states with little to no income. This is impossibility therefore I believe we will always find racially or income separated areas. 

Immigrant Chicago

            The main reason that immigrants are still a big part of the city of Chicago is that they make up most of the population of growth into the city every year. The other reason that immigrants are important to the city of Chicago is because they also fulfill a lot of the service and factory position that are available. Immigrants usually come into the city with a low education level or with little English skill and many of these jobs provide them with the income they need. When it comes to Mexican immigrants many of them are still coming from rural, or farming communities and lack the skills necessary to work with in a city that is still an industrial city. Many immigrants migrate to the outer suburbs to obtain jobs in the factories and in landscaping business because these are the skills that they posses. Other immigrant population faces other problems because they come into the county highly skilled and educated.  Other white or European immigrants may have an easier time finding a well paying job because they come over with education or with the ability to speak English. However even with these advancements many immigrants find themselves in job niches, for example there are many Irish construction workers or Asian dry cleaners.

            Immigrant challenges are still similar to problems they faced in the 19^th century. Immigrants still face the problems of entering the county with their entire families. Limit on the amount of people from particular countries entering into the United States as well as the challenges of obtaining a visa to enter into the country make it hard for families to enter into the county together. The difference with immigrants today is that they are able to communicate more easily with those who are still living in their home country. The cost of long distance call and the ease of travel now makes the ability to contact loved ones or even to return home a real possibility something that was not always the case in the 19^th century. Immigrants today are also usually more educated then immigrants that entered into the county when it first started. Today’s immigrants may be in more service level jobs then in the 19^th century because though Chicago is still a semi industrial city a lot of the factories have moved outside the city. Immigrants have similar experiences to those who immigrated to the United States in the 19^th century because they move into niches that contain people who have similar origins and cultural traditions. Like the neighborhood of Pilsen that was one a Czech neighborhood when there were large numbers of Czech entering into the city, Pilsen has become a predominantly Mexican neighborhood since the Mexican immigrant population is one of largest immigrant populations to the city of Chicago. Chicago is still a large immigrant city and many of the immigrants’ still face problems that are similar to the problems they faced in the 19^th Century. 

Hull House

Hull House

The visit to Hull house was really informative to the life of Jane Adams. In being sociology major I have read a lot of articles about here and abstracts from her books like 20 years at Hull house but have never had the opportunity to visit it.  I was really surprised that when they started hull house they thought that the community would be interested in art slides. It really goes to show that sometimes you must go into the community and live among the people that you are trying to help to really know what services will be useful to them. This was shown again by the fact that the Hull house started to offer day care because there were so many women working in the garment factories near by. When the children came to the day care dirty they installed bath to wash the children before they went home. They even had a summer camp for the children so the children could get fed three meals a day and experience nature. To get the children to be able to have more of a childhood since many of them had to start working as such a young age they built a park and tried to get other communities to build parks as well. They also built stables to raise cattle when the families were being sold milk that was basically poison. I was also really surprised that the Hull house was also involved in doing research when it came to the milk and various other science and neighborhood research. Another aspect of Hull house that surprised me was that Jane Adams was not the soul founder and that Ellen Gates was actually a co- founder and huge part in making Hull house what it was. Hull house became a central part of the community that immigrants could seek out for help in assimilating to their new life in the city of Chicago. The hull house was not just a day care for working mothers but a social center for language classes and various other events and classes. When we visited the museum we were able to see a model of the complex, I could not believe how large the complex actually was and how many different types of buildings were actually incorporated into the complex. The people who live at hull house were not usually people in the community but were the volunteers that came to the complex to teach the classes and help those in the community.  They were mostly well-educated individuals that had money that spent long periods of their life donating their time to Hull House. I feel like Hull house was a stepping-stone to the modern day social work field that was non-existence at the time. 

Cabrini Green

Cabrini Green

The visit to Cabrini Green really surprised me. From everything I have herd about and seen about the area on the news I was surprised to see a completely changed setting. Maybe since we were there during the middle of the day the area is different but I never got the felling of being unsafe. Instead there were women with strollers and lots of people walking their dogs. When our tour guide talked about the idea of mixed housing income area it seamed not to be the best of plans. The tare down of the high rises was necessary I feel since the area seamed to be so dangerous, but when they torn down the high rise houses they displaced a lot of people that were not offered housing in the area.  The new mixed income housing only offers so many houses for the people that need CHA housing. The rest of the low-rise housing is supposed to be high priced and market value housing. The problem comes with incorporating theses people into one new mixed income neighborhood. People that are live in different types of communities because of income have different social norms and different values this can cause problems in a community.

The Zorbaugh readings about the slums paint a very different picture of the north side then we see today. The area was highly industrialized with the gas plant (that still exist) or various types of other industrial companies most witches are gone now or only remain on Goose Island. The housing around this area was not highly sought out because of the pollution and noise of the factories. This is why areas on the north side were often considered slum and low-income housing. This made the people that lived in these slum areas isolated and caused then to adopt separated values from the rest of the city (another reason I don’t believe mixed income housing works). Little hell was commonly known as a slum area until federal money was used to tare down the housing and put up the large high rises of Cabrini Green. But when the city did not pay to upkeep the CHA housing that was originally supposed to be mixed income as well, if scared away the more wealthy residents. The new low rise housing that is now there was supposed to be a solution to the solution of little Hell but we will have to see how well these new mixed income low rises housing works. 

The Gold Coast

This week our reading focused on The Gold Coast and was followed by our tour of the north side.  The Zorbaugh readings offered incite about specific areas in the North Side. The one problem I had with the readings where that this book was written a while ago so when he talks in almost present tense about certain areas you have to remind yourself that some of the areas have changed dramatically since the time the book was written.

 The gold coast is an extremely wealthy area. You can sense this change from the inner city and the loop just by walking around. The stores and shops shift from chain stores and fast food restaurants to high-class exclusive clothing lines like chanelle and high-end restaurants. The housing also changes. With in the loop area there is little housing that is not above retail shops in high rises. In the Gold coast we see more single-family large homes many of which are protected to preserve the architecture history of the city. The gold coast worked its way up to being the wealthiest zip codes in the United States at one time.  What surprised me was the lack of personal relation ships in an area that had so much focus on staying in with the elite. In the readings there was a main focus on what the rules and regulations were to stay or to become an elite or a society person. It surprised me how much work or lack of work it took to stay in with the elite. There were even rules on how your maid should act. Specific social rules were in effect too, like not being able to carry an umbrella or sending your children to the right school and donating to the right charities. With all the social rules that govern the exclusive society of the elite, it is sad to see how many of them do not know their own neighbors even after living with them for many years.

Is it only the elite society that has lost their sense of community? Zoraugh believes no. He also talks about another group of people. The working class and young singles that live in the furnished room of the Chicago area also have the same lack of community as the elites. The world of furnished rooms are not like the traditional boarding houses of the city they are more apartment style single room dwellings that much of the white collar working class secretaries and office clerks dwell within. They choose the furnished rooms because they lack the traditional rules of the boarding house, because its what they can afford and because they are close (within walking distance) to their jobs in the loop. These residents usually move from room to another and people often do not stay long in one place making the sense of community very low. There was one article that caught my attention, when someone went to acquire about someone living in one of the rooms the landlady was unable to confirm or deny wither or not the person even lived there. The lack of community and a moral center was also made clear by the reading about the charity girl. This girl comes to the city with all the hope in the world and is slowly beat down by the daily grind of life and soon looses her faith and her optimism. The world of furnished rooms lacks the same amount if not more community as those on the gold coast. The people in both worlds express their loneliness in a city filled with thousands of people. 

Make no small plans?

Burnham’s claims where completely justified.  The problem with cities when the plan was created and even today is that they are built to fulfill the needs of a population that changes rapidly and often. The cities like Chicago were first built so people could walk everywhere, streets were very narrow and often in very poor condition. The people that planed out these walkways and roads never could imagine the amount of cars that would fill the street and crowed the city. Sure horse drawn carriages, and street cars, and some cars existed at the time the plan was created but did the people could not have know that the street car would give way to the subway and the elevated rail and become extinct. Buildings were also built close together and there was no regulations or height requirements that exist in today’s city planning. This resulted in a city was crowded, dark and polluted. Factories were built right by residential and business centers creating a city that was forced to live under the smog of the factories pollution. The plan hoped to change this by moving the factories further from the center of the city and winding streets to reduce congestion as well as let light and air into the areas between the buildings. They even had to tear down buildings to achieve things in the city like winding Michigan Avenue. Burnham’s plan even predicted the fact that the public would like to utilize the lakeshore, so they filled in the bay area and created parks and shorelines that the public could go and enjoy.  The plan was focused at managing problems that still are problem today because of increasing population and the continuing of traffic. At the time the plan worked to solve the issues in the city but there is no way that the plan could have predicted how to transform the city in a way that would sustain the needs of the city for 100 years. The plan focused more on transportation need like moving the rail stations out of the center of the city and creating more areas of light and public use. I think that at the time this was a good plan for the city of Chicago but today’s plan would need to focus more on additional things. As well as providing solutions to the traffic and parking problems in the city we must also look at the condition of the city itself. The school systems and other public works need to be examined and included into the plan so that children are all able to attend good well-funded school. Also areas need to be encompassed together so that there are not elite neighborhoods and slums. To change this a solution that would solve the issue of decent affordable housing for low-income family’s needs to properly be integrated into already established and well off neighborhoods. Chicago has become less of a business center and more of a tourist spot. The ability to adjust to the growing number of people in and out of the city is going to be a major problem. Right now huge office building is left unused and taking up space. For example the offices located by daily plaza that are around the CBS offices. Proper planning could have prevented the building of such unneeded office space and could have produced something else. Since there are very few production plants in the city and many of the businesses have managed to more out of the suburbs the city needs to continue at looking at ways to make the city more attractive for weekenders and tourist. Also I think we need to look at pollution in the city as well, programs like trying to clean up the Chicago river are a good start to the kind of direction the city should head in. Looking far enough today I think is almost impossible to do without constant planning. There are too many technically changes that could not have been predicted. Who would have thought we would be able to read books, type, and run computer programs on an ipad anywhere in the city. At the same time you have to be careful about how far you look ahead because if u plan for a population that is 100 years away and that is not the direction the city heads you’ll have unhappy residents for those 100 year. Most of the world thought we would be flying around in cars and living on different planets by now.

Urbanism as a way of Life

Louis Wirth had 3 distinct characteristics that were necessary in a city. A city had to be dense or contain a dense population, be heterogeneous and include large permeate structures. The problem with Louis Wirth article is that it may not adapt as well to the new technology and movement of the city.  Today’s skyscrapers are large structures but many lack the craftsmanship detail to become permeate structures in the urban environment. Instead they are built to produce profit and torn down and rebuilt to produce even more.  Companies don’t need large office building or manufacturing plants to conduct their businesses with the internet, email and video conferences people can do business from countries away at the touch of a button making living in the city less of a necessity for companies and their employees.  Though the general population of the city still remains dense I believe the population of people that live there have expanded or changed the reasons why they choose to remain in the city. Also with the use of better public transportation there are many people who have moved out to the suburbs with their families but continue the commute into the city for school, work, or pleasure keep the city at a relatively constant day-to-day state.

Though a city can be a very heterogeneous place it also becomes a place where different social, class or racial groups congregate into smaller areas, for example china town, boys’ town, little Italy. These areas of the city become know for their cultural or social activities and continue to attract others with similar interest.  Wirth does not mention the social groups that are formed as a result of the city and how different the city can be from one end to the other. Conceptualizing the city into one distinct way of life I believe is almost impossible there is too much that changes from one city block to another to be able to say, “yes that is what urban life is” and “no that doesn’t happen in urban life”.

Wirth also fails to address the problems of social class in the city, many associate the city with a vast difference between rich and poor and leads to how you can define an urban way of life without talking first about the differences of how urban people live their lives. Today we also have to deal with media coverage that is involved in skewing our opinion of urban life. If you are never in the city and all you see in the media is about how dangerous the city is, you may miss out on the many cultural and social events that make the city such an interesting place to live.