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.