Sonya Bogdanova: The Working Man's Reward by Elaine Lewinnek

Hi all! This is an excerpt from the book I mentioned during the Experimental Station visit, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. This should be a direct link. You can also search for this book through the UIC Library, it'll link you to the Oxford Scholarship Online page so you can read more online.

"Middle-class businesspeople and packinghouse managers lived in the part of Lake known as Englewood, south of Fifty-fifth Street (later Garfield Boulevard). Wealthy packinghouse owners lived in an elite “nook of sylvan quietness and verdant beauty” just east of Halsted, in villas on Emerald and Winter (later Union) Streets.¹³ By the 1890s the stench of packing and the disparities between Packingtown’s owners and workers drove the owners to more quiet, more verdant retreats elsewhere. This created a leapfrog effect. While Chicago’s workers moved out of the city, businessmen were also moving out, “to skip the intermediate areas partially filled with obsolete houses occupied by the poorer classes and seek homesites where the houses were new and the neighborhood had not acquired an adverse character.”¹⁴ That elite search for space untainted by workers competed with the workers’ own search for homes near peripheral factories, both influencing the dispersed nature of Chicago’s built environment."

Ad for homes by the Stockyards