About 78 years ago, Chicago went through not just the Depression, but the hottest day ever recorded in the city. On one stagnant day, the city baked… but the Tribune Tower was pleasantly refreshing.
Between the 1919 race riot and the end of the Great Migration, segregation went from specter of racial strife to legal doctrine, aided by the law and economic writings of Progressive reformers Richard T. Ely and Nathan William MacChesney.
POWER DOWN: This summer, book a stay on this northwest Illinois farm and let living off the land help you press pause
The 420-some unit complex, built by Julius Rosenwald as affordable housing for middle-class blacks in a segregated city, was once managed by Quincy Jones’s mother and provided elegant apartments at reasonable rates. After years of neglect and then abandonment, it’s now an expensive problem.
GOD IS HIS CO-PILOT: The leader of Woodlawn’s New Beginnings Church is hoofing it across America in a bold antiviolence crusade
The prewar Lathrop Homes at Damen and Diversey have long been one of the better public-housing developments in the city, and even in a deteriorated state are a good foundation for public or mixed-income housing. Yet despite their well-maintained landscaping, they’re almost completely vacant—among many other CHA units in housing limbo.
America sweating its spoiled, stupid youth has a long, rich history in journalism and higher education—none richer than in the postwar years, when our nitwit teens were going to get us all nuked to kingdom come.
It took a long time for the Chicago Pride Parade to draw over 800,000 people—before it really took off in the 1980s, the early years of the parade were a modest affair, except for the floats.
Chris Sautter, who describes himself as Obama’s “first media consultant,” was in town this week. Our meeting came after Sautter’s name recently surfaced in one of the juicier parts of a new book I wrote about earlier this month…
Dartmouth geographer Richard Wright talks about how segregation (and the Chicago School-driven understanding of it) is changing, and how it’s not. In Chicago, the picture’s very different, depending on whether you look at neighborhoods or schools.
