Hard Labor Made Easy
New Web site documents the history of Chicago’s working class
by C.T. Ballentine
Chicago’s reputation as a hard-working, blue-collar town is impossible to ignore, as cross-generational labor history is integral to the city’s culture. “Chicago is the immigrant industrial city. Working people in Chicago created what became the model of urban industrial life,” says Jeff Helgeson, Labor Trail’s administrative coordinator. “They made a city that worked out of a remarkable diversity of ethnic and racial backgrounds, and their struggles largely created the opportunities, and limits, of life in the city.” The Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies (CCWCS), which already hosts educational panel discussions and historical exhibits, is adding to the documentation of the working-class community by launching Labortrail.org.
The online component of Labor Trail is offered as an expansion to “The Labor Trail: Chicago's History of Working-Class Life and Struggle,” a map of “140 significant locations in the history of labor, migration and working-class culture in Chicago and Illinois.” The map is available through the site for five dollars and for free to educators. The site also invites contributions from its visitors by encouraging them to post additional sites or primary-source material for already-documented locations.
Below are a few of the neighborhoods featured and a small selection of the presented sites. The Near West Side features the location of the Haymarket Riots -- one of the most famous events in both Chicago's and America's labor history (though the map offers very little detail, focusing instead on lesser-known events). Labor Trail itself does not provide live guided tours, but does recommend that anyone interested in them visit the Illinois Labor History Society (kentlaw.edu/ilhs). Whether live or virtual, these tours provide an important, and oft overlooked, view of the Chicago cultural landscape.
Pilsen
The map lists sites from Pilsen’s Bohemian past in the mid-19th century, after a large portion of Chicago’s Czech community were driven from what are now Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. At 16th and Halsted streets in 1877, a union composed of Czech and other European immigrants battled with a combined force of the Illinois National Guard and Chicago police, resulting in the death of 30 workers. There are also sites from the thriving Mexican community for which the neighborhood is now known, including the Chicago Public Library Branch at 1805 S. Loomis, named for Rudy Lozano, a community activist and organizer assassinated in 1983.
Back of the Yards
Back of the Yards was home to a great number of stock yards in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the poor working conditions of which were dramatized famously in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The map shows the BO Packing Co., one of the neighborhood’s few remaining packing plants, which can be found near 43rd Street and Loomis Boulevard, as well as the Colombia Hall on 48th and Paulina streets, a community center and tavern where meetings of the Stockyard Labor Council were held.
The Loop
This tour shows the site of the Bread Riots at LaSalle and Kinzie streets, where in 1872 unemployed workers gathered in protest and were beaten by police, as well as Printer’s Row, the six-block chunk where Chicago’s once vibrant publishing trade thrived, now redeveloped for commercial and residential use.
