The History of Chicago

Old History

Before European settlement, the area now called Chicago was a primeval bog on the banks of the vast lake the natives called “The Great Water.” The area’s most numerous inhabitants were the Potawatomi Indians, but it was a
common trading site and travel stop for Indians from the Ho-Chunk, Kickapoo and Winnebago tribes as well. Legends claim there was something special about the area. Archeologists have borne this out by finding an extraordinary number
of strange symmetrical earthworks and ritual mounds in the area, the significance of which remain unknown and has probably been lost.

The word “Chicago” means either “striped skunk” or “pungent leek” in the language of the Miami and Illinois Indians. The name was apparently applied to the marshy mouth of the Chicago River because of the heavy presence of leeks there. For hundreds of years, the area remained quiet and largely uninhabited. Then the white came and it’s been flowing
ever since.

Fort Dearborn: First Blood

In 1803, the same year the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase, an army captain named John Whistler came to the area the Indians called Chicago and built Fort Dearborn, named after Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of war. South of the palisaded fort were merchants and weaponsmiths attached to the fort to keep the soldiers supplied with guns, ammunition and other necessities. To the north were a few scraggly trappers and traders with assorted ties to the Indians, the British and the French.

Fort Dearborn was a risk, a military operation in hostile territory, and it wasn’t going to be long before hostilities reached a violent climax and seeming conclusion. After an extended period of escalating aggression, the hostile Indians attacked the fort in August of 1812, slaughtered the residents and burned the fort to the ground. The thick, rich blood of innocents splashed across stones and dirt and seeped into the ground, and the flames and billowing smoke rose greasily to the heavens to announce the annihilation of the white settlers. According to the tales of the Indians, something in the area changed on the day of the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Something that had been quiescent in its bindings stirred in its sleep.

Already things were going wrong.

The site was abandoned by the United States for four years, and largely returned to its natural state. The area was too strategically important to the settlers, however, and another wave arrived in 1816 and built a second Fort
Dearborn. Larger and more secure than the first fort, this one became the core
of a burgeoning city that took its name from the river it sat next to: Chicago.



Driven by the steady westward flow of settlers and the city’s opportune placement on a major waterway, Chicago grew quickly. It got its first bridge and drugstore in 1832, and incorporated as an official town a year later.

Trees were falling, and wooden buildings were going up at an astonishing pace. The Union Stock Yards opened in 1865, and Chicago’s slaughterhouses grew at a phenomenal rate, starting a trickle of blood from the city that would swell to a torrent in later years. One poet called Chicago the “butcher to the world.” As the decades passed, the intimate connection between spilling blood and making money would only grow stronger, and that legacy would long outlast the city’s stockyards. Chicago was a workingman’s town that still had a feel of the frontier to it. When the town’s citizens weren’t working, they liked to drink, gamble, visit whores and, of course, go to church on Sundays. Even in the early years, Chicago was known for its crime and rampant vice, and had a reputation throughout the United States and Europe as a wicked city. Newspapers would daily announce the latest sensational crimes, and they were legion.

Compared to other cities of the day, Chicago’s many dens of vice of all sorts were blatant and unapologetic. Many of these establishments, called “the Patches,” were located along the banks of the Chicago River, and the Chicago Tribune described them as “places of the most beastly sensuality and darkest crimes.” This reputation only fueled the city’s decadence. Criminals, charlatans, prostitutes, pushers and predators of all description, lured by the city’s lawless image, came from across the United States to take part in the city’s booming economy in whatever way suited them best. These news stories had an impact on the type of people who sought out Chicago, and ultimately shaped the city by luring a certain lawless element. That would explain a lot about Chicago in the years to come. And hot on their heels followed an army of moralists, preachers and two-bit prophets ready to save the sinners’ souls before the city fell like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. They failed.

Mr. Maynard’s Failed Exodus

By the first years of the 1870s, the chorus of voices complaining of Chicago’s wickedness was beginning to gain
some volume. One of these voices was that of Jeremiah Maynard. Depending on whom you listen to, Maynard was
either a man of unusual insight or a lunatic. He talked frequently of the dark forces at work beneath the city’s façade of normalcy and claimed to have evidence of a grand conspiracy against humankind. He raved about the machinations of “godless cabalists,” “beasts that hide behind men’s faces” and other, darker creatures that hid in Chicago’s shadows. Some listeners thought he was using colorful metaphors. Others believed he was telling the literal truth — as he saw it, at least. And some claim to have seen the horrors Maynard was talking about with their own eyes.

From 1866 to 1871, Maynard built a small following through a combination of revival preaching, anti-corruption activism and sheer charisma. Among those who might be called his followers was a small handful of influential men, including General Phillip Sheridan, Maynard’s commander
in the Union Army.

In the spring of 1871, Jeremiah Maynard and a couple of trusted intimates left Chicago to secure a route westward to find a Zion of their very own, free from “infernal manipulation and the wickedness of weak men.” His plan
was to return to Chicago in the fall, to spend the winter making an all-out assault on the forces of darkness, proving
their existence to one and all, and then to depart for New Zion the following spring.

It never happened. Within a week of Maynard’s departure, members of his “flock” began dropping like flies.
Some died of disease, others from accidents and others still wound up as victims of the city’s burgeoning violent crime
rate. Those who survived this series of unfortunate events grew quiet about what they had learned about the world
from Jeremiah Maynard, and most disavowed their former “guide” entirely. Unsurprisingly, all of Jeremiah Maynard’s alleged “evidence” of the dark conspiracy was destroyed by the Great Fire a few months after he left town. Some claim this was itself part of the conspiracy. Others call it an easy out for
Maynard’s erstwhile followers.

Jeremiah Maynard himself dropped out of history about a month after he left Chicago. It is assumed that he met his
fate while looking for his new Zion, but there are no official records of his death.

The Fire

On the night of October 8, 1871, there was a strong northerly wind blowing across Chicago. While hardly noteworthy
in Chicago, in this case the wind proved to be disastrous. A barn in the southern portion of the city caught fire
around 8:30 in the evening. With the wind fanning the flames, fire lunged through the city’s tightly pressed wooden
buildings at an astonishing rate. For 36 hours, the flames raged through Chicago, destroying more than 18,000 buildings
over nearly four square miles in the heart of the city. It was as if the fire were hungry and wanted to glut itself.
The common lore surrounding the fire is that it was caused when a cow kicked over an oil lantern, but that tale
has been frequently challenged and the truth of the situation remains unclear.

Whatever the case, Chicago was not the only place to experience fires that night. All across Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, blazes seemed to erupt spontaneously at approximately the same time. In recent years, scientists have suggested that these fires were caused by a swarm of incoming meteorites, but, in the 19th century, the more commonly held belief was that the Great Fire was the old-fashioned wrath of God brought down on a city that wore its wickedness on its sleeve.

The chaos and horror of the fires were greater than anything the United States had seen. Even years later, survivors of the fire would talk in hushed tones of the absolute and terrifying loss of reason that afflicted so many of Chicago’s citizens that night. Thieves trying to loot evacuated homes were shot and tossed into the flames to be counted as fire casualties later. Likewise, any number of long-time grudges, lovers’ quarrels and vicious business rivalries were settled the same way. Blood spilled. Bodies burned. The chaos — and the death toll — would have been much worse but for the presence of General Phillip Sheridan, the Civil War hero and ranking military commander in the area, who instituted martial law and returned a modicum of civilization to what had rapidly degenerated into a frenzy of madness and mayhem.

Rebuilding

When the fire was all done, a solid third of the city — its densely settled heart — had been destroyed. Where another
city might have been crushed, Chicago’s momentum saw to it that the city not only rebuilt, but grew stronger.
The Devil, they say, protects his own. A wood shantytown sprang up in the space of days to house builders. Other cities
and a handful of other nations gave aid to help make the new Chicago bigger and better than the old.
It was a resounding success. From 1837 to the time of the fire, Chicago had grown from a town of 1,000 to a city of 325,000, and was barely beginning to fulfill its destiny.

Like the phoenix rising from its own ashes, Chicago rose again, and took the opportunity to expand and beautify itself as it did so. With the backing of millionaires, world-renowned architects and an army of highly skilled builders, Chicago’s rebirth, at times, seemed to unfold far faster than anyone would have thought possible. Still, any hopes that Chicago had been purified by the flames were never realized. Without even much of a hiatus, the city’s vice pits surged back to full strength, fanned by the winds of power, lust and greed. Rootless, unanchored young men and women heard that Chicago was the place to make money, through a variety of means, and they swarmed to the city in droves and played their own parts in the rebuilding. Within a year, there was little evidence a fire had ever taken place. Over the course of the next two decades, the city’s population tripled, and Chicago eclipsed Philadelphia as the second-largest city in the United States.

Dangerous Knowledge

Chicago had no library before the fire. As a gesture of international good will, the government of England donated
17,000 books to the city to help establish the first Chicago Public Library. Some of those books were predictable
classics of science and literature — Plato’s Republic, the plays of Shakespeare and the like — but a handful of
the donated volumes were strange, unsettling books that England donated solely to get English soil. Foremost among
these was the allegedly damned Codex Tenebrael, which contained all manner of esoteric lore concerning angels,
demons and the summoning and banishing thereof. According to one city father, “I would sooner place a
phial of prussic acid in the hands of a young person than allow him access to the contents of this ungodly book.” The
library’s administrators initially fought to keep the book on the shelves, but, in the face of sustained pressure from an array of churches, the library relented, and the tome was auctioned to the highest bidder for the staggering sum of six thousand dollars — enough to buy many, many other books.

The librarians, having learned their lesson the hard way once, worked in tandem to ensure that none of the squeamish
church-goers so much as saw any of the other books of “esoteric knowledge and exotic spirituality,” and many of those
tomes remain in the library’s special collections even today.

New Thought

By and large, young Chicago was an intensely pragmatic city, and not prone to flights of fancy. Millionaires
and visionaries had the luxury and leisure time to dream, but the vast majority of its inhabitants were concerned with the concrete needs of the day, a few earthy entertainments by night and not many higher concerns. Religion, mainstream or otherwise, was not generally a pressing concern, but as leisure time increased, so did interest in less-immediate, more spiritual topics. By the end of the 1870s, Chicago had a number of major churches to preach to its burgeoning masses of workers. The city had also become a hotbed of alternative spirituality and the birthplace of a new religious philosophy, called New Thought.

According to the tenets of New Thought, a regimen of diligent meditation and ascetic living could
grant a person abilities akin to magic. Adherents of this “metaphysical religion” rarely seemed to gain the
requisite insights, although the movement’s leaders were clearly capable of spiritual feats that, to the
layperson, were indistinguishable from magic. Ultimately, those miracles performed by the leaders of
the New Thought movement may have been too remarkable. The miracles were so far outside of the
realm of possibility that most of the public thought they were old-fashioned frauds, and New Thought
remained a relatively offbeat, if remarkable cult — the public never embraced it, despite its miracles.

Tyrants and Anarchists, Haves and Have-Nots

Chicago was already a city of millionaires, of powerful men with big egos and far-reaching agendas in search of profit
by any means. As it happened, Chicago was also a city of the common workingman, trying to make a living by making the millionaires’ plans come to pass. The two were at odds almost from the very beginning. The workingman had a better life when he was paid more for his work; the wealthy owners made more profit when they paid their workers less. All the power was in the owners’ hands — until the workers unionized; at which point they had a powerful tool for demanding fair wages. Time and time again throughout Chicago’s history, owners did what they could to crack down on unions, including bribing judges and hiring criminals to intimidate and kill union activists. For their part, the unions did what they could to fight back against the oppressive power of the owners, including unionizing workers throughout the city and aligning themselves with radical political movements like the anarchists. That dynamic led to violence on many occasions, the most lethal of which was the Haymarket Riots of 1886, when thousands of workers went on strike in order to reduce the work day from 10 hours to eight — while daring to ask to be paid the same wages. The violence started with strikes and picket lines and grew more heated until there were riots, police crackdowns, shots fired, bombs thrown, blood flowing into the dust, dozens dead, sham trials and executions for crimes that had never been committed.

When the riot was over, Chicago had cemented its reputation for being a home of corrupt police and radical anarchists,
both of which the city sheltered and would continue to shelter through the golden age of American industrialism.

The World’s Columbian Exposition

If Chicago needed any sort of grand statement to crow its rising status among American cities, the city got one in
1893 in the form of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Hailed as the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’
discovery of the New World (albeit a year late), the Exposition was (and remains) the largest World’s Fair any city has ever produced. From the day of the Exposition’s opening to its close, 28 million visitors strolled through the “White City” of the Exposition, an astonishing number given that the population of the United States was only 63 million.
The Columbian Exposition established Chicago as a city of great resources, boundless energy and solid ideas.
This World’s Fair was the ultimate manifestation of Chicago as a powerful force in a booming America. If Chicago’s geography placed it at the heart of America, the Columbian Exposition placed the city at the heart of America’s cultural
identity and dreams for the future.

All was not as it appeared to be, alas. Even as Chicago was experiencing its grandest moment, the city was also experiencing one of its darkest, though only one man knew of the ghastly crimes that were taking place. Some who claim that Chicago is a cursed city point to the fact that even the city’s most brightly shining moment was tarnished by the ghoulish deeds of Herman Mudgett. More commonly known by his pseudonym, H.H. Holmes, Mudgett lured dozens of people, many of them young women, back to his “murder castle,” where he subjected them to horrible tortures before killing them and disposing of their bodies in the quicklime pits, acid vats and a crematorium in the basement. Once again, the city’s hunger for blood made itself known, and, once again, mortal hands were only too willing to do the bloody deeds the city demanded of them.

Tarnish on the Golden Age

Blessed with an unusually resourceful citizenry and ample funds, Chicago seemed mighty indeed. By 1900, there seemed
to be nothing that the city couldn’t achieve. Certainly, the city faced some challenging times — the waste of the city (garbage, sewage and the effluent produced by the city’s industries and stockyards) was proving difficult to get rid of. Dumping it in the Chicago River had seemed to work initially, but when trash, sewage and human-sized clots of animal blood began washing up on the beaches, the city had to come up with a better way of dealing with the waste produced by its booming success. With a nigh-demonic craftiness, the city

The River of Blood: 1900-1920

Chicago did come up with a better way. In 1900, after many years of discussion, an unheard-of expenditure of
money and a great deal of work, the city of Chicago succeeded in subjugating nature to the city’s will and reversed
the flow of the river the city was named for. It was a moment of nigh-unbelievable hubris, but hubris was hardly a
stretch for Chicago.

With the Chicago River no longer emptying into the lake where the city’s drinking water originated, the river
could be used to dispose of all manner of waste, including all of the increasing output of blood from the stockyards.
Hundreds of animals were killed and butchered in Chicago’s slaughterhouses every day, and truly staggering quantities
of blood and offal were dumped into the river.

As the river went, so went the city of Chicago. The river was flowing backward, choked with blood and animal
remains. The city itself became a bloody place, out of touch with the natural flow of the world. The years following the
subjugation of the river would not be as kind to the city as the years preceding it.

A handful of self-defined spiritualists, sensitives, seers and others tried to draw attention to what they called “the
spiritual consequences” of the river’s reversal, the mass slaughter of animals and the unprecedented pollution problem,
but they were written off as attention-starved, mentally unbalanced and, worst of all, enemies of Progress. Jehovah
might have had his token defenders, but Money and Progress were the only two gods really worshipped in Chicago
on any large scale, and those gods were not kind to the heretics of the faith. The meatpacking industry was among the wealthiest and most powerful in the city at the time, and the meatpacking companies would not brook slander, even by the lunatic fringe. The companies’ agents saw to it that these spiritual deviants were bribed or threatened until they shut up or left the city. The remaining dissidents found the retribution of the meatpackers to be swift and brutal. It would not be the last time that industry squelched activism in the city of Chicago.

Big city-shaping projects were very much the order of the day in the first years of the 20th century. These years
also saw Chicago dig an freight railway system beneath the Loop to allow deliveries underground through the sub-basements of key buildings. The tunnels served a number of purposes, including mail delivery and garbage removal.
While the underground freight system was a work of genius for a few, brief years, the prohibitive cost of operating
the trains in the tunnels combined with a rash of disappearances ultimately led to the entire system being closed
and sealed off from the surface world in the late ’50s.

In the ’60s, the electrical cabling, tracks, locomotives and train cars that had remained in the freight tunnel system were sold for scrap. Not much remains today but fragments of derelict steel and fiber-optic telecom cables, yet many buildings in the Loop are still connected by an underground network that few even remember exists. All in all, the years between the Great Fire and the beginning of Prohibition were good ones that would later be seen as Chicago’s Golden Age. It would all be downhill from there.

The Lawless Decades: Prohibition and the Mob

The constitutional amendment outlawing the creation, distribution or sale of alcohol went into effect in January of
1920, and the next 13 years saw Chicago earn a reputation for lawlessness unrivaled by any other city in America. Prohibition undermined the law, turned organized crime into an American empire and resulted in the corruption of hundreds, if not thousands, of police officers, judges and politicians. Bootlegging and bloodshed went together like gin
and olives, and the number of murders committed in Chicago started climbing as soon as booze was outlawed.

With the beginning of the Prohibition era in 1920, Chicago’s vice dens took on a new life. Even those citizens
who normally steered clear of shady operations were inclined to stop in for a drink from time to time. The law itself had started to seem pointless, punitive and arbitrary. The mob, already making a fortune from Chicago’s gambling and prostitution operations, was only too happy to include the distillation and smuggling of alcohol on their list of underground businesses, and bootlegging became one of the most lucrative rackets. Initially, it seemed like there was enough crime and vice to go around and a number of gangsters earned their notoriety in the brothels and speakeasies of Chicago.

But two factions went to war over Chicago’s lucrative bootlegging industry: the Irish mobsters of the North Side, and the Sicilians on the South Side. The Irish produced mob leaders with names like Bugs Moran and Dion O’Banion. The most
notorious of the South Siders was none other than Al Capone. For the duration of Prohibition, blood and hooch alike
were flowing freely. Violence between gangsters and police was almost as pronounced as violence between rival crime gangs. Chicago’s land was baptized with the blood of hundreds of mobsters, from the floor of the auto garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place to the sidewalk in front of the Biograph Theater where the FBI gunned down John Dillinger.

Chicago’s crime organizations had a serious advantage over the mob in most other cities: Chicago’s gangsters had the
political machine of the city on their side. Judges, aldermen, industry captains and City Hall potentates had learned that it was much easier to employ gangsters than to oppose them. The rise of labor also contributed to the success of organized crime, and the boundaries between labor unions and crime gangs were porous, where they existed at all.

The Curious Structures of Mr. Guilford

One of the most curious of Chicago’s architects was a man named Andrew Guilford. Throughout most of the 1920s,
Guilford was an inexplicably fashionable architect for a certain subset of Chicago’s landed gentry. His homes, while beautiful and unusually sturdy, weren’t particularly original, and certainly didn’t seem so at the time Guilford was designing, in the wake of the much-better-known Frank Lloyd Wright. The appeal of Guilford’s designs, it has been surmised, stems from the fact that they were unusual without being too radical, just different enough to appeal to Chicago’s burgeoning bourgeoisie. The key feature shared by all of his later buildings were strange (and technically illegal) secret rooms; each Guilford design had a hidden room that, in one way or another, captured the essence of the rest of the house. One enthusiastic critic praised the secret rooms as being “the architectural equivalents of Fabergé eggs.” Historians have been arguing for decades now what the intended purpose of these rooms was. Some historians have suggested that they were rooms for illegal distilleries, private home speakeasies. These extra chambers are often surprisingly spacious and extraordinarily secure; nearly all are located under the building’s foundation and lack windows.

Many of these buildings were later destroyed, either through the usual churning of construction through Chicago
neighborhoods or through the more direct hand of the government that alleged (in more than one account) that
Guilford houses were often owned by “bootleggers, communists, atheists and other persons of questionable character.”
Prohibition, including all the misery came with it, was only the first of several blows to the city from which it never
fully recovered. The second of those blows came in October of 1929 with the crash of the stock market, which ushered in
the worst economic disaster America has ever seen.

The Great Depression

The Depression hit Chicago hard. Since the Great Fire, the city had fancied its progress immune to the setbacks that
plagued other, lesser cities, but Chicago quickly learned otherwise. Many of its vaunted millionaires were rendered penniless by the Crash of ’29. Worse, much of the city’s wealth came from agribusiness, and, with the Midwest becoming an enormous dustbowl, there was no wheat for market, no corn for the cattle and no money flowing into the city. What did
flow into the city were young, unemployed men and women looking for a way — any way — to make money.
By this point, the rich, ornate buildings of the turn of the century seemed like sheer folly, monuments to hubris.
Such luxuries were far outside the reach of the common man during the Depression, even in a city that loved the
common man as much as Chicago.

Chicago’s crime rate skyrocketed. The ability of money to motivate people toward questionable behavior varies in
inverse proportion to how much people have. The rich could afford to have ethics; the poor man was stuck doing
what he had to in order to survive. And, during the Depression, very few people had money, so Chicago, already a known haven for mobsters, whoremongers and vice peddlers of all description, became a city of desperate individuals all too eager to do desperate things. Even as the city was falling prey to a hundred blights, Chicago pretended it was still the city it was in its heyday. The World’s Fair of 1934, called “A Century of Progress” tried to recreate the wonder of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but lacked the money, the aesthetics or the sense of wonder of that previous fair.

The Destruction of Grandeur: 1940-1960

For a few brief decades in the ’20s and ’30s, progress and decay hung in perfect balance in Chicago. Its industry and
commerce were barely keeping pace with its crime and dissolution. Though crime-ridden and corrupt, the city found itself
in a state of equilibrium, neither gaining nor losing ground. The ’40s were another story.

In the ’40s, the hybrid vigor of the preceding century abandoned Chicago. The real consequences of the Great Depression set in. World War II sapped the resources of Chicago just as it did the rest of the country. Blacks moved to Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods in record numbers, and rather than integrate with “those people,” whites fled to the bland safety of the suburbs. Property values bottomed out; within a decade, the formerly affluent South Side became an extensive ghetto. Upon the soldiers’ return from the war, thousands of families gave up the dangers of urban life altogether in favor of the bland safety of the booming suburbs.

As the city’s wealthy citizens got nervous about the increase in crime and poverty in the city, law, order and
“progress” became the key words of the day. Chicago’s land prices plummeted. Many of the iconic buildings of the late
19th and early 20th centuries, private castles built by selfmade millionaires, saw their glory days fade into the past, and, one by one, the buildings wound up falling to the wrecking ball. It was as if the stern present had gone to war with the beautiful, decadent past.

The Crusade of the T-Men

The activity and excesses of Chicago’s criminal underworld were so notorious and so well covered in publications
around the world that, by the 1940s, legends of Chicago’s wickedness eclipsed every other fact about the
city. There was nothing people wouldn’t believe about Chicago. It was known to have establishments of the most
decadent sorts, from speakeasies to opium dens to dance halls for homosexuals. Every sort of lurid, exotic crime was
presumed to take place there, from white slavery to serial murder.

Two agents from the Department of the Treasury almost convinced a few people that Chicago was infested with cabals of unseen enemies that ruled the city by night (not unlike Jeremiah Maynard, 70 years before them). These agents were remarkably persuasive and had a number of people believing their disturbing tales. During the agents’ uncontrolled (and largely unauthorized) hunt, they burned down a number of residences they claimed were being used as “dens of unnatural disease” — a term they never were able to explain with any clarity — and caused headaches for several local politicians.

Luckily, the T-men were exposed as unhinged loose cannons before causing any lasting damage, and the department re-assigned them to separate offices in Nebraska and Wyoming, where they spent the remainder of their unremarkable careers.



The ’40s through the ’70s saw the city grow larger and more segregated. While affluent, white baby boomers were
growing up in the few good neighborhoods of the North Side, the South Side was falling to the dark forces of despair
and horror. By the ’70s, the tides of entropy had slowed their constant lapping at the neighborhoods of the North Side — most of them, anyway. The same was not true of the South Side.

Many American cities reached their nadir points during this decade, and Chicago was no exception. Most of the urban
renewal tactics undertaken by the city in the ’50s and ’60s, particularly on the South Side, had failed, and blight covered most of the South Side like a cancer on the city’s geography. A handful of small ethnic enclaves survived these decades untouched by the South Side’s corruption by adopting a vigilant, almost xenophobic approach toward outsiders.
These enclaves’ siege mentality resulted in a few horrific incidents of vigilante justice, but also preserved their communities, keeping them all but untouched by the passage of time. The vast majority of the South Side, however, became a no-man’s land avoided even by the police. Consequently, the worst in human nature (and inhuman nature, in some cases)
reigned ascendant over any of the South Side’s residents who were too poor to escape. Only reports of the most extreme
atrocities — mass murders, large-scale white slavery operations or, on one occasion, a studio set up to produce snuff films — were enough to get the police to intervene, and then only if they weren’t paid to mind their own business.

By the ’80s, it would have been difficult for things to get any worse on the South Side, and then the times
changed.

Recent History

The ’90s were kind to Chicago. The robust national economy buoyed the city enough that even some South
Side neighborhoods started to enjoy the benefits of gentrification. Buildings that had been run down tenements
for decades were bought, gutted and rehabilitated into housing for Chicago’s growing affluent class. The Loop once
more became a residential neighborhood, instead of the sterile toiling place it had been for decades.
The city still has its poor, but the soaring property values are slowly conspiring to force the poor from the city so
wealthy, college-educated workers can take their place. Chicago has begun a financial recovery from its long
ailment, but the city has not shaken the corruption that many now feel has eaten its way to Chicago’s core. Money
still speaks louder to the city’s judges, politicians and police than the quieter voice of ethics, and that allows things to happen in Chicago that should be unthinkable in the
core of the “wholesome Midwest.”

The residents of Chicago, however, have grown blind to the corruption around them, and dark deals that would
raise red flags in any other city now go unopposed, allowing any number of underground elements to operate within
the city with little or no opposition.

And yet the city grinds on.