Chicago's South Side with Geoffrey Baer

South siders come in every color of the rainbow. But they all have one thing in common. A fierce pride for their neighborhoods. In this show, life-long south siders take us to the places they love. Like Bronzeville, once known as Chicago's Black Metropolis. Clubs, cafes, seeing each other and being seen and that was really, what it was all about. Hyde Park, where we meet idealists who tried to fight City Hall. And you gotta remember in those days City Council was a very rough and ready place. People punched each other. It was a tough place. And Chinatown where new immigrants are spicing things up. WOOOOO! There's power hitting a hah! and power politics in Bridgeport. And the South Side's top tourist attraction. 500,000 people a year toured the stockyards & the packinghouses. 500,000 people a year! Also Pullman, from controversial company town to National Monument. And the Pullman Porters who fought for justice. A. Philip Randolph and the Pullman Porters are the grandfathers of the Civil Rights movement. Chicago's first Mexican community on the Southeast Side. And a new lakefront park on the site of an abandoned steel mill. One of the friends that I brought with me. He came here, looked into the lake, through the trees. And he was like, "it's like a whole 'nother world over here. It's like a paradise." We remember when Englewood was the busiest shopping district outside the Loop. And meet people committed to bringing the neighborhood back. I'm gonna be right here as it grows. I'm gonna grow with it. We step off with a famous parade in Beverly, where we learn to speak south side. What parish are you from? Barnabas. I think a lot of people, not form Beverly, might say, "what do you mean, what parish am I from?" I think that's been going on for years. That's a real South Side thing. Plus one pope some pretty intense pedaling Holy Moly!!!! And the president of the United States. (Applause) I'm Geoffrey Baer join me for a trip through Chicago's South Side. Imagine it's a summer night in the golden age of Bronzeville. The neighborhood is alive with music. You're dressed to the nines. You've got a date on your arm; and you're heading out to the hottest club in the neighborhood. You'd have been right here. At an Ace Hardware? Ok, things have changed. But this was once the Sunset Café, and later the Grand Terrace. Greats like Earl "Fatha" Hines and Cab Calloway played here and Louis Armstrong was in the house orchestra. These days, you'll just have to imagine Pops' "Sunset Café Stomp" echoing through the building. "Sunset Stomp, got folks jumping Sunset Stomp" The store manager's office was once the stage with a jazz-age back-drop that's still there. Hard core jazz aficionados periodically make pilgrimages. The Sunset Café is just one gem in a treasure trove called "Chicago's Black Metropolis." Bronzeville It's Chicago's hub of African American arts & culture. And that proud history is preserved and advanced today. It's a history built out of a century-long struggle. But the story of this neighborhood begins before the Civil War. Bronzeville is actually a part of the larger neighborhoods of Grand Boulevard and Douglas, named for Stephan A. Douglas. He was one half of the legendary Lincoln-Douglas debates... the shorter half. Stephen A. Douglas died of typhoid a year after losing the election. He's entombed in this monument at 35th street. After his death, part of Douglas's Oakenwald estate was used as a Civil War POW camp. Nearly 1 in 7 Confederate prisoners died in deplorable conditions at Camp Douglas. And 150 years later, archeologists are now unearthing artifacts. After the war, Douglas was home to a Jewish community that included the Marx Brothers. They were still touring vaudevillians when they lived in this gray stone on Grand Boulevard. Douglas was also home to other German Jews, as well as working class Irish, Scots, and English. As for African Americans, only a handful lived in this neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century. But with the "Great War" escalating overseas, that was about to change. Tens of thousands of African Americans from the Deep South, poured into Chicago to fill jobs left open as white workers shipped off to war. It became known as the Great Migration. The nation's most influential black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, guided many migrants to Chicago. Founder and Editor Robert S. Abbott used the paper to champion civil rights and celebrate African American culture. Soon, thousands of African Americans were packed into over-crowded and dilapidated buildings. They were forbidden to move into roomier white neighborhoods by restrictive housing covenants. Despite this injustice or perhaps because of it, the people of the Douglas and Grand Boulevard neighborhoods built a vibrant community that came to be known as Bronzeville. You think of Bronzeville, it's a city within a city. To get a real sense of what Bronzeville was like back in the day, I met up with author Bernard Turner at Gallery Guichard. Clubs, cafes, people walking back and forth, seeing each other and being seen. And that was really what it was all about. Artist Archibald Motley's series, Bronzeville at Night, shows that the strip of south State Street, nicknamed the Stroll, was no place for the faint of heart. So we've found this quote from Langston Hughes about the stroll. He wrote: "Midnight was like day. The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folk and sinners." Yep. Bronzeville offered the finest entertainment in black Chicago, at places like the Regal Theater. The Regal was famous for any kind of show that you could think of. Nat King Cole, Lena Horn, Duke Ellington, You can add Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, the list goes on. At the Savoy Ballroom next door, two bands played alternating sets every night so patrons could stay on their feet. The dance floor was large enough for a resident basketball team. The Savoy Big Five hit the road in 1929, renamed the Harlem Globetrotters. And then you had the Palm? Yeah. Politicians went there, you could meet famous people there. The Chicago Defender called the Palm Tavern "The most high classed Negro establishment in America" when it was opened in 1933 by "Genial Jim" Knight, a former Pullman Porter turned Policy King. Ok, so what's policy? Policy is kind of the precursor to what we call the lottery right now. But it was all underground, and of course, illegal. There were souls to be saved in Bronzeville, and plenty of churches to do the job, including Chicago's oldest black congregation, Quinn Chapel. With deep roots in abolitionism and activism, Quinn Chapel was a natural stop for speakers like Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King to name just a few. (Church organ) The chapel was featured in WTTW's own special Going Home toGospel with Patti LaBelle, in 1991. Gospel music was in fact born in Bronzeville. It started with a personal tragedy. Blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey lost his wife and newborn baby in childbirth. To cope with the pain, Dorsey infused typical blues rhythms with religious lyrics. The result was "Precious Lord Take My Hand." Dorsey organized the first gospel choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and then went on to a legendary career directing the Pilgrim Baptist Church Choir. Pilgrim was destroyed by fire in 2006. Bronzeville is alive by night. It's fun, its entertainment. During the day, this is really a center of black enterprise, right? Absolutely. Think of um, the big businesses that were here. Like Supreme Liberty Life Insurance, the first Black owned & operated insurance firm in the north. Supreme Liberty Life Insurance was also the launching pad for one of the most successful publishers of the 20th century. John H. Johnson. Hhe wanted to create a magazine that was gonna be like Reader's Digest. The Negro Digest. Johnson used his mother's furniture as collateral to get the magazine started. Its success allowed Johnson to launch his second magazine, Ebony. And later a fast-paced news magazine Jet. And if that wasn't enough, John Johnson and his wife Eunice created the Fashion Fair line of cosmetics aimed at a market most cosmetics brands ignored women of color. Anthony Overton? He was a big important entrepreneur in the city. The Overton Hygienic Building housed an earlier cosmetics empire. The fact that Overton was born a slave only makes his story more impressive. His foray into publishing, the Chicago Bee was headquartered down the block. In 1996, The Bee Building became a branch of the Chicago Public Library. Mr. Overton still looks on today. And black entrepreneurship extended to health care too! The nation's first successful open heart surgery was performed in Bronzeville, at Provident Hospital in 1893 by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. This building was the birthplace of Black History Month. Inside the Wabash Avenue YMCA, a group led by historian Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926. The celebration expanded to the entire month in 1976. The list of Bronzeville luminaries is by no means limited to men. Maybe the most famous name is Margaret Burroughs. Margaret Burroughs, yes. She's one of my heroes. Burroughs co-founded the South Side Community Arts Center as part the WPA. The center has been showcasing African American art in the same South Michigan Avenue building since 1940. Um, I have a quiz question for you. Do you know what famous person in the arts from Bronzeville started out as an assistant to a spiritual healer? No. (Laughs) Gwendolyn Brooks! Gwendolyn Brooks became poet laureate of Illinois and the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize. Many of her works are set in Bronzeville. Like her 1968 book-length poem In the Mecca about the Mecca Flats, an apartment building at 34th & State. The building started out whites-only but soon housed a vibrant African America community. It later became overcrowded, dilapidated, and as Gwendolyn Books put it; "bleak." It was eventually demolished to make room for the new modernist IIT campus, designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. IIT was part of the so-called urban renewal that saw huge swaths of the South Side bulldozed in the mid-twentieth century, much of it replaced by sprawling high-rise public housing. An earlier experiment in affordable housing was more successful, at least for a time. The privately financed Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, opened in 1930. Funded by Julius Rosenwald. Not an African American. Not an African American, but someone who believed the money that he had should be used for the community. The proudly well-kept building fostered a strong community for residents like Joe Louis, Quincy Jones and Gwendolyn Brooks. But it eventually fell victim to the housing pressures that plagued Bronzeville. It closed in 2000. But a $109 million restoration started in 2015. If you could characterize Bronzeville today, what's it like? Bronzeville today is a community, changing for the good. There's a lot of new, vibrance in the community. There's an art gallery right here! There's a beautiful art gallery. ...where we are now. Art galleries, restaurants, new businesses, it's something that I think everybody in Chicago should know about. So, you're a tour guide, uh, is there one place that we can go right now that you can show me? Let's go. Bernard took me to The King Drive Gateway Project. It pays tribute to the neighborhoods' historic roots with a series of works of art. Including this 15 foot tall bronze, it's called Monument to the Great Migration. What's his suit made of? Looks like, is that shoe soles? It is actually shoe soles. It symbolizes all the people who made, a perilous trip from the South to Chicago. Yeah, they were really kinda givin' up everything, risking everything, right? They were giving up everything on a chance of having a better life in Chicago. There's a kind of optimism embedded in this statue, isn't there?" You think about all of the people who migrated here, they're going to begin a new life and there's opportunities to be had. So yeah there is optimism. Immediately south of Bronzeville there are two Washington Parks. The city park designed by Olmstead and Vaux and the community of the same name right next to it. Bisected by Garfield Boulevard, Washington Park was the longtime home of Butternut Bread. And the neighborhood that inspired the Studs Lonigan Trilogy by novelist James T. Farrell. If it's the second Sunday in August, it's the Bud Billiken Parade. Billed as the second largest parade in America,, it's the unofficial kick off to the school year. The first Bud Billiken Day Parade was organized in 1929 by the Chicago Defender. Just don't expect to meet Bud Billiken. He's fictional. A character created by the Defender, inspired by a Buddha like figure. The parade marches through Bronzeville and ends with a festive picnic in Washington Park, right near the Du Sable Museum of African American History. It was originally called the Ebony Museum, but was renamed for Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, a fur trader of African descent who just happened to be Chicago's first permanent nonnative settler. The museum traces the African-American experience, from Africa, through slavery, to the civil rights movement and beyond. You can visit Mayor Harold Washington. "Hi, welcome back to my office. I am Harold Washington." Or a reasonable facsimile. And learn about blacks in the Armed Forces, like the first African American military pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen. Further south in Washington Park, is the solemn Fountain of Time from 1922, by Loredo Taft. A 26-foot-tall figure of Father Time gazes across a reflecting pool at a procession of 100 human figures, representing every phase of life. The sculptor drew his inspiration from Henry Austin Dobson's poem Paradox of Time which reads in part; "Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go." It doesn't look like much now, but this is Chicago's oldest surviving L station. It was built in 1892 along an extension of the city's first L line, that transported visitors to the world's fair. A couple doors down is one artist's commentary on the proliferation of Currency Exchanges on the south side. Except this one doesn't cash checks. The Currency Exchange Café is a Washington Park coffee house and restaurant. Along with the gallery next door, the café is part of artist Theaster Gates's efforts to change the landscape of the south side. In 1893, 27 million people flocked to Jackson Park for the dazzling World's Columbian Exposition. The Fair introduced the world to Cracker Jacks, the Ferris Wheel, Juicy Fruit Gum, Cream of Wheat and many other firsts! It made Chicago feel like the center of the world. There was just one problem the magic wasn't meant to last. The fair closed just as an economic depression swept the country. The plaster pavilions were abandoned, many burned. But before it went up in smoke, the fair attracted thousands of workers, creating a boom in surrounding neighborhoods, like Woodlawn. It's the last stop on the city's oldest L line, the home of high school football dynasty Mount Carmel, and the setting for the Apostolic Church of God's Joy of Christmas. And back in the 1920's, it was a hopping hub of entertainment. There was a mammoth movie palace called the Tivoli at 63rd and Cottage Grove. 3,500 seats! Nearby, the famous dancefloor at the elegant Trianon Ballroom could accommodate 3,000. The Trianon even had its own radio station, WMBB, for Worlds' Most Beautiful Ballroom. The local beer garden was designed by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. At Midway Gardens you could toss back a cold one while enjoying the symphony or ballet. And for a dose of pure populism there was the White City Amusement Park with its 300 foot tall electric tower, illuminated by 20,000 light bulbs. The name White City was a reference to the white washed architecture of the nearby World's Columbian Exposition. But it might as well have referred to the park's clientele. Like most establishments in Woodlawn, blacks were not welcome here. And property owners used restrictive covenants to keep African Americans from moving into Woodlawn. But Carl Hansburry bought this house anyway and moved in with his family including his daughter the future playwright Lorraine. A judge ordered the Hansberrys to vacate their home. But the family fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally ruled in their favor. That landmark case set the stage for dramatic change in Woodlawn. And it inspired another drama, Lorraine Hansberry's, A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play by an African-American woman. The end of restrictive covenants brought hope to many African Americans. But the panic pedaling that followed ruined those dreams. Later, disinvestment and gang activity took their toll on Woodlawn. The neighborhood's population dwindled through the early 2000s. But important pieces of the past survive in Woodlawn. Like The Grand Ballroom. It's still the epitome of elegance. The lovely room, with its original 60ft long bar from 1923 now caters to weddings and dance classes. For eight decades the Chicago Crusader has been, quote, "Reporting the news without fear or favor." It's been under the careful leadership of editor/publisher Dorothy Leavell since 1968. And there are signs of revitalization in Woodlawn too. Like the 21,000-square-foot Metro Squash Center. The center's after school program trains young athletes while offering academic tutoring and mentoring. "If they can do it, then I can do it as well." In the early 1900s Chicago was a toddlin' town. For almost a century the city had been growing by leaps and bounds. But as newcomers flooded into Chicago to seek their fortunes in real estate, factories, and slaughterhouses, the city became overcrowded, dirty, and diseased. As early as the 1850s, settlers started looking for places to get away from it all. Seven miles south of downtown, with an unobstructed lake front view, Hyde Park was marketed as an escape from the big city. Before it was a center of higher learning, before the Blackstone Branch became the first branch of the Chicago Public Library, and long before Valois offered a "presidents favorite" menu, Hyde Park was a suburb founded by lawyer and developer Paul Cornell. Paul Cornell had imagined that Hyde Park would have a major university, kind of like Northwestern in that suburb to the north, Evanston. That vision became a reality in 1892, and it only took the richest person in U.S. history to get it done. "The best investment I ever made" is what John D. Rockefeller said about his donation to help found the University of Chicago. Promoters of the World's Fair of 1893 sought to convince the public that Chicago was a major world city. So they had to hurry up and build a major world university. The school has certainly lived up to that billing, producing 89 Noble Prize Winners as of 2015! With all the academic success, it's easy to forget that The University of Chicago was once a college football powerhouse. In fact, half-back Jay Berwanger was the very first winner of the Heisman Trophy, in 1935. Head coach Amos Alonzo Stagg led the original Monsters of the Midway on the field, but it's what happened under the stands that changed the course of history. The world's first controlled nuclear reaction led by Enrico Fermi. The top secret experiment was a key part of the WWII Manhattan Project. This sculpture, "Nuclear Energy" by Henry Moore marks the spot today. Before the Second City hit the mainstage, they were a group of U of C alums, and dropouts, known as the Compass Players. Founding members sometimes staged improve performances in the back of Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap. For over 50 years, Jimmy Wilson ran the bar that catered to locals, students, Nobel laureates, and Pulitzer Prize winners. So far, we've learned that Hyde Park was once a suburb. In fact, it was a huge independent township that extended far south of here. (Thank you) So, how'd it become part of the city? Annexation - it's the Chicago way! The same people who'd been trying to run the neighborhood then decided, well, we might as well run the city. That's Rebecca Janowitz, author, lawyer, and Hyde Parker, through and through. Just too much education. Uh-huh. It's uh, rampant in the neighborhood. It's an over-educated neighborhood. It's an over-educated neighborhood. Rebecca and I grabbed a table at Medici on 57th, to talk Hyde Park politics. In 1889, Chicago annexed Hyde Park. What changed politically for Hyde Parkers at that point? They started sending people down to city hall who were completely unlike the people everybody else sent to city hall. All the other neighborhoods. Yes. And you got to remember in those days that City Council was a rough and ready place, people punched each other. It was a tough place. The career pols in City Council were exasperated by Hyde Park idealists who actually believed government should serve the public good. What's so fascinating about it is that the cast of characters changed. Originally, it was a bunch of Protestant men, and then they added some women, and then some Jews, and eventually some blacks. But the spirit was much the same. You disagree with us, we'll bury you in data. We'll just keep up the fight, [laughs] Case in point, 5th Ward Alderman Leon Despres who was a major thorn in the side of city hall. "Talk on the issues before the council. Don't be talking personal." "What happened to your vaunted boasts of law and order in Chicago?" Leon Despres, of course, was famous in the 60s as the lone negro on the city council. He was white. Yes, but he was known as the lone negro. And that was a compliment. He was the one who raised the Civil Rights issues in the City Council Congressman William Dawson, who represented Chicago for 27 years took the view that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. At one point was probably the most powerful black politician in America, and a lot of people have forgotten about him. "Follow your own rules." Mayor Richard J. Daley knew his Democratic machine would grind to a halt without African Americans and he relied on Dawson to get out the vote. So we've mentioned a lot of these people we need to talk about, the power couple of Hyde Park, who went to Washington, DC, got into politics. Of course I'm talking about Paul Douglas and his wife Emily. Yes. They were an amazing power couple. "that accounts..." He was a U of C economist, she was a voting rights activist. Both were elected to congress. Emily to the House of Representative in 1945 and Paul to the Senate in 1949. He brought his Hyde Park idealism to the national stage. His lasting legacy was saving the Indiana Dunes. Hyde Park's sister neighborhood, Kenwood, sits directly north. Kenwood has long been one of the most fashionable neighborhoods on the south side. It was home to "The Greatest" Muhammad Ali, who moved there to be close to Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, who lived just a few doors down. Later Louis Farrakhan moved in here. There's also Chicago's oldest Jewish congregation, but it didn't start out in Kenwood. Well, the Jews moved. I mean, thank God we stopped finally, at least we stopped moving, but we certainly moved all over the South Side and we built some beautiful buildings on the way. Like the home of Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH. If you look closely, you'll see there are Stars of David in the stained glass. After merging with another congregation the renamed KAM Isiah Israel settled in this Byzantine inspired structure on Greenwood Avenue. It's directly across the street from the neighborhood's most famous resident. So famous the Secret Service wouldn't let us show you his house. Is Barack Obama like a quintessential product of Hyde Park? If Obama had lived a lot of other places, he would have been a black man living in a white neighborhood, or a black man living in a black neighborhood, He came from a racially mixed neighborhood. Hyde Park launched President Obama's political career. It was also the backdrop for his budding romance with lawyer Michelle Robinson. I guess when you're the "first couple" even your first kiss is worth a monument. Everyone talks about Barack Obama as the customer of Hyde Park bookstores, it was Harold Washington who used to have to get help staggering out to the car with all he bought at the local bookstores. "You want Harold. you got him!" As Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington burst on to the scene with a larger than life personality. I think more than anything else, he really did stand for inclusion. He embraced Chicago as a very diverse place. "...towards this same end, Chicago is united today. No other city on this continent represent these ideals and struggles better than Chicago does." Urban renewal wiped out large parts of the South Side. But Hyde Park took a stand against the bulldozers. Urban renewal was very hostile to urban living. They wanted to turn Hyde Park back into a suburb. They thought suburbs were where the middle class is supposed to live, the houses should be further apart, there should be lots of lawns, there should always be parking, you know, there should always be lots of parking the essence of a city to me is that there is no parking, they want to have lots of parking, but somehow have great cultural institutions supported by almost no people. Sarah Spurlock tied it to WWII when she was talking to me about it. She said a bunch of people came back from the war and they didn't want to live in the community that looked like the one they grew up in. They thought: if we can win the war, we can change this neighborhood. (Guitar playing) "How you doing, peace!" "Baby, maybe we could..." Hyde Park's idealism and social consciousness definitely comes through in its arts scene. The Hyde Park Art Center, founded by Paul Douglas and a group of artists in 1939 has been a neighborhood showcase for the Chicago Imagists, the Monster Roster, and Hairy Who. The center has moved around a bit, but it's found a permanent home on Cornell Avenue. "Start over again, again, again..." The Little Black Pearl Workshop provides a positive outlet for urban youth to express themselves in visual arts and dance. And for a more classical approach the Hyde Park School of Dance offers rigorous training to students of all backgrounds and abilities. And like a ballet, it takes hard work and dedication to maintain the delicate balance that makes Hyde Park special. "Don't you give, don't stop. Give in to love. Don't you, don't give up..." "Thank you!" It looks like China. It sounds like China. And it definitely tastes like China. "Good. Excellent." But this Chinatown is part of Chicago's South Side. The Chinatown Gate from 1975 is an icon in this neighborhood, so it might surprise you to learn that Chicago's original Chinatown wasn't even here. It was in the Loop! Chinese immigrants began settling around Clark & Van Buren after the city's first documented Chinese resident, T.C. Moy moved here in 1878. He sent word to his family that Chicago was more accepting of Chinese than places out west, where his countrymen had first settled in droves for the California gold rush and later built the Transcontinental railroad. The last phase of it, is about 80% people working are Chinese, after they completed that, they had no place to go. That's Bernie Wong, founder and director of the Chinese American Service League. She met me at the sparkling new Chinatown Branch of the Chicago Public Library. They were out of jobs. Yeah, they were out of jobs, they want new opportunities. And so the first Chinese, Mr. Moy came here, Mr. Moy. Mr. Moy and we have a lot of Moys right now and I think he brought a lot of his kin over here Chicagoans might have tolerated these new neighbors, but they were seen as exotic and left to fend for themselves. The family association, if you are Wong, the Wong family would take care of you. Provide you some jobs. The Lis will take care of the Lis; and the Moys take care of the Moys. As the community grew, it became divided between two rival fraternal groups called tongs. The On Leong Tong led its members out of downtown and built the Chinatown we know today, including the On Leong Merchants Association Building from 1928, now called Pui Tak Center, which became the unofficial Chinese City Hall. For all its convincing Chinese iconography, the architects were Norwegian-Americans because there were no Chinese architects in Chicago back then. Today the community still works hard to help its own with organizations like Bernie Wong's Chinese American Service League or CASL. So I want to talk about CASL, the Chinese American Service League. I love talking about CASL. Well you founded it, right? Right. We decided to start an organization. We have no money. We didn't have any skills. We didn't know how to do it. That shouldn't stop you, right? Well we luck out. We run into a lot of people willing to help. We were very naïve, we put a little ad in the newspaper and say we need to find an exec director, and you know for months nobody applied. So my friends strong armed me into taking the position. So you became the... For a while and so 36 years later. I'm still sitting here. (laughs) (restaurant ambiance) Restaurants are really a very big part of Chinatown and it brings a lot of people to Chinatown, Chinese and not Chinese. And the good thing is that, when we first started, you mainly only have Cantonese restaurants. That's because the vast majority of Chinese in Chicago and in America up until the mid-20th century were Cantonese-speaking from China's southern region. And their restaurants offered Americanized dishes some of which, weren't even found in China. Chop suey, totally invented in America, right. Absolutely, chop suey... Oh, egg foo young. Egg foo young and your cookie - fortune cookies. None of that came from China. Today Chinatown has gone way beyond Chop Suey and Egg Foo Young. You can sample delicacies from all over China, like the ultra-spicy offerings, here at Sze Chuan Cuisine (thank you) on Wentworth. Alright, let's try it. Woooo. This more diverse cuisine has accompanied new Mandarin speaking immigrants, who've come to Chicago from all over China. Chinatown is not just for the Chinatown residents. I mean we have people coming in from all of the suburbs and sometimes from Indiana and Michigan and Wisconsin. They come down here and they shop. While the restaurants and groceries let you taste Chinese diversity, the Chinese American Museum fills in the details. And the museum has its own dramatic story. A devastating fire in 2008 destroyed ninety percent of the museum's artifacts. But other Chicago museums pitched in to help restore them and the museum re-opened in 2010. If you really want a full immersion in the many different cultures of China, the place to go is Chinatown Square. Chinatown Square is a shopping mall that opened in the 1990s. But don't picture Woodfield or Water Tower Place. Here you feel like you've been transported to China. The two-level center designed by famed Chicago architect Harry Weese is lined with shops selling everything from Chinese healing herbs and groceries to electronics and trinkets. And the restaurants offer a wide range of Chinese cuisines. In the middle of Chinatown Square is a broad plaza for community gatherings ringed by twelve statues representing the Chinese zodiac. Chinatown Square was just one part of a desperately needed expansion of Chinatown in the early 1990s. So Chinatown has expanded a lot since you got here Yeah. But it's very dense, right. It's a very crowded... Extremely dense. And then the highway came through and you lost a lot of theneighborhood, right? We lost the neighborhood, yeah. Some of the houses was pulled back or gone. And playgrounds, right? Yeah, further south we lost two playgrounds so almost more than two generations the kids have no place to play. In the 1980s Chinatown developers acquired an abandoned Santa Fe railroad yard on the edge of the neighborhood. On this 30-acre parcel they built Chinatown Square, new housing and most dramatically, a park right along the Chicago River named for developer and neighborhood leader Ping Tom. You know, when you're in Ping Tom Park, you cross an active railroad line to get in there and you see the "L" going overhead. You see that amazing vertical lift bridge. And the warehouse across the river. It's really kind of, very embedded in industrial Chicago. You're right. You're living in an area that you have a little bit of everything. And very recently the park has expanded to the north? Yes! This is great. You know we are having a very diverse population utilizing the park. And I'm one of the patrons. I go swimming and I do my exercise there. In the field house? In the field house. Not in the river? No, not yet until they clean it up. Well the river is used for one very special Chinatown celebration each summer, the annual Dragon Boat Races for Literacy. Businesses and other groups from around Chicago field teams, often made up of novice rowers (Dragon Boat captain) Down! Reach! Reach! ...who get a same-day crash course in how to paddle a huge dragon boat. Five Holy Martyrs Catholic Church in Brighton Park was founded in 1908. It's a reminder that the near southwest side once had a large Polish population. Now, there's a lot of room inside. But the church had to build this outdoor alter in 1979 to accommodate the overflow crowds who came to see a very special Polish visitor. Tens of thousands came to hear Pope John Paul II say mass. He was only the second pope to visit the United States, and the first to come to Chicago. (Pope speaking) The Pope was presented with a gift box of not just any chocolate, the World's Finest Chocolate. Sounds appropriately precious for a pope. But in this case it's just the name of the famous confectioner in Archer Heights. And if you grew up in Chicago, or raised kids here, you've probably sold some World's Finest yourself. Since 1939, this family-run company has pioneered candy as a force for fundraising. If you're more a fan of salty snacks like chips and pretzels, well Archer Heights has you covered too, with Vitners. The brand began making snacks for local taverns, and now distributes throughout the country. Nearby, where the historic boulevard system turns a corner at Garfield and Western you'll find Gage Park and the neighborhood that shares its name. The fieldhouse has a long history of...dance. Decades ago you could swing your partner and do-si-do here with the Gage Park Steppers, square dance club. Today, the steps look a little different, but the technique is just as impressive. This is the Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago. Reflecting the fact that the Hispanic population in the three neighborhoods we've just visited, now ranges from 75 percent to nearly 90 percent. (Jet engines blast) Just a few seconds away as the jet flies are Midway Airport's next door neighborhoods. There you'll find the vast factory that cranks out Tootsie Rolls to the tune of 66 million every day. And Ford City Mall. Both are housed in just a small part of what was once a sprawling WWII factory that churned out nearly 20,000 B-29 bomber engines. In nearby Marquette Park, an earlier aircraft one that met a tragic end is memorialized, reminding us of this neighborhood's Lithuanian heritage. The pilots were Lithuanian-Americans Steponas Darius and Stasys Girenas who lived and worked in Chicago. They tried to break Charles Lindburgh's transatlantic distance record in 1933 by flying non-stop from New York to Lithuania. But after 4,000 miles they crashed in Germany, just 400 hundred miles short of their goal. Neither pilot survived. Like Darius and Girenas, other Lithuanian heroes are remembered at the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture. Today, the neighborhood has a large Hispanic population. But masses are still said, and sung, in Lithuanian, at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church. Canal Origins Park, along the Chicago River's south branch is so tiny it's easy to miss. But what it's named for is big, really big. An engineering marvel that made Chicago a major metropolis. This is where the first shovels began to dig the Illinois & Michigan Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. And changing Chicago forever. Completed in 1848, much of the 96 mile canal was dug by Irish immigrants. It was backbreaking work and on-the-job injuries and deaths were not unusual. Many Irish ditch diggers settled along an old wagon route next to the canal, Archer Road, named for canal construction supervisor William Beatty Archer. Their settlement was first called Hardscrabble. But as traffic on the canal began to build, one obstacle that gave boat captains a headache is said to have re-christened the area. Legend has it that an earlier bridge here near Ashland Avenue was too low for barges to pass beneath. They had to unload and transfer their cargo to barges on the other side. The bridge became a port, giving the neighborhood its name, Bridgeport. Down Halsted Street, Schaller's Pump claims to be the oldest bar in Chicago. Since 1881, the Schaller family has owned the Pump, named for a direct connection to the former brewery next door. If it's your birthday in Bridgeport your most embarrassing baby picture is likely to show up in the Bridgeport News. Since 1939 it's been loaded with birthday announcements. And oh yeah, community news and 11th Ward political coverage. Around here, there's politics aplenty. Five Bridgeporters have been elected Mayor of Chicago. Ed Kelly, Martin Kennelly, some guy named Daley, Michael Bilandic, and another guy named Daley. "Vote for Chicago. Vote Democratic. Vote for Daley." The Daleys, are of course, Richard J. mayor from 1955 to 1976. And Richard M. from 1989 to 2011. "I need a cheese and pepperoni for dine-in." The neighborhood that produced so many political elite is as famously blue collar as a breaded steak on your lunch hour from Freddie's. Non-Bridgeport mayor, Carter Harrison said, "Bridgeport, was where men were men, and boys were either hellions or early candidates for the last rites of the Church." And folks in Bridgeport would probably agree with him. There's still a fierce pride here and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Well its home. And there's also a sort of communal culture in these neighborhoods. That's Dominic Pacyga, who's authored many books on Chicago history, he was born and raised in Back of the Yards. Why is it called Back of the Yards? Simply because it's behind the stockyards. [Both laugh] Dominic and I bellied up to the bar at Stanley's, the last tavern at was once called Whiskey Row to discuss south side devotion. What do you think that's about? that kind of special feeling about your neighborhood, that really I think is particular to the south side. These neighborhoods provided a sort of cradle to grave experience for people. I grew up in Sacred Heart Parish. We were polish mountaineers. We ended up hanging out together with kids from the same ethnicity. And we ended up at the funeral parlor that was run by a polish mountaineer. Well you haven't yet! Well I haven't yet! [laughs] While we still have Dominic... We're talking a high percentage of immigrants- Yes. These were really immigrant neighborhoods. These were very much immigrant neighborhoods. And wave after wave of immigration had entered into Chicago, washed across these neighborhoods as well. So they built these magnificent churches for the large part. You had the Irish... Germans... Italians... Polish... Lithuanians... Croats... Slovaks... And Mexicans. These immigrants came to do the dirtiest of dirty work, in The Union Stockyards, Opened on December 25th, 1865. What better way to celebrate Christmas than to open a live stock market, and so they open on Christmas day 1865. [GB Laughs] It made Chicago "Hog Butcher for the World," And men like Swift and Armour household names. Up to 50,000 workers slaughtered, butchered, and packed as many as 18 million animals a year! The stockyards were really like a city in itself right? Oh Yeah! They had their own fire department, had their own bank, they had the office building, which was the exchange building They had their own L line. They had their own L line till 1957. And visitors were welcome. It is estimated that at the turn of the century 500,000 people a year toured the stockyards & the packinghouses. 500,000 people! A year. It was a tourist attraction? Yeah it was a big tourist attraction. Chicago chamber of commerce didn't like it because it made us a cow town, you know but the mayor certainly liked it and everybody else pushed it. The speed and efficiency of the packinghouses were known throughout the world! Henry Ford is said to have perfected his assembly line after visiting the dis-assembly line at Chicago's hog operation. But for workers, this industrial wonder could be a miserable place. Author Upton Sinclair exposed the dirty and dangerous underbelly of the Stockyards in his book "The Jungle." What were the conditions like in these neighborhoods? The neighborhoods were, of course, poor working class communities. The streets at the turn of the century tended to be dirt. So it got pretty muddy if it rained? It got pretty muddy. There's one-uh-fellow who's interviewed, I believe, in the Chicago Daily News. Talks about going from bar to bar in his canoe in the spring because bubbly creek would back up; the water would fill the streets, and then he said occasionally he'd fall out of the canoe after being at a few bars and his wife would make him-you know-change his clothes. Well yeah if it was Bubbly creek that he was falling into. Bubbly Creek was a little tributary to the Chicago River that the Stockyards used as an open sewer. Gasses from decomposing animal waste caused the water to bubble and foam. The aroma was legendary. Well I was an alter boy as every good little catholic boy was, and they took us out to a seminary in the country and uh-I said, "what's that smell?" They said, "What smell there's no smell." I said, "there's a smell what's that smell!" He says, "it's called fresh air". And I literally got sick! Did it make you sick? Yeah, it made me sick. So we associate this area with the stockyards. Right. But there was a lot of industry in this area in the early days right? Was this kind of the center of industrial Chicago at one point? Well actually the whole, the whole south branch of the Chicago River was-uh-the industrial heart of the city. There was the Central Manufacturing District across from McKinley Park. And Stearns Quarry produced limestone. The abandoned pit has now been repurposed as Palmisano Park with a lake surrounded by towering limestone walls. In May of 1934 the big fire took place-burnt much of the stockyard down and then crossed into Canaryville and uhh-burned everything down across the street on Halsted street and into the neighborhood. There's an interesting story about a bar on Halsted Street. Fireman were fighting this fire so he opened up all his bottles of beer and handed em' out to the fireman, and that bar was saved! Amazingly enough. How 'bout that! There you go. One of the last bars on Halsted Street to be saved. The stockyards survived the fire, but began a slow steady decline. And finally closed in 1971. Just about all that remains are the abandoned Stock Yards National Bank and the stately old entrance gate. It's very interesting to see how this square mile really represents the whole history of industrial America. Railroads to labor unions, to advertisement, to industrialization, to mechanization, and then to de-industrialization in the 50s and 60s. It's the first major industry to leave Chicago. So that raises the question, people still eat meat! Right. What happened? Why did the packinghouses leave? They left for a couple of reasons. One, these plants were very old, there was more land in the suburbs to build on. And also Richard J. Daley, he had sort of wanted to get away from that image of a cow town. He saw a modern, global city emerging, skyscrapers, highways, expressways, exactly-everybody living in the sky like the Jetsons was his sort of image. And the stockyards were seen as old, and they smelled. So today what was the stockyards is not just a bunch of abandoned land right? No no! Today it's probably the most successful industrial park in the city. There are about 15,000 men and women working in those plants now. Bridgeport is also now part of an international arts scene. The Zhou brothers work has been featured in galleries across the world. But they've set up shop in the neighborhood with their Zhou B Art Center. And what was once the Spiegel Catalog Warehouse is now a cultural hub for artists and exhibitors. The Bridgeport Art Center is a half million ft2 for artistic creation and ceremonial bliss. Bridgeport today of course is so close to downtown. I was at Sox Park just the other day and I looked up at the alley and there was the Sears Tower. SO you end up thinking, My God, something this close is going to take off, so you have this very diverse community emerging around Sox Park. Which technically is in Armor Square, but... It's Bridgeport. A minor oversight around here, but the White Sox have called 35th and Shields home since 1910. After 80 years in Comiskey Park, the club moved across the street to the New Comiskey Park in 199. Just 12 years after it was built, the park got a new name, US Cellular Field, and a major facelift. Eight rows of nosebleed seats were lopped off the upper deck and capped with a more stylish flat roof. A party deck was added in the outfield and the sea of blue seats was completely replaced with green ones. Well, almost completely. Two blue seats remain, marking the landing spots of Scott Podsednik's walk off homerun, and here in left field, Paul Konerko's grand slam. Both in the 2005 World Series. "Tying run at 2nd, two out. Palmeiro, over the head of Jenks, Uribe charges, throws. Out! And the White Sox have won the World Series. Bridgeport and the rest of the south side were witness to a historic playoff run by the White Sox. Capped by a World Series sweep of the Houston Astros. The champs were welcomed home with a ticker tape parade down La Salle Street, and the south siders were the center of the baseball universe. A scrap yard on the Lakefront seems more industrial than residential. But don't tell that to Bavarian immigrant Andreas Von Zirngible. He lies for all eternity at the mouth of Chicago's other river, the Calumet. It's not quite the tourist destination that the Chicago River has become, but if folks had listened to Jefferson Davis way back in 1833, downtown Chicago might be here today. The future president of the Confederacy was sent here by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to survey the region and reported that the Calumet was a far superior river for a harbor. But in one of the earliest examples of Chicago politics, settlers near the Chicago River pulled strings and obviously the city grew there instead. Eventually the river downtown became overcrowded and industrialists started looking south for room to grow. It took a while, but it turns out ole Jeff Davis was right. Well, about the river anyway. The move to the Calumet region sparked an industrial boom on the Southeast Side. And the biggest industry here was steel. In fact there was a steel mill in each of the four neighborhoods on the Southeast Side: South Chicago. East Side. South Deering. And Hegewisch. Much of the steel that built Chicago's famous skyline came from right here. The Calumet River is still busy with barges and Great Lakes freighters. But the mills are gone. All that's left on the site of U.S. Steel's South Works are these towering concrete walls. So, right behind you... What the heck is this? That's called an ore wall. Basically what they were used for is when the barges would come in through the slips, they would unload the raw material that makes steel That's Dan Lira, president of the South Chicago Chamber of Commerce. We met at the abandoned South Works site to check out the first new piece of a planned redevelopment, a lakefront park dedicated to steelworkers in 2015. For Dan, it's personal. We're talking about a community I grew up in. I grew up right around the corner in what we call "The Bush", out in South Chicago. You're kind of a young guy. Do you remember this mill when it was operating or are you too young? During the late 70s/early 80s as a kid you remember the trains that were going by, you know. I know the environmentalists might not like this, but when you see a puff of smoke around the area, that meant, there's work going on. Jobs Jobs, that's what it meant to this neighborhood. When you think about the origin of the Hispanic, Mexican immigrant, they think, the city sometimes thinks it's Pilsen or 26th Street, but actually it was here in South Chicago. In fact Chicago's first Mexican Church is on 91st Street in South Chicago. Our Lady of Guadalupe served Mexican migrants who came for jobs in the mills in the early 20th Century. The church created this memorial to a terrible loss. Twelve parishioners gave their lives in Vietnam, more than from any other church. Every September, Mexican Independence Day is celebrated with a parade on Commercial Avenue that rivals the one that goes through Pilsen and Little Village. This beautiful Serbian Orthodox Church on 114th street in East Side is a reminder that the mills drew many different ethnic groups to the Southeast Side over many decades. Each settled in their own pocket of the neighborhood. We say for the early immigrants: Polish, Serbian, Italian, Jewish area this was. And then the Latinos came in afterward and right now it's about 40-50% African-American. So this is a melting pot, when we talk about the Southeast side of Chicago, we're diverse in all races out here. The union kind of bridged all these different ethnic groups, right? Yes. Yes they did. The union was very strong. It had at its peak, over 130,000 members part of the steel workers union. The struggle to unionize turned deadly on Memorial Day 1937. Workers had gone out on strike when Republic Steel refused to recognize a union. A demonstration was held outside the plant. As strikers started marching toward the factory gate, police opened fire. Killing ten. The strike was broken and the company didn't unionize until five years later, after the federal government mandated union elections. This monument at 117th Street by a former Republic steelworker, uses ten steel pipes to represent the ten demonstrators who were killed. The hard fought union victory became moot within a few decades, as one by one the plants shut down. So what is that like when the industry shutters and goes away? Well, what happens is jobs, you lose jobs. And when you lose jobs, what this community had to face was how do you fill that void? Do you imagine it coming back? Ah, actually, yes. That's the plan. Imagine a vast new development, literally a city within a city on a parcel of land larger than the downtown Loop. That's how much available property was left behind when South Works shut down in 1992. For now the planned development called Lakeside, with its homes, shopping areas, transit links, local school and marina, are all still on the drawing board. The developer predicts that it will take 25 to 45 years to complete. But Lake Shore Drive has been extended to the site and for the first time in a century the lakefront is open to Southeast siders. So you had all these people in these neighborhoods, who were living what - like a few hundred yards from the lake? Right. They probably didn't even know they were living that close When we finally got here. I remember one of the friends that I brought with me, he was like, he came here, looked into to lake and through the trees, and he was like it's a whole new world over here. It's like a paradise. And people that used to work here, older people that were working in the steel mills, even seeing them, they had tears in their eyes because they had never been here and it was like history. They were looking at the ore walls, looking at just the area, and what they remember it, and then seeing this. On the site of another former steel mill the vision is back to nature, with a little adventure thrown in. It's called Big Marsh Bike Park. The former Acme Steel site and a defunct industrial waste dump are being transformed into a manmade wilderness within the city, laced with trails for BMX and cyclocross bike riders. At 278 acres it's almost as big as Grant Park! Now, if you prefer to ride on a track, you'll find the city's only velodrome in South Chicago. I thought I'd give it a try. So what's a good time trial? No problem. The South Chicago Velodrome opened in 2011. Bike-racing enthusiasts got inspired to build it during Chicago's ill-fated bid to host the 2016 Olympics. The land is leased rent-free from the owners of the former U.S. Steel plant, while the property awaits redevelopment. Wooo! That's a 50-degree bank! Holy Moly! The velodrome folks told me I had to go 15 to 20 MPH or my bike would slide out from under me. Top sprinters can pedal faster than 40! Even in an industrial area, there's one kind of strike labor and management can agree on. Yes! First take. I swear. Skyway Bowl has been a neighborhood institution for decades. Some say it was the first black owned bowling alley in the country. And everyone knows its family owned and family friendly. Chicago State University built a new modern campus in 1975. It's a far cry from the school's first classroom, which was in this railcar in 1867. Back then it was a teachers college in Blue Island, known as the Cook County Normal School. Later it moved to Englewood, and finally to its current location in Roseland. "Thank you. Can I help you?" Many South Side communities have been torn apart by violence. Diane Latiker had enough, so in 2003 she opened her Roseland home as a safe place for youth and started the non-profit Kids Off the Block. Here, neighborhood teens in the program are rebuilding a memorial to their fallen peers. Latiker learns the interests of each kid in her care and steers them toward classes and training programs just right for them. This local story went national, when Diane was featured as a CNN Hero. Right on the Lake in Jackson Park, La Rabida Children's Hospital is named for the Spanish Pavilion from the Worlds' Columbian Exposition of 1893. That's because it once stood on this site. The pavilion was a replica of the monastery where Christopher Columbus prepared his historic voyage. The old pavilion was replaced with a full-fledged children's hospital in the 1930s. La Rabida stands just across Jackson Park Harbor from the South Shore Neighborhood. In this majority African American neighborhood, former synagogues are a reminder that South Shore was once home to a large Jewish community. Ironically, the neighborhood's most significant landmark wasn't open to its Jewish residents. The South Shore Country Club, housed in this Mediterranean Revival style building, excluded all minorities. Even as more and more African Americans moved into the neighborhood, the club refused to admit them. Membership dwindled and the club closed in 1975. The Chicago Park District bought the old club and renamed it the South Shore Cultural Center. They lovingly restored this building and now the beauty is for everyone to enjoy. Even the old stables have a new purpose they're home to the Chicago Police Department's mounted unit. Each horse is named in honor of a fallen Chicago Police officer. If you fly a City of Chicago flag outside your home, it probably came from the WGN Flag Company on South Chicago Avenue. These days, WGN, no relation to the TV and radio stations, stays very busy decorating the United Center. Advocate Trinity Hospital, formerly South Chicago Hospital on 93rd Street, is the reason a nearby neighborhood is called Pill Hill. Pill as in medication, and Hill as in, well it's sort of a hill. Pill Hill is part of the larger neighborhood of Calumet Heights. Across 87th Street in Avalon Park is WVON. It featured a crew of black DJs called the Good Guys like Herb Kent the Cool Gent and Pervis Spann. The station switched to a talk format in the mid-1980s, and adopted the nickname Voice of the Nation. Down the block, is a place where style does the talking. In an era when roller skating has all but disappeared, the Rink is a throwback. But consider yourself warned, the "Old School Hour" is not for novices. It's always been a dream of mine to be the first president to dedicate a national monument in sub-zero conditions. In February 2015, the president's dream came true, when he dedicated Chicago's first national park. That site was the historic company town of Pullman, here on the far south side. Today the Pullman neighborhood, nestled between the South Shore Line and I-94, has historic charm and youthful exuberance. There's the mammoth House of Hope, an energy "farm" with 32,000 solar panels. And greens with a view at Harborside International Golf Center. But what makes Pullman a national treasure, is its history. This is where George Pullman set out to transform American industry. But his story is as tragic as it is triumphant. Pullman had risen to fame after the sleeping car he manufactured was hitched to the funeral train for assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. The notoriety attracted investors and demand for Pullman's next generation of cars dubbed hotels on wheels. The Pullman car was the epitome of luxury travel in the 19th century. And it put the town of Pullman on the map, literally. To ramp up production, George Pullman bought 4,000 acres near Lake Calumet in 1880, and built a company town, which he named for himself. Much of that town is still standing today. Homes of various sizes were rented to workers according to the employees status. As with everything in his empire, the town was expected to earn a profit. And the Pullman company controlled everything. The first resident moved into Pullman in January 1st of 1881. By 1884, there were over 6,000 people living here. That's Pullman resident Mike Shymanski, he's the president of the Historic Pullman Foundation. And the idea was the people that came to work here would have these good housing and all these amenities. And the amenities were fantastic There was a Pullman-owned bank. A Pullman-owned shopping center called the Arcade. And a Pullman-owned Market Square where vendors rented space to sell their wares. The Florence Hotel was named for Pullman's favorite daughter. This was the only place in town where alcohol was served and only to company managers and their guests. Pullman even built a church, but the rent was too high to attract a congregation for the first 6 years. Pullman believed his spotlessly clean town with its wholesome amenities would create a new kind of factory worker. One that was sober, hard working, and loyal to the company. And of course if they're happy workers, they won't join a union, right? Well, there won't be a need to. I mean, and things went along fairly well and it wasn't until the Great Recession of 1893-97 that screwed things up. That was the start of big trouble in Pullman's paradise. To make ends meet, he cut workers' wages. But he didn't reduce the rent for workers' housing, because he had guaranteed a profit to his investors. Pullman's employees walked out on strike on May 11th, 1894. The American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs got workers across the country to refuse to operate trains with Pullman Cars. Pullman refused to negotiate and federal troops were called in to break the strike. Violence erupted and several workers were killed. Debs was jailed. The strike was broken, and Pullman reopened for business. But in the aftermath a federal commission condemned Pullman for his actions. Three years later, George M. Pullman died of a heart attack. Many accounts say that his grave at Chicago's Graceland Cemetery wasreinforced with steel and concrete out of fear that his body would be desecrated. He was the focus of a lot of hatred. Did he feel misunderstood? Oh I'm sure he felt he was misunderstood. He was more of a person who wanted to provide people with opportunity and be a great capitalist. And he ended up between a rock and a hard place during the strike because on one hand he had responsibility to his stockholders, his bondholders, and he also felt some responsibility to the community that he had created. Why did the National Park Service name Pullman a national monument? The innovation of rail transportation, which Pullman was sort of the avant-garde on that. Also, the emergence of the labor movement. The third reason was the Pullman porters or the brotherhood of sleeping car porters. The Pullman Porters provided impeccable service aboard the Palace Cars. Many of the first generation had been slaves before emancipation. Their polish and gracious demeanor were legendary but life for them behind the scenes was another story. The Pullman Porters worked under inhumane conditions. Conditions that were not necessarily fair for the normal working class. That's David Peterson. I met him at the A. Phillip Randolph Pullman Porters Museum, where he serves as president and executive director. To think that someone would be on the road that long on their feet serving people and then get 4 hours of sleep, that's just unrealistic. Where did they sleep? Majority of the time, the smoking car. So just imagine that. The four hours that you do have to sleep, you have to - you're inundated with smoke. Many passengers called every porter "George" after their omnipotent boss. Despite their lack of power in the company, Pullman Porters were well respected in their community seen as role models for their professionalism. But they wanted better working conditions. They were denied membership in all-white railroad unions, so they formed their own, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph. The Attorney General characterized A. Philip Randolph in a certain way. What did he call him? He called him the most dangerous Negro in the United States. What made himso dangerous? There were several accusations made about A. Phillip Randolph. They called him a communist. They called him all different types of things, but at the end of the day he was just someone who was concerned, very very passionately about the economic empowerment of the African-American community. It took 12 years, but the Pullman Company finally recognized the union in 1937. The struggle was for a contract, but it was for more than a contract, right? Absolutely after they got that respect and they became the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, they saw this power. So this - the next thing was okay, how can we help everybody else? So it really becomes a big component of the Civil Rights movement. A. Philip Randolph and the Pullman Porters are the grandfathers of the Civil Rights movement. "And that's why I'm designating Chicago's Pullman District as America's newest national monument." The Pullman Company stayed in business well into the 20th century. But demand for Pullman cars fell off with the decline in passenger rail travel. The company closed the plant in 1957 and the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Neighbors banded together to fight a plan to bulldoze all of Pullman in 1960, beginning a slow process of landmarking and restoration. In a heartbreaking setback, an arson fire destroyed much of the old factory, including its famous clock tower on a cold December night in 1998. But the state has been rebuilding it and the National Park Service plans to use it as the visitor's center for the national monument. Today there are encouraging signs as factories return to Pullman. This one plans to clean up. The South Side Soap Box. That's the nickname of San Francisco-based Method Soap's 22 acre Chicago plant that opened in 2015. At first glance it looks like a rainbow, but the color that really stands out is green. A wind turbine and sun tracking solar "trees" help power the plant that includes a 75,000 square foot greenhouse on the roof. From soap to suds, Pullman has gotten into the micro-brew game with Argus Brewery. Producing beers with names like Iron Horse and Pegasus, this brewer is right at home in the historic Schlitz stables. Most amazingly of all, this 19th century model town is now being seen as a model town for the 21st Century. If you were doing a sustainable new town today 90% of the same criteria would be used that Pullman used. It was a pedestrian scale community and it also had a wide variety of housing. By design it was built to have a diverse community of people at different incomes, living together. It's a tranquil community garden today. But if you close your eyes you might just be able to picture the days when this was a railroad junction, bustling with steam trains. Actually you don't have to close your eyes. The walls tell the story. The surrounding community of Junction Grove was home to immigrants who came to work in the nearby stockyards and later African Americans arriving in the Great Migration. Junction Grove got a new name when a businessman who lived here lobbied his neighbors for something that reminded him of his New Jersey home, Englewood. I know what you've heard about Englewood. The crime. The unemployment. The abandoned buildings. Heck, America's first documented serial killer, H.H. Holmes, was a resident in the 1890s. But there's another side to Englewood. One where people are working to build a stable community, raise families, and bring back some of the prosperity from the days when 63rd and Halsted was the largest shopping district in the city, outside of the Loop. As in other South Side neighborhoods, the population began to plummet in the 1960s, and the once-vibrant commercial district went with it. Efforts to revitalize it with a suburban style shopping mall and later a major redesign, failed. For forty years, a large portion of Englewood was left to decay. But today at 63rd and Halsted, something's cooking! Technique is important in the kitchen, especially when it doubles as a classroom. This is chef Murray and this is the Washburne Culinary Institute, which has been training chefs of the future for the last 75 years. I am not a cook, so I'm gonna need all the help I can get here. Make sure you have your fingers under... Oh yeah, ok. Rock the knife. Hey man, I'm going to show my wife that I'm a trained chef. Washburne is now housed on the 40-acre campus of Kennedy King College. Which Opened in 2007, bringing the intersection of 63rd and Halsted back to life. Not with shoppers, but with students. "89.3, WKKC. You're live with Harold Rush, that's me!" That of course, is Harold Lee Rush. A fixture on Chicago radio for decades. "The name of the song, I Can't Feel My Face. Honest to goodness." Rush mentors future broadcasters, at Kennedy King's radio station, WKKC. His mid-day show features a segment with journalist Rashanah Baldwin, called "What's Good in Englewood?" "Fresh moves bus, you remember the bus?" Rashanah has become a voice for Englewood residents who are sick of hearing the same old questions about their neighborhood. How did you survive growing up? What was it like? Do you know anyone that was shot? Have you experienced the violence first hand? So what do you want to say when somebody says that to you? I kind of want to tell them to shut up, but you know, I have to be respectful for the question, but you know, I get that some people just don't know, and they see what's happening on news, and all over. Rashanah and I met at Kusanya Café, a trendy coffee shop in Englewood, opened in 2013. And it's coffee with a cause. This non-profit is the kind of positive force Rashanah champions. So if I could be that voice, that platform to share all the great programs, all the great events, all the great initiatives. Look what we're doing, look at Large Lots, look at Kusanya Café, look at Dream Café. Now we have two cafes in the community. Did you know that? And people are like "No! I didn't! Where is it?" DREAM CAFÉ is entrepreneur Howard Bailey's attempt to solve Englewood's food desert crisis. A sit-down place where you can actually enjoy dinner, without it being in a greasy bag or Styrofoam or ordering food through a bulletproof window. Me being a vegetarian, I'm like, love asparagus. Now you can sit down and enjoy fresh veggies, organic food. So are you feeling like it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? In other words, I mean there is violence. By percentage, maybe more than in other communities. But by focusing on it, is that your issue? I call it poverty porn. Just focusing on what's going wrong in the community, never showing people like myself who are just living, not surviving, just living. I don't wake up every day thinking I got to survive, I got to walk out of my door and look over my shoulder. Like I'm talking about like I come to Kusanya Café and have tomato basil soup, or I do yoga on my back deck. In addition to her radio gig, Rashanah works for Teamwork Englewood, the non-profit that brings community services together. It's housed in the historic Chicago City Bank and Trust Buiding that's also home to Englewood Blue, a business incubator for the community's startup entrepreneurs. So when you see Englewood, what do you see? I see an amazing community, that's like any other community. You know. We have our challenges, we have, you know, certain disparities but we're living, we're working. We're law abiding citizens show that. Show what's going right. Here's something else that's right. Growing Home. It's more than just an urban farm. These dual patches at Wood Street and Honore Street offer job training for the unemployed and individuals deemed "at risk" hires. Urban farming is a growing trend, but Englewood has some long surviving businesses too. Can you name some of the long time business in the neighborhood? Some of the successful businesses. Oh, yeah. My favorite is John's Hardware and Bicycle shop. I remember going there when I was nine years old to buy a bike with my mom. And I'm happy to see that they've been in the community for over 40+ years, never left. When times got tough in the late 1980s, five churches in Englewood banded together to form St. Benedict the African. And built this striking modernist church building. Today, St. Benedict stands as one of the few church's built in Chicago for a predominately black congregation. Even one of Englewood's biggest problems - vacant lots could become a big opportunity. Through the city's Large Lot Program neighbors can purchase vacant lots on their blocks for just $1 apiece. Get a lot for a dollar, and you can build on it? Yes, I know, I know. You can beautify your neighborhood. Now you can take this blighted, dark area and do something with it. You've stayed here. Yes. Why have you made the commitment to stay here? I wanted to see the community change. I wanted to see what it's going to become. People are excited. Fellow Englewoodians that I created, that I coined the phrase, A term you coined, Englewoodians. Englewoodians. It's a sense of community, it's a sense of partnership, it's a sense of family, it's like "oh you're from Englewood too! Where'd you grow up? You do hear that, you know, the marker that you've succeeded, is "I got out of that neighborhood!" Right? Yup, I survived, I made it. I don't have to look back at the community anymore. It's not how you feel That's not how I feel at all. I'm gonna be right here as it grows, and I'm gonna grow with it. Maybe I'll have my name on one of the streets. Seriously, because it's like why leave? I wanna see, you know, what the community is going to become. I don't want to be pushed out to the suburbs, I want to stay right here, and raise a family. Where will you find the only Chicago Park District bowling alley? In the Martin Luther King Family Recreation Center, in Auburn Gresham. Auburn Gresham holds a firm spot in the Chicago Bungalow belt. Its bungalow district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and like so much of Chicago it's laid out on a rigid street grid. But just a few blocks away that grid morphs into serpentine streets surrounding a lagoon traversed by footbridges, it's unlike anything else in the city. This is Auburn Park, first developed in the 1870s, long before the bungalows were built, when this area was one big marsh. The developers of course had to drain the marsh to build houses, but they kept part of it as a lovely lagoon, to attract homebuyers. In the early 2000s a developer added to the neighborhood's eclectic architectural mix with these 99 eye-catching modern homes. The development called The Havens was built on 14-and-a-half acres of disused railroad property. St. Sabina Catholic Church in Auburn Gresham is the home of a famously outspoken and sometimes controversial priest. Father Michael Pfleger is often in the headlines confronting violence and other urban problems that have plagued Auburn Gresham and other Chicago neighborhoods. The church also provides neighborhood residents with food, clothing, and job training, in partnership with Catholic Charities. "The jewel of the southeast side of Chicago." That's how real estate developer, author, and civil rights activist Dempsey Travis described Chatham. #195, seven wings. #195 Chatham was home to gospel great Mahalia Jackson. She was Born in New Orleans, and came to Chicago during the Great Migration. As "the Queen of Gospel" it only makes sense that Jackson toured with the "Father of Gospel," Thomas A. Dorsey for nearly 15 years. Mahalia Jackson's house on Indiana Avenue was landmarked by the city and later became the home of former U.S. Senator Roland Burris. "What I'm trying to do is bring the city together. I want all people together." Chatham was also the longtime home of Chicago's 2nd African American mayor, Eugene Sawyer. Although, he was tapped to succeed Harold Washington in a north side parking lot. If a mayor and senator could live in Chatham, why not a president? The chief executive might feel right at home in Chatham's version of the White House... except for the color. This private residence was built of blue Italian brick in 1966. As for being an exact replica, we'll let you be the judge. Expansive lawns are nice, but here on south King Dr., a large front yard wasn't the intention. These tiny 1920's era homes are called Garlows - a cross between garage and bungalow. They were designed as affordable homes for the middle class. Once owners had the means, they were supposed to build a larger house on the front of the property, and turn the garlow into a garage. But the Great Depression ended this American dream, and the quaint homes stayed. In a funny twist, some later homeowners built garages on the front yards. To get to the last stop on our South Side tour you can take the historic Rock Island Railroad to 91st Street. This station is called Beverly Hills. You won't find any movie stars around here, it was just a reference to the hilly terrain in the new development of Beverly. Well, as hilly as it gets in Chicago anyway. Beverly sits at the northern tip of the Blue Island Ridge. This was an actual island in prehistoric times when Lake Michigan was a much larger body of water that geologists named Lake Chicago. For a city built on Midwest prairie, a paltry 670 feet of elevation is enough to qualify Beverly as the highest point in Chicago. The neighborhood has many other high points... Like an art museum in the Ridge Park Fieldhouse, with works by Grant Wood, Mary Cassatt, and Maxfield Parrish. There's also a record shop "where vinyl still lives" And a brew pub on Western Avenue, called Horse Thief Hollow. It takes its name from the legendary hideout where bandits stashed stolen horses. And there's a one-of-kind collection of Prairie Style homes by Walter Burley Griffin on a single block of 104th street in East Beverly. Griffin left the office of Frank Lloyd Wright to become one of America's most important architects. The scenic terrain and architecture in Beverly, make you feel like you've gone way beyond the city limits. Beverly has big homes, wide lawns, Metra stations, sounds a little like a suburb. You know I think it has some characteristics of a suburb, but we're definitely in the city. So you're not too fond of the suburban, uh, characterization? Maybe in some ways. (laughs) That's Willie Winters, the former executive director of the Beverly Area Planning Association. We grabbed seats at The Beverly Arts Center to talk about the benefits of a city neighborhood with a suburban lifestyle. Beverly is also a neighborhood where you have a lot of cops and a lot of firefighters. The city does have residency requirements. So if you're a cop or firefighter you have to live in the city. Which is a benefit for us. But I think there's something about the suburban feeling that is... that attracts people here, right? Oh yeah, definitely. As opposed to places up north you can pretty much find a parking spot in front of your house any night of the week. So there's those types of things. I think you have families here in Beverly that have been here you know, three generations. People put stakes down in this community and they're rooted here. What parish are you from? Barnabas. St Barnabas, but you know people usually just drop the Saint and say the last name. OK, so you didn't drop a beat when I asked you that question. I think a lot of people, not from Beverly, might say 'What do you mean, what parish am I from?' I think that's been going on for years so it's a real south side thing. So you don't say what ward you're from, or what neighborhood you're from. I think that would depend on how politically involved you are. The 19th Ward, we're always the highest vote total in city. We vote more than anybody. You vote early and often? We vote early, (laughs) but not often I don't think. I think we vote once. Catholic high schools are a big deal on the south side. With so many options to choose from, a few rivalries are bound to heat up. Can you tick off some of those schools? Oh sure, Brother Rice, where I went. You gotta say yours first. I gotta say mine first, but there's St. Rita. Mount Carmel. Marist High School. Mother McAuley. And there's no rivalry between these schools, right? Oh, no. There's quite a bit of a rivalry, it's funny. So there's not like 'Ugh he went to Mount Carmel, ugh" Maybe if my kids made that choice, although they both went to Brother Rice. Your kids went to the school you went to. They did, they did. Did you push them a little? Maybe a little. (laughs) (Crowd cheering) Beverly is a diverse neighborhood including about one-third African American. But the ethnicity Beverly is most famous for is Irish. Some years ago, probably 10 years ago they did a study and they said that between 103rd and Western and about 107th, so many blocks east and west there was the highest concentration of Irish surnamed families living in that community. So there's quite a bit of Irish folks out here. There's even an Irish castle. A real estate tycoon named Robert Givens built it in 1886. Givens apparently based the design on a castle he had sketched while in Ireland. If you know one thing about Beverly, it's the South Side Irish Parade. Yes. I would say that is a big thing for sure. (bagpipes) Back in the day kids from the neighborhood would say maybe their first sip of beer ever was at the South Side Irish Parade. That's maybe true, I never witnessed that myself. Uh-huh. You deny anything. (cheering) The Downtown St. Patrick's Day Parade, is very political, you know the mayor and all of the politicians march in it. Is it different here? First of all, the politicians actually march towards the end of the parade here. Here? I mean they're all welcome. They have to register and pay their fee like everybody else Is there a message in putting the politicians at the end? Generally, for the South Side Irish Parade the honoree is a group. It could be a charity organization or could be a family of servicemen who was killed in the line of duty. King Lockhart Park at 106th & Western is a permanent memorial to two fallen Chicago firefighters. Patrick King and Anthony Lockhart. They died on this site in 1998, battling a blaze at a tire store. I think it speaks to supporting those that protect us. Not just for firefighters and policemen, but also transcends into people who fought in the different wars and conflicts that our country has been in. Marine Corps Corporal Conner Lowry of Beverly was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2012. On the one year anniversary of his death, a bronze sculpture was dedicated in Beverly Park. You know, all the physical beauty of Beverly is great. It's the people, for me. That's what keeps me engaged in this community. Those types of things. There's one last stop I have to make in Beverly before the end of the show. It's a place that's most popular on hot summer nights and can leave some people speechless. "Ok, Geoffrey, are you ready to roll?" Sorry, I'm gonna need a minute to finish my Rainbow Cone. What else would you call a single cone layered with chocolate, strawberry, Palmer House - which is a cherry walnut concoction pistachio and orange sherbet? The Sapp family opened the Original Rainbow Cone in 1926, when the far south side was mostly just prairie. The roadside ice cream outpost served city folk who trekked out here on Sundays to visit cemeteries in the area. The business boomed and within four years the shack was replaced with a permanent building. I need to do a selfie, um before it melts. All these years later; Rainbow Cone is still a family-owned Beverly institution. As I said at the start of this show, you find every color of the rainbow on Chicago's South Side united by neighborhood pride. Whether you live there now, or you've moved away,

Channel: WTTW

Views: 125,830

Keywords: south side, chicago south side, chicago history, chicago neighborhoods, chicago neighborhoods tour, chicago neighborhoods to visit, geoffey baer, south chicago, chicago documentary, geoffrey baer, chicago architecture, geoffrey baer chicago, geoffrey baer chicago videos, geoffrey baer wttw, geoffrey baer pbs, hyde park, brighton park, pullman porters, bridgeport, englewood, washington park, chicago black history, chicago black history tour, pullman porters documentary

Id: M5s-_v8lsS8

Length: 99min 49sec (5989 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021