Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 (review)

Bachin takes an interdisciplinary approach to her account of city building by invoking urban history, sport history, and social history that covers politics, race, architecture, and economics in a nuanced examination of contested urban space. She moves beyond the usual coverage of elites to include the middle and working classes with a particular view of the role of female civic leaders, such as Jane Addams, Mary McDowell, and Ida Wells-Barnett. Rather than an elite imposition of social control, Bachin posits a continuous struggle by a variety of groups for the attainment of whiteness, with its concomitant rights and privileges. She demonstrates prodigious scholarship, much of it immersed in primary sources, evidenced by eighty-eight pages of endnotes. A plethora of photographs further enhances the text.

Bachin's singular focus on Chicago's South Side is both a strength and a weakness of the book. She deftly explores the interlocking networks between the University of Chicago, the public parks, the Comiskey Park baseball stadium, and the growth of an African-American urban culture in the rapidly expanding Black Belt of the South Side of Chicago. That narrow focus allows her to establish a strong argument, but the inclusion of the Chicago Stadium on the West Side or Wrigley Field on the North Side might have produced a different picture.

Bachin's account starts with the 1893 World's Fair and its progressive vision of order and harmony in urban planning. The emphasis on classical architectural design promoted a particular ideology, further enhanced by the Gothic design of the new University of Chicago. The latter's emulation of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge signaled the validation of a particular WASP culture that manifested itself in an anti-Catholic, antisemitic campus life that also marginalized women. Such elitism differed markedly from the university's off-campus ventures into settlement-house social work in the teeming ethnic enclaves.

In such neighborhoods, the construction of public parks, fieldhouses, and supervised programs sought to bring middle-class order, decorum, and the pragmatic practice of democracy to residents. The city building Burnham Plan of 1909, only partially implemented, intended to merge aesthetic and commercial interests. Entrepreneurs such as Albert Spalding and Charles Comiskey offered baseball as both commercialized leisure and a wholesome, moral antidote to perceived social ills. The 1910 opening of Comiskey Park featured a civic parade, led by the mayor, and its location enhanced local real estate values. Bachin asserts that baseball provided a "shared sense of community" despite various ticket prices that allowed box seats for the wealthy, while relegating working-class fans to the uncovered bleachers (234).

Popular culture faced further negotiation in the nearby Black Belt, fueled by massive African-American migration from the South and segregated housing patterns. The vibrant, expressive African-American musical culture elicited jazz and a cultural mixing in the black and tan cabarets; black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson challenged the precepts of Social Darwinian racial ideology. Bachin's analysis of such contested spaces and negotiated culture offers a new model and supports the primacy of Chicago as a central location in the American culture wars.