Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago by Colin Fisher (review)

How did immigrants and working-class Chicagoans interact with nature in the decades before and after 1900? In Urban Green, Colin Fisher sets out to answer this question through thematic chapters that focus on topics such as African American recreation and the role of nature in Chicago’s labor movement. He argues, often quite convincingly, that the city’s working class cherished and heavily utilized neighborhood parks, forest preserves, and rural camps and retreats and that such spaces contributed to the formation of ethnic identity and the vitality of the labor movement.

Perhaps more than any other in recent years, this study straddles the fields of social and environmental history. Fisher is acutely aware of the professional challenges that result from this unconventional approach. In his acknowledgments he thanks his publisher “for taking a bet on an unorthodox project that many cultural historians saw as too environmental and many environmental historians saw as too cultural” (xii). Fisher appeals directly to both camps in his introduction, making a clear case for the importance of his research for both social and environmental history.

Readers of any stripe will likely be struck by the wide-ranging appeal of recreation to the city’s working classes. Chicago’s major ethnic groups—Germans, Poles, Irish, Scandinavians, African Americans, Italians, Eastern Europeans—all gravitated to parks in the city and in outlying areas. On Sundays, workers flocked to the city’s parks, where they relaxed, played games, took walks, and recalled their homelands. Parks provided a much-needed escape from the grimness of the industrial settings where the city’s workers spent their days. The cramped and insalubrious rooms that they called home provided little respite from factories and processing floors. In an interesting paradox, industrialization helped spur the development of urban park systems.

Parks also helped immigrants maintain and nurture a sense of ethnic identity. They were the sites of elaborate festivals that celebrated home villages and regions. Tens of thousands of Swedes gathered in the city’s parks to celebrate the summer solstice, an ancient Viking tradition. Each August, Irish immigrants massed to commemorate Our Lady Day in Harvest, when they marked the onset of the fall harvest and victories over the English. Immigrants visited parks in part to recreate and imagine their homelands. The organizers of one prominent German festival “built the entrance and towers of Stuttgart Castle; another year, they recreated the sixteenth-century town of Ulm, complete with a Bürgermeister who greeted members of the audience as if they were long-lost friends” (55).

Fisher downplays the familiar story of class conflict in parks, according to which American-born elites disdained the carousing and game playing of immigrants. In fact, he argues that the immigrant custom of visiting parks on Sundays (generally their one day off) encouraged more affluent Chicagoans to embrace the parks as well. Accustomed to visiting with friends and family in their homes on the Sabbath, the city’s elites took a cue from their employees and began to view Sundays as a time for both religion and outdoor leisure. This notion of leisure from below is an intriguing idea, but one for which Fisher offers only suggestive evidence.

The scattered nature of the source base makes detailed analysis of recreational and leisure experiences difficult. For many working-class residents, visiting parks was a routine occurrence. As a result, only a handful of these visits left a trace in the historical record. Fisher works around these absences by presenting biographical sketches of individuals with close ties to parks. He highlights the experiences of people like Leonard Dubkin, whose West Side neighborhood lacked trees, but who vigorously promoted the joys of the city’s parks and preserves through his newspaper columns and in six books on the city’s nature. In contemporary America, unions and environmentalists often disagree about the wisdom of infrastructure projects, with unions touting the employment such projects...