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49  The CityThat SweatsWork Growth and Inequality in Post-Fordist Chicago The taxi ride from Midway International Airport to the Chicago Loop speeds visitors through a century’s worth of industrial history in the space of twenty minutes. Packed tightly against L tracks, rail yards, and the industrial waterways carved out of the South Branch of the Chicago River, the Stevenson Expressway offers an unsentimental view of the manufacturing past that moved the poet Carl Sandburg to label Chicago “the City of big shoulders”—a phrase as obsolescent as it is overused. Halfway through the journey downtown, visitors pass the belching smokestack of the Fisk power plant, a decidedly ugly landmark that stands in ever-sharper contrast to the increasingly opulent cityscape behind it. Even as the visitor to the city passes through an unpretty industrial space, the visual excess of Chicago’s rebuilt downtown draws the eye. Miles from the Loop, the shrinking landscape of Chicago’s Fordist past begins to give way to physical markers of the city’s much-discussed and little-understood rebound from a seemingly endless series of plant closings in the 1970s and the 1980s. Punctuated by the addition of sixty-, eighty-six-, and ninety-eight-story landmarks in the 2000s, the Loop’s growing skyline draws the eye of visitors and residents alike. It is the most striking symbol of the new Chicago but not the most fitting. The city’s transformation is more aptly epitomized at the margins of the celebrated downtown. The South Loop, home to little more than unused train tracks a few decades ago, now boasts miles of condos, townhouses, and residential towers to house the city’s growing professional workforce. As the taxi exits the Stevenson Expressway for the Dan Ryan, this new minicity of condominiums shifts to the visitor’s right. To her left lie 10,000 more units of newly upscaled housing in the formerly Mexican American workingclass neighborhood of Pilsen and in the repurposed factories on the city’s Near West Side. Decay in Chicago’s “neighborhoods,” the catch-all signifier 50 · THE CITY THAT SWEATS WORK for the inner ring of formerly middle-class areas devastated by deindustrialization , is now threatened by the seemingly unstoppable growth of the Loop and its professionals. These visible symbols of polarization dominate narratives of inequality in Chicago and elsewhere for many reasons, including their obvious visual metaphors and the fact that the professionals who determine popular narratives of inequality (as well as those who consume them) spend a lot of time in and near central business districts. But the majority of Chicago’s population has always lived in neighborhoods outside its storied center and the surrounding zone of transition, and the less-noted changes to those neighborhoods constitute a crucial piece of the story of contemporary economic restructuring. On the way to its rendezvous with architectural landmarks on the lakefront, the taxi from Midway skirts Brighton Park and Archer Heights, home to one of Chicago’s multiple “Polish Broadways.” Across the Chicago River, behind the Cook County Department of Corrections and freight tracks, lies La Villita (the Little Village), where the crush of consumer traffic to 26th Street’s innumerable restaurants , supermarkets, and clothing stores brings the street to a standstill at all hours. Poorer than the professionalized lakefront neighborhoods on the North Side but higher in income than South and West Side ghettoes chronicled by generations of Hyde Park graduate students, these neighborhoods and their thriving low-wage businesses represent a critical but overlooked element in Chicago’s ongoing experimentation with economic reconfiguration in the wake of deindustrialization. Just as they focus on opulent downtowns, critical narratives of Chicago’s white-collar rebirth and its attached economic inequalities focus on financial industries and the rarified analysts and deal makers whose spending on the job drives the skyline upward. The centralization of financial capital and the rise of financial command-and-control centers—Chicago’s clusters around the merged Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange— clearly lays the ground conditions for the workplace inequalities that define contemporary American cities (Harvey 1985). As the basic analytical formulations about global cities suggest, the well-heeled consumers employed in downtown skyscrapers play a crucial role as consumers of these services. But they are not the only consumers with income to spend, and businesses serving those professionals are not the only businesses to degrade work. Understanding the production of low-wage jobs means finding the right industries to examine and...

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