Straßenverkehr und soziale Sichtbarkeit: Das Massenmedium Straße in Chicago 1900–1930 by David Sittler (review)

An individual’s ability to use public spaces, based on aspects like race, class, gender, and age, is as topical an issue today as it was in early twentieth century Chicago. David Sittler argues that urban streets are a form of media— being on the street means constantly participating in media-technologies of social visibility that resonate through that street’s material elements; these are read by others on the street and amplified in the printed media. Sittler defines “Bilder-Verkehr” (“picture traffic”), the subject of his study, as all the “pictures” that can be visually perceived by any traffic participant on the street (p. 37). From different viewpoints, Sittler studies the physical practices on Michigan Avenue, then the specific activities that achieved mass-media visibility, such as demonstrations. He also consults contemporary experts’ writings about Chicago’s streets. Having examined the race riots of 1919 as an extreme case of “Bilder-Verkehr,” he argues that the violence of the riots can be perceived as media practice.

Studying the entire visibilities, even on one street in one city for a defined period, is a gigantic task. Sittler marches, or maybe rather saunters, through a great variety of interesting phenomena, from street cleaners and statues to street facades and political groups. This abundance of subjects prevents the author from looking deeply into any of them, and the number of perspectives, concepts, and thinkers make the book a challenging, sometimes bewildering read. However, the amount of detail is also a fitting reflection of the multifaceted topic of simultaneous occurrences. Understandably the focus on social visibility as well as the tradition of media history steer the use of literature. In a study about streets, however, we expect at least some recognition of the large field of recent studies on the history of space and mobility in cities. A prime example is Peter Norton’s article on changes in U.S. city streets during this period, predominantly in Chicago, resulting in the hegemony of car-traffic at the cost of all other street uses and users: “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street” (2007). Without this context, the book’s recurring analysis of social visibility and media representations of different traffic modes lacks a crucial historical dimension.

In the final chapter, Sittler turns to the work of the Chicago School of Sociology in order to link its classic studies with his attempts to grasp essential phenomena from the visual mass of a street. He suggests that the city is not only the topic, but also the outcome of the study, because it produces new presentations and definitions of its phenomena (p. 339). This is a refreshing insight. It could have been presented at the beginning to serve as a fruitful framing of the entire book. Some maps would have been beneficial to illustrate the subject (following the example of the Chicago sociologists Sittler analyses). Even so, his analysis has a strong visual rooting in the photographs he uses as sources and points of reference. A mainly micro-historical approach to using pictures allows him to concentrate on just thirty individual pictures to anchor his analysis. It would be helpful to have a more thorough explanation of how and why he chose these pictures and analyzed them. Sittler could also have told us more about the fleeting everyday practices that he refers to only in passing (p. 178). Other authors have used historical photographs also to analyze such practices, for example, Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, and Roland Canu in “The Forgotten Role of Pedestrian Transportation in Urban Life: Insights from a Visual Comparative Archaeology (Gothenburg and Toulouse, 1875–2011)” (2015). Nevertheless, Sittler’s book is a very welcome addition to the visual scholarship of urban street life and a rich, thought-provoking walk through the everyday history of Chicago.