Object Lesson: : Architecture at Pullman National Monument as Both an Agent of Division and Collective Identity

Few American places have been so conspicuously shaped by the politics of class and race over the long twentieth century as Pullman, Illinois, making it an important location for studying the role of place-based heritage practice in today’s fight for social justice and equality. This model company town, built in 1883 by luxury-train producer George Pullman as the ultimate test of corporate paternalism, gained high praise at first, but became the poster child for company overreach when an 1894 strike highlighted worker frustration with Pullman’s control over both wages and rents (Figure 1). The company was ordered to divest itself from the town by 1907, but Pullman retained a distinctive identity on the south side of Chicago throughout the twentieth century, largely because of its recognizable architecture.

When President Barack Obama created Pullman National Monument in 2015, he called for intersecting stories of race, class, labor, and place that would use the site’s history to “tell rich, layered stories of American opportunity and discrimination, industrial engineering, corporate power and factory workers, new immigrants to this country and formerly enslaved people and their descendants, strikes and collective bargaining.”¹ Obama’s directive, however, set up a challenge for National Park Service (NPS) staff because the active heritage community in Pullman was deeply divided— spatially and racially—in ways that undermined the president’s holistic vision.

In Pullman’s residential area south of the factory site and clock tower, the famous Florence Hotel and Greenstone Church punctuate about twenty-five blocks of red brick row houses. Starting in the 1960s, several community groups of middle-class, mostly White, residents developed a popular narrative about Pullman’s significance as the nation’s first professionally designed model town. Led by the Historic Pullman Foundation and the Pullman Civic Organization, these groups successfully listed the Pullman Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places and gained state and local designations in the 1970s. They have been active in historic preservation ever since.

Figure 1.

Pullman Company Administrative Building and Clock Tower, front view, “the sheer beauty,” undated. Chicago Public Library, Historic Pullman Collection, Photograph cgp_spe_hpc_1.11a.

On the northern side of Pullman, however, a different history and preservation story prevailed. The National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, founded in 1995 and housed in one of the original 1883 row houses, celebrates the African American men (and some women) whose work created the luxurious service that made Pullman palace cars famous. Porters never lived in the town itself because only factory workers were allowed to rent company houses. The Pullman Company did not hire African American workers in its factory (except periodically as strikebreakers). But as the Great Migration, “White flight,” and deindustrialization changed the demographics of Chicago’s South Side over the twentieth century, the northern part of Pullman became majority African American. The grassroots effort to establish and maintain the Pullman Porter Museum came after decades during which northern Pullman was initially excluded from the historic district boundaries and repeatedly omitted from the sanctioned heritage narrative conveyed in Pullman’s more famous—and more White—southern half (Figure 2). For the newly created national monument, the question of how to unite Pullman’s conflicting narratives quickly became a pressing issue.

Figure 2.

The National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum operates from an original row house in northern Pullman. The Historic Pullman Foundation runs its exhibit hall in southern Pullman in a mid-twentieth-century former VFW hall that it shared with the interim NPS visitor center until fall 2021, when a new one opened in the former administration building and clock tower. “Current District Boundaries” map of Pullman National Monument, updated from Positioning Pullman (National Park Conservation Association, 2015), 17.

In this article, we argue that the racial and class divisions that Obama’s proclamation sought to overcome were built into the landscape by George Pullman and his architects in 1883 and have been...