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Community Area 50 - Pullman Location within the city of Chicago |
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| ZIP Code | parts of 60628 | |
| Area | 12.58 km² (4.85 mi²) | |
| Population (2000) Density |
8,921 (down 4.53% from 1990) 1,609.5 /km² |
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| Demographics | White Black Hispanic Asian Other |
8.49% 81.4% 8.91% 0.17% 1.03% |
| Median income | $30,966 | |
| Source: U.S. Census, Record Information Services | ||
Pullman is a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, twelve miles from the Chicago Loop by Lake Calumet. It is also one of the 77 official Community areas of Chicago. Once the most famous planned community in America, the oldest part of Pullman is notable for its role in American labor and planning history.[1]
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[edit] History
The area now known as Pullman encompasses a relatively wide area, but it
, the ori than the two historic areas (the older historic area is often referred to as just "Pullman" and the northern annex historic area is usually referred to as "North Pullman"). Please note that this article deals with all areas, though the area built by the Pullman company is the area that was part of the original historic Pullman area which is bounded by 111th Street on the North end, 115th Street on the South end, Cottage Grove on the West end, and the railroad tracks on the East end.
Pullman (Historic Pullman) was built in the 1880s by George Pullman for his eponymous railroad car company, the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman's architect Solon S. Beman was said to be so proud of his creation that he asked George Pullman if the neighborhood could be named for himself. Pullman responded to the effect, "sure, we'll take the first half of my name, and the second half of yours."
In a day when most workers lived in shabby tenements near their factories, Pullman seemed a dream, winning awards as "the world's most perfect town." Everything, from stores to townhouses, was owned by the Company. The design was pleasing, and all of the workers' needs were met within the neighborhood. The houses were comfortable by standards of the day, and contained such amenities as indoor plumbing, gas, and sewers.
Pullman's misfortune came during the depression which followed the Panic of 1893. When demand for Pullman cars slackened, the Pullman company laid off hundreds of workers, and cut hours for others. Despite these cutbacks, the Company did not reduce rents for those that lived in the town of Pullman. The Pullman Strike began in 1894, and lasted for 2 months.
George Pullman himself died in 1897. The Illinois Supreme Court required the company to sell off the town which was annexed into the city of Chicago. Within ten years, all non-manufacturing property - the houses, the public buildings - was sold off to the individual occupants.
Along with the whole South Side, the town of Pullman had been annexed to the City of Chicago in 1889. After the strike Pullman gradually became a regular Chicago neighborhood, only with distinguishing Victorian architecture. The fortunes of the neighborhood rose and fell with the Pullman Company.
The Pullman factory made its last car in early 1982 for Amtrak. The neighborhood's decline that began in the 1950s continued, but that economic decline at least spared the district's architecture. In 1960 the original Town of Pullman, approximately between 111th and 115th Streets, was threatened with total demolition for an industrial park. The residents there formed the Pullman Civic Organization and saved their community. By 1972 the Pullman Historic District had obtained National, State, and City landmark status to protect the original 900 rowhouses and public buildings built by George Pullman.
Today Pullman is quickly gentrifying, with many residents involved in the restoration of the district through their own homes and throughout the district as a whole. Walking tours of Pullman are available.
Pullman is full of historic and architecturally significant buildings, among them are the Hotel Florence, the Arcade Building, the Clock Tower and Factory, the complex surrounding Market Square and Greenstone Church. Pullman is also home to one of Chicago's many beautiful 'Polish Cathedrals', the former church of St. Salomea, which is now used by Salem Baptist Church of Chicago.
Pullman is served by two Metra stations: 115th and 111th street. All Metra trains passing through the area stop at the 115th Street station and only local trains stop at the 111th street station. Express trains from 115th Street take approximately 22-25 minutes to reach the downtown loop area and local trains take about 30-40 minutes. http://www.metrarail.com/Sched/me/me.shtml has a train schedule for these stops as well as other pertinent information on Metra.
1995 Census date of homebuyers: 61% Caucasian, 27% African-American, 12% Other (Hispanic, Asian, etc.)
1999 Census date of homebuyers: 65% Caucasian, 29% African-American, 6% Other (Hispanic, Asian, etc.)
2001 Census date of homebuyers: 75% Caucasian, 19% African-American, 6% Other (Hispanic, Asian, etc.)
The Census data to the right reflects the entire ward that is now known as Pullman, not just the historic areas, which are generally more diverse.
[edit] Trivia
- Pullman has been featured in several major motion pictures. Road to Perdition (Tom Hanks, Paul Newman) was filmed in historic Pullman, showing the factory and how it "once was" with workers, as well as many other scenes of the neighborhood itself. The Fugitive (see The Fugitive (1993 film)) had several key scenes in Pullman, as was where the one armed man lived in the movie. You can see Harrison Ford in the local bar using the pay phone, then he runs down the alley, then atop many of the Pullman rowhouses. In April 2007, Universal Studios began filming of "The Express" which also features several scenes in Pullman, one which includes the cast leaving the Greenstone Church (see Ernie Davis).
- On November 12, 2006, Historic Pullman was the topic of the HGTV television show "National Open House", featuring a Pullman house on 112th and Langley.
- The owner of the DigIt Pullman store (Mike McGraw) has been featured in many local news stories in 2007. The Chicago Sun Times ran a news story on him in April 2007, and the local ABC 7 news did a "Someone You Should Know" segment on him on May 3, 2007.
- Pullman was one of seven sites up for 8 Chicago area attractions that was nominated for the Illinois Seven Wonders sites in a contest sponsored by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Voters were able to vote online for Historic Pullman to represent Chicago as one of Illinois' Seven Wonders. Pullman beat out many of the more well known tourist attractions and made it to the last 3 before being cut out of the running.
[edit] References
- ^ Reiff, Janice L. (2005). Pullman. The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved on 2007-05-19.
[edit] External links
- Official City of Chicago Pullman Community Map
- Historic Pullman Foundation
- Pullman Neighborhood Website
- Image of museum
- DigIt Pullman
- Suntimes Article on Digit and Pullman
- Suntimes.com Blog Article about Pullman
- Illinois Seven Wonders - Voting has ended
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Encyclopedia of Chicago Once the most famous planned community in America, the oldest part of Pullman is notable for its role in American labor and planning history. The town had its origins in the late 1870s as George M. Pullman looked for solutions to two problems. The first was where to build a new factory for his Pullman Palace Cars, the sleeping and parlor cars that were becoming increasingly popular with those traveling on the country's expanding rail system. The second was how to attract and encourage workers who would share his vision of American society. Pullman wanted to avoid the types of workers who participated in the turbulent 1877 Railroad Strike, or those he believed to be discouraged and morally corrupted by urban poverty and social dislocation.
Pullman Arcade Building, 1885
Although his primary manufacturing plant was located in Detroit, Pullman was a longtime Chicago resident. With the assistance of Colonel James Bowen, the Pullman Land Association quietly purchased four thousand acres near Lake Calumet in an area both thought had a bright industrial future. Pullman hired architect Solon Beman and landscape architect Nathan Barrett to erect a town designed to provide its residents with decent housing in a socially and physically healthy environment that would also generate a 6 percent profit for the Pullman Palace Car Company. Even before Pullman's first residents settled there in 1881, visitors came to admire its beauty, which stood in stark contrast to other working-class areas in industrial cities, and to marvel at the success of its social planning. Not only did Pullman workers live in brick houses, they and their families had access to schools, parks, a library, a theater, educational programs, and many other activities provided by the town. When state labor commissioners visited in 1884, they proclaimed it a successful venture, especially for the women and children, who seemed protected from the worst aspects of industrial America.
Not all observers viewed Pullman from the same perspective. In 1885, Richard T. Ely published an exposé in Harper's Monthly charging that the town and its design were un-American, a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment. When Pullman workers went on strike in 1894, protesting cuts in wages while rents and dividends remained unchanged, the strike captured a national audience. Commentators from across the nation debated the proper nature of the relationship between employers and employees, as well as the broader question of the political, social, and economic rights of working-class men and women.
By the close of the strike, even such bulwarks of Chicago's business community as the Chicago Tribune and Swift & Co. publicly decried the suffering inflicted on law-abiding employees by an inflexible Pullman management. The Illinois State Supreme Court gave legal weight to this sentiment in 1898 when it ordered the company to divest itself of residential property in Pullman. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Pullman had become another Chicago neighborhood, tied closely to the surrounding communities of Kensington and Roseland.
In subsequent years, the Pullman community experienced changes familiar to other neighborhoods in the city: ethnic succession, the aging of housing stock, and changing employment opportunities that attracted residents away from the Pullman Car Works and into jobs elsewhere. Residents still perceived Pullman as a good place to live; neighbors maintained strong ties to each other, to their predominantly Italian and Polish ethnic communities, and to the neighborhood itself. Outsiders, however, saw old housing and vacant industrial land. Pullman's reputation fell most dramatically in the late 1920s and 1930s, when unemployment and bootlegging activities made it seem to be a nascent slum. By then, Chicago sociologists had expanded the Pullman community area to include the largely unsettled area between the old historic town and 95th Street. In 1960, consultants to the South End Chamber of Commerce recommended that Pullman be demolished between 111th and 115th to make way for industrial expansion to benefit the remainder of the Calumet region.
Pullman residents fought this destruction. In 1960, they reactivated the Pullman Civic Organization to remove any signs of blight and to lobby to keep their neighborhood. Realizing that the community's own history could provide a valuable wedge in leading that fight, they founded the Historic Pullman Foundation in 1973. Pullman was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 and has received similar state and local designations. Pullman, the original showpiece community, retains much of its original architecture and spatial orientation and attracts thousands of visitors each year. In 1994, North Pullman residents, largely an African American population, achieved city landmark status for their area of Pullman as well. At the same time, they established a museum honoring Pullman porters. Since then, the city has joined the two separate districts into one Chicago landmark district.
The Pullman Car Works produced its last railroad car in 1981. A decade later the state of Illinois purchased a section of the plant, along with the Hotel Florence, the largest public building in Pullman, with the hope of creating a museum featuring the history of the community and the company. In December of 1998, a fire swept through the vacant clock tower and construction shops, putting the museum plans in doubt and creating a new challenge for the community and its residents.
Encyclopedia of Chicago George Pullman established himself in Chicago in March 1859, as a building raiser and mover. He soon began converting railroad chair cars into luxurious sleeping vehicles. His first major sleeper, The Pioneer, appeared in May 1865, followed in February 1867 by the chartering of Pullman's Palace Car Company. For the next two and a half decades, Pullman expanded his operations and overcame his competitors until he controlled the industry. As a leading industrialist, he assisted in rebuilding Chicago after the 1871 fire, and helped found and support many of its social and cultural organizations. He also erected the Pullman Building in downtown Chicago and a home on Prairie Avenue.
After 1881, when Pullman opened the town of Pullman, Illinois, to house his construction plant and his workers, he was hailed as an enlightened employer who considered the best interests of his employees. This image was destroyed following the 1886 Haymarket Riot, and during a strike at the Pullman works between May and July 1894 which publicized his antilabor stance. Pullman's peers censured him for refusing to deal with strikers during the stoppage, while a subsequent government investigation revealed his unsympathetic treatment of employees.
