New City, Chicago

New City is one of Chicago's 77 official community areas, located on the southwest side of the city. The area is divided into It is a blend of predominantly Irish-Americans in Canaryville, Mexican-Americans in Back Of The Yards, and African-Americans south of 49th Street. The area was home to the famous Union Stock Yards that were on Chicago's south side until they closed in 1971.

Neighborhoods

Back of the Yards

Back of the Yards is an industrial and residential neighborhood so named because it was near the former Union Stock Yards. Life in this neighborhood, which was famously organized by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s, is profiled in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle. The area was formerly the town of Lake until it was annexed by Chicago in 1889. The area was once an Eastern European, predominantly Polish, neighborhood.

Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, cites the Back of the Yards as an area able to successfully "unslum" in the 1960s, due to a beneficial set of circumstances. This included a stabilized community base with skilled members willing to trade work to upgrade housing, as well as active and well led local social and political organizations. Jacobs often cited the Back of the Yards as a model for other depressed neighborhoods to follow to upgrade their communities.^[1] Some time after the 1970s, the population of the neighborhood changed to predominantly Mexican-Americans.

The Back of the Yards area is the main setting of the television series Shameless, which is based on the British series of the same name, however the exterior scenes used in the show are actually shot in the South Lawndale community area as evidenced by the prominence of the Pink Line elevated tracks viewable in the show.

Canaryville

Canaryville was a predominantly Irish American neighborhood, with borders of Canaryville are from 40th to 49th streets between Union Pacific railroad tracks to the east and Halsted Street and the former site of the Union Stock Yard to the west. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Chicago and has a reputation for insularity or hostility to outsiders. Given its close proximity to the stockyards, the area's physical environment and economic life were shaped by livestock and meatpacking from the 1860s until the industry's decline in the postwar era.

Canaryville's name may originally have derived from the legions of sparrows who populated the area at the end of the nineteenth century, feeding off stockyard refuse and grain from railroad cars, but the term also applied to the neighborhood's “wild canaries”, i.e. gangs such as The Irish Lords and The Flags S.A.C.

Notes

External links

• Official City of Chicago New City Community Map
• Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (the country's oldest community organization, founded by Alinsky in 1939)
• Back of the Yards Blog (Blogger living at 47th and Throop, Site Updated with Neighborhood and Personal News)
• Encyclopedia of Chicago - Back of the Yards