PART 1
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

1
Exposition: The Story of Decline

When Nelson Algren got back to the Near Northwest Side of Chicago in 1945 after two years of military service, he got back to work. He was a writer, and his job as he understood it was to write about Chicago. If the city seemed to have changed in his absence—"The last of Chicago's gaslamps had gone out," and "Fluorescent neon lit brands of beer never named before"^[1] —he still could pick up where he had left off before the war. After making a name for himself with a first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), and short stories in the 1930s, he had begun to win significant acclaim for his novel Never Come Morning( 942). In 1945, he was poised to make his mark on the literary world. Working from observation of postwar Chicago, his wartime experience, and a base of stories and poetry he had written in the 1930 and 1940s, Algren produced three Chicago books in relatively short order: a collection of short stories entitled The Neon Wilderness (1947) set the stage for two longer works, the novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and the book-length prose poem Chicago: City on the Make (1951). Golden Arm, which was awarded the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950, was Algren's best and best-received work. It sold well, and influential writers and critics like Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and Malcolm Cowley identified Algren as a major postwar novelist on the rise. They, and the publicists at Doubleday whose ad copy for Golden Arm urged readers to "add the name NELSON ALGREN to the honor roll of Chicago authors . . . who have entertained you and inspired you with novels that have made American literary history," agreed that Algren was the next big Chicago writer: one in a line that extended back through Wright and James T. Farrell to

Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and other masters who had explored the literary implications of industrial urbanism as exemplified by Chicago.^[2]

In retrospect, though, the fanfare accompanying Algren's arrival as a Chicago writer marks the end of his most productive period, and he never wrote another sustained, original treatment of the city with which he was so closely identified. Golden Arm and City on the Make were his last Chicago books, and together they drew a portrait of midcentury Chicago as a city in steep decline—if not in ruins—about which Algren would not have much else to say. The two books are a literary epitaph for the city Algren knew and the city he wrote.

The October City

Algren was identified as a Chicago writer, but he had never been a civic booster. From the very beginning of his writing career, he marked out the sphere of the desperately dispossessed as his literary territory, and his body of work advanced a critique of the arrangements of power and meaning in the industrial city. The workers and drifters who populate his books always play hopeless hands against a house that stacks the political, economic, and cultural deck against them. Like the Chicago novels of Farrell and Wright, who shared with Algren the project of representing the industrial city's neighborhoods, Algren's Chicago novels and stories are overhung with a sense of the inevitable: people without access to wealth and power will be ground up by urban business as usual—the production and consumption of goods, services, and the status quo.

If Algren's postwar writing sustained the terms of critique he had developed before the war, it put them to a new purpose. Golden Arm and City on the Make, refitting the language and imagery of his earlier work and of the Chicago tradition in which he placed himself, move from the urgent contemporaneity of social critique toward the retrospective, elegiac mood of the decline narrative. Midcentury Chicago was in many ways a boom town, beginning to flower into new, postindustrial shape under pressure from suburbanization on the periphery and redevelopment in the center, but for Algren it was an aging industrial city that was rapidly exhausting both its productive vigor and its cultural importance. At midcentury, Algren looked back upon high-industrial Chicago, which had been the subject of his starkest renderings of urban modernity, as the capital of a golden age populated by outsize heroic figures: not just the working men and women who made the industrial city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also great reformers like Jane Addams, literary icons like Carl Sandburg, larger-than-life victims like Shoeless Joe Jackson, and even the fantastically villainous industrialists, owners, and politicians who exploited and opposed them. Golden Arm and City on the Make narrate a decline from this golden age to a debased, reduced present. They do not so much advance a

critique of industrial urbanism  as imagine—and nostalgically mourn—its passing.

In Golden Arm, something has gone obscurely and finally wrong in midcentury Chicago. The novel's characters, operating within the tightly circumscribed limits of neighborhood life in the Polish urban village around Division Street and Milwaukee Avenue (see figs. 1 and 2 for locations referred to in part 1), can sense the local effects of massive change without being able to specify its dimensions or causes. The invalid Sophie Majcinek, sitting at her window in a wheelchair late at night, reads intimations of apocalypse in the crowded, lowrise landscape of walk-up apartment buildings, rooming houses, factories, churches, and elevated train tracks:

Moonlight that had once revealed so many stars now showed her only how the city was bound, from southeast to the unknown west, steel upon steel upon steel; how all its rails held the city too tightly to the thousand-girdered El.

Some nights she could barely breathe for seeing the flat and unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever really saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.

For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it. No one else was really any better off than herself, she reflected with a child's satisfaction, they had all been twisted about whether they sat in a wheelchair or not . . .

She grew tense to see how the nameless people were bound, as they went, to the streets as the streets seemed bound to the night and the night to the nameless day. And all the days to a nameless remorse.^[3]

The news is bad but incompletely articulated: the vista murmurs to Sophie of nameless remorse and an imminent but unspecified disaster. All she knows for certain is that things were better in the old days, when "some happier, some might-have-been, some used-to-be or never-was Sophie" lived in a world that had not yet "gone wrong, all wrong." If that receding golden age of the 1920s and 1930s was like spring, then at midcentury Chicago has reached October, when the year begins its steep decline into Chicago's famously brutal winter:

sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away. "God has forgotten us all," Sophie told herself quietly. . . . The wind was blowing the flies away. God was forgetting His own. (99)

The year's decline and fall seem to resonate with a larger, parallel decline and fall of the world she knows.

The world she knows is the industrial city, and more precisely the industrial neighborhood order, that flourished between the Chicago fire of 1871 and

World War II. Chicago was the paradigmatic American city of that period, the model of industrial modernity and the kinds of urbanism associated with it. Migrations from Chicago's various hinterlands—not only the small-town and rural Midwest and South but also Germany and Ireland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Mexico, the Philippines—brought people of modest means to Chicago to work in its factories and the service industries they engendered. For foreign immigrants, the urban villages that grew around factory workplaces, streetcar lines, and local institutions were staging grounds in which they came to terms with the transition between the Old Country and America. European immigrants and their descendants dominated the urban villages of industrial Chicago, which ringed the downtown core in a vast patchwork. The urban villages, and the ways of life they housed, were the heartland of the industrial city's social landscape, formed on an armature of rail lines, port facilities, factories, and other infrastructure dedicated to circulating raw materials, manufactured goods, and the people who processed and bought them. Sophie sees this world from her window—the old neighborhood bound to the rail lines, "steel upon steel upon steel"—and obscurely mourns its passing as she reviews her own hard luck and the intimations of personal disaster still to come.

Golden Arm tells the decline as neighborhood tragedy, so claustrophobically local in scope that the decline seems ungraspable, mysterious, inchoate; Algren's prose poem City on the Make, published two years after Golden Arm, extends the decline into new registers—poetry, history, cultural criticism, sociology—and to a metropolitan scale. City on the Make surveys the landscape from a more omniscient and informed remove; it commands spatial and temporal perspectives beyond the imaginative reach of Golden Arm and its characters, like Sophie, who are hemmed in by the near horizon of the El and the limits of the urban village. In City on the Make, the decline plays out on a grand scale:

Wheeling around the loop of the lake, coming at Chicago from east and south, the land by night lies under a battle-colored sky. Above the half-muffled beat of the monstrous forges between Gary and East Chicago, the ceaseless signal-fires of the great refineries wave an all-night alarm.

Until, moving with the breaking light, we touch the green pennant of the morning boulevards running the dark-blue boundary of the lake. Where the fortress-like towers of The Loop guard the welter of industrial towns that were once a prairie portage.^[4]

City on the Make reads in the metropolitan landscape a myth of creation in which factories make the city of Chicago and the way of life housed in its neighborhood order. The first paragraph is all color and sound in the darkness: the monstrous forges beating like artillery or a gigantic heart, signal fires

against the night sky. The stuff of the city is being forged, refined, destroyed, remade in bursts of heroic activity. The second paragraph maps the results, a landscape coalescing like a newly forged creation at daybreak: parks and skyscrapers along the lake, neighborhoods like "industrial towns" clustering around the Loop and stretching away across the flat prairie. The creation myth informs a familiar historical narrative in which the people who live in the industrial towns and work in the factories have, while fighting a constant battle against the people who own the factories, produced a mature industrial metropolis from the kernel of a frontier outpost in barely a century's time. This is the generic Chicago of the period between the Great Fire and the mid-twentieth century: a capital of industrial modernity, shaped by manufacturing and peopled by urban villagers.

The moment of creation passes, and the momentum built up by the initial swing from the southeast carries the reader onward in space and time, north up the lakefront as the day begins. The point of view drops down to a motorist's perspective from Lake Shore Drive as we pass Lincoln Park and eventually into the suburbs beyond, where the narrator launches into a standard, uninspired version of the midcentury critique of suburbia: "the people are stuffed with kapok," "the homes so complacent, and the churches so smug, leave an airlessness like a microscopic dust over the immaculate pews and the self-important bookshelves," and so on. This suburban landscape is a "spiritual Sahara": "the beat of the city's enormous heart, at the forge in the forest behind the towers" (26-27), cannot be heard at this remove.

The narrator finds himself, at the end of this journey up the lakefront, deeply out of place. The story of the industrial city seems to have ended in the suburbs, about which he has nothing of interest to say, and his grand aerial perspective on the cityscape seems to have collapsed into that of a cultural hobgoblin of the postwar period, the suburban commuter tooling along Lake Shore Drive. Deposited in what he regards as alien territory, the narrator ends up far from the industrial neighborhoods that form the city's heart and his principal inspiration. It is an apt figure for the historical moment City on the Make addresses: the poem's great project is to show how and why the narrator's Chicago is disappearing, to bring to a close the generic narrative of prairie portage grown into manufacturing capital. The industrial city of downtown and neighborhoods gives way to the postindustrial metropolis of inner city and suburbs, and the old neighborhood order shows signs of breaking up. The narrator finds himself growing estranged from Chicago itself, increasingly adrift even when he is within the once-familiar landscape of the neighborhood order. These changes come slowly—the monstrous forges still beat all night, and from the air the old neighborhoods look just as they did a generation before—but a final transformation appears inevitable. At midcentury, industrial Chicago has entered the late autumn of its years.

City on the Make's autumnal mood derives in part from the poem's abrupt telescoping of time: "An October sort of city even in spring. With somebody's washing always whipping, in smoky October colors off the third-floor rear by that same wind that drives the yellowing comic strips down all the gutters that lead away from home" (72). The comic strips yellow with age even as they blow down the gutters; spring collapses into October; the newly forged city of daybreak ages to a grim seediness by nightfall, when emerge "the pavement-colored thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole night to kill" (60). In the course of the narrator's lifetime (he was still a boy in 1919), Chicago has fallen vertiginously from youthful promise to early dotage, spring prospects turning to October regrets. The martial imagery of industrial creation—the "battle-colored sky" and "signalflares"—takes on new meaning when the reader enters the streets of the pristine city seen from on high at daybreak: the narrowed, annihilating landscape of midcentury Chicago resembles a battlefield after a great defeat. In the workingclass neighborhoods, where in Algren's account all the casualties fall, laundry whips from the line off the third-floor rear like off-white flags of surrender.

That surrender indicates the end of the battle and thus the end of the myth of creation. At midcentury, industrial Chicago has reached full maturity in the final transformation of prairie into metropolis: "The pig-wallows are paved, great Diesels stroke noiselessly past the clamorous tenements of home. The Constellations move, silently and all unseen, through blowing seas above the roofs. Only the measured clatter of the empty cars, where pass the northbound and the southbound Els, comes curving down the constant boundaries of the night" (75). The "clamorous tenements" of the industrial neighborhood order frame the heartlike engines that shape the city and power its commerce. A series of limits—the iron perimeter of the El, the asphalt underfoot, and the sealike sky above the roofs, with jets moving in it like Melville's sea creatures swimming beneath the pillows of sleeping Nantucketers—define the city's form and contain the way of life lived in it. The paragraph begins with the strokes of life-giving engines and ends by arriving at a limit in both space and time: the El forms "the constant boundaries of the night" as well as of the landscape. City on the Make wants to show that the industrial city has likewise reached some limit in its development.

In the next paragraph, a ghost-haunted survey of the high-industrial era identifies midcentury Chicago's landscape as the industrial city's terminal form:

The cemetery that yet keeps the Confederate dead is bounded by the same tracks that run past Stephen A. Douglas' remains. The jail where Parsons hung is gone, and the building from which Bonfield marched is no more. Nobody remembers

the Globe on Desplaines, and only a lonely shaft remembers the four who died, no one ever fully understood why. And those who went down with the proud steamer Chicora are one with those who went down on the Eastland. And those who sang "My God, How the Money Rolls In" are one with those who sang "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (75-76)

Like the aerial rush up the lakefront, a movement in space, this swift pass through seventy years of history spanning the Civil War and the Great Depression makes a portrait of the city in time. The train tracks provide a spine connecting the October city to echoes of its past: two great wars of the last century, one between North and South and one between labor and capital (the "four who died" were hanged after the Haymarket Square riot; Inspector Bonfield led police against them); long-ago ship disasters on Lake Michigan; echoes of songs associated with the prosperity of the 1920s and the hard times of the depression. Midcentury Chicago seems to have passed a dividing line. Even the 1920s and 1930s, easily within the lifetimes of relatively young adults at midcentury, seem to have fallen far astern: the people who sang songs of the 1920s and 1930s merge "as one" into hindsight in the same way that people drowned in different ship disasters are "as one" at the bottom of the lake.

The foundering ships reinforce the Atlantean image of the people of Chicago going down with their city. At the end of the slope of decline, still in the future but within sight (like the dead of winter from the perspective of October), lies a final collapse described in City on the Make's closing lines: "We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. . . . For keeps and a single day" (77). At the end of its history, industrial Chicago—the El, the monstrous forges and the diesel engines, the neighborhoods like villages and the towers of the Loop like fortresses—will stand in ruins like Atlantis or Troy.

This decline provides the main theme of City on the Make and the principal subtext of Golden Arm. Sophie Majcinek, penned within the close horizons of industrial urbanism as it is lived in the old neighborhood, senses only the vague outlines of this decline in the "rumors of evening" that filter down to her in murmurous, coded fragments. Nelson Algren, whose own windows looked out on a similar vista in the 1940s and early 1950s, could feel the change coming, too. He could not have known then that Golden Arm and City on the Make would be his last Chicago books, but one can feel his unease, like Sophie's, with the intimations of change he felt moving through the familiar landscape of the neighborhoods he lived in and wrote about. Algren's literary subject was industrial urbanism; his literary project was to represent the industrial city and infuse it with meanings, as had a number of celebrated Chicago writers before him. He understood the decline of industrial Chicago to mean the end not only of the neighborhood order he knew but also of the literary tradition in which he worked.

The Logic of Decline

Any city at any time is going to hell in one sense or another. Narratives of decline seem to spring from the overlap of orders in time and space: the overlap of established residents and newcomers; of pieces of social landscape arranged to serve different sets of people and functions; of different institutional arrangements for making money, exercising power, making life meaningful, living poorly or well. However, specific arguments for decline have historical and generic provenance that can be traced to period and place, to particular structures of thought and traditions of representation. Nelson Algren's version of Chicago's decline was part of a larger literature of urban decline that thrived at midcentury and has since become a staple of postwar urbanism. That literature embraces a variety of fictional and nonfictional accounts, written by a range of variously accredited and influential urban intellectuals, many of whom agreed on little else.

"In the years just after the Second World War," observes Robert Beauregard, "the trauma of the country's large central cities could hardly be avoided." That "trauma" was most evident in the great industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, and it was, most immediately, the result of "  5 years of depression, war, and inflation"^[5] in which specifically urban problems had been pushed to the back burner: factories, civic buildings, and especially overcrowded neighborhoods were physically deteriorating; cities' economies, especially factory production and downtown retailing, were showing signs of long-term erosion; pollution was increased and traffic congestion exacerbated by the proliferation of cars in streets originally designed for the horse and wagon; city governments were denounced as weak and corrupt, while federal government was potently committed to suburbanizing the nation; many cities' tax bases shrank as poor in-migrants, especially Southern blacks, settled in the inner city while middleclass whites and businesses dispersed into the suburbs. The trauma was also, however, part of a larger change in the form and function of cities. The industrial cities that had for generations been the leading models of American urbanism were undergoing a profound transformation. The gradual shift of primary economic function from manufacturing to services, the prodigious rise of the suburbs as places to live and work, the expansion of the black inner city, and the erosion of the industrial village—these were the big groundswells, just beginning to shake the foundations of industrial urbanism, that would make urban history in the second half of the century. One can perceive their effects, as well, in the way urban intellectuals wrote and thought about cities. There had always been a vigorous literature of antiurbanism in American culture, and there was a long tradition of equating cities with specifically moral decline, but we can make out a particular genre of decline narrative—promulgated especially by people who loved cities—that appeared after World War II and has descended

to us as one of our fundamental ways to think about and represent inner cities. In many different versions, and pursuing an enormous range of particular subjects that range from traffic to class conflict, the postwar narrative of decline considers the causes, effects, and meaning of the endlessly complex set of changes that add up to postindustrial transformation.

Chicago, the paragon of industrial urbanism, provided an especially resonant setting for the postwar decline. "There is an opinion," observed A. J. Liebling in 1952,

advanced by some men who worked in Chicago transiently during the twenties, as well as by many native Chicagoans, that the city did approximate the great howling, hurrying, hog-butchering, hog-mannered challenger for the empire of the world specified in the legend, but that at some time around 1930 it stopped as suddenly as a front-running horse at the head of the stretch with a poor man's last two dollars on its nose. What stopped it is a mystery, like what happened to Angkor Vat.^[6]

Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, New York newspapermen who had worked more than transiently in Chicago before World War II, made a similar claim in their hard-boiled insider's guide, Chicago Confidential (1950): "In 1910  Chicago breezily and confidently expected to surpass New York by 1950; in 1950 it no longer talks of growing bigger than New York—it wonders when it will be smaller than Los Angeles."^[7] Liebling, Lait, and Mortimer, reporters all, did not claim to have formulated the story of Chicago's decline; rather, they claimed to have collected it as it circulated ready to hand in the culture around them. Having gone to Chicago to do what amounted to follow-up pieces on the well-known story of its remarkable growth into a world city in the half-century before the Great Depression, they had returned with stories of decline.

The reporters' claims to having found the next chapter of the Chicago story in the narrative of decline found support from Carl Sandburg, whose literary persona continued to enjoy a close identification with the story of industrial Chicago in the ascendant, a story he had definitively told in the early twentieth century. Sandburg was not a "native Chicagoan," but he was poet laureate of Illinois and author of the city's semiofficial poem, "Chicago" (1914). That poem had been quoted and referred to so consistently (even by people who had not read it or any other poems) that over time what Liebling simply calls "the legend" of Chicago had become condensed into a few of its richly freighted phrases: "Hog Butcher," "Big Shoulders," and so forth. Sandburg wrote in Holiday magazine's special issue on Chicago in 1951, "There is a question that occurs: Is Chicago less vivid and strident than in former generations? That could be, might be, I'm not sure."^[8] Like Liebling, Sandburg employed a passive construction—"There is an opinion . . ."; "There is a question that occurs . . ." —that imputed to the decline the status of received wisdom. The hesitant tone

of Sandburg's answer to the "question that occurs" at midcentury makes a striking contrast to the belligerently assertive language of his celebrated poem. In 1914, he had imagined industrial Chicago issuing a challenge:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and
          coarse and strong and cunning
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job upon job, here is
          a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities.^[9]

At midcentury, Sandburg's drastically changed tone seemed to concede the loss of the youthful vigor and prospects with which his earlier poetry had infused its portrait of the industrial city. The Holiday article repeats the poem's language, like the word "vivid" (which seems to be associated with productivity), but drains the words of their original stridency. Writing about midcentury Chicago, Sandburg seemed to be unsure of what to say about it.

If midcentury Chicago as a literary subject was still importantly defined by themes and language evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the shocks of industrial modernity, then the passing of industrial urbanism suggested a decline and demanded a revision of the Chicago story. If Sandburg was not prepared to write it, others—like Liebling, Lait, Mortimer, and Algren—were. The story of decline, literary and journalistic, told of Chicago's passage from a bygone moment of limitless promise to a reduced and dispirited present day. Variants of the decline appearing in the late 1940s and 1950s told of Chicago's fall from aspiring world city to the humbler estate of one regional capital among many, from industrial dynamo to rusting postindustrial dinosaur (anticipating by decades the Rust Belt elegies that accompanied the city's great period of deindustrialization in the 1970s), from literary capital to cultural wasteland, from vigorous city of neighborhoods to blighted inner city eclipsed by prosperous suburbs, from a vital congeries of white-ethnic villages and Black Metropolis to an archipelago of white enclaves surrounded by pathologized black ghetto. The story of decline argued for the passing of a moment when Chicago had been the right place at the right time. It had once been the way station between metropolitan America and its resource-rich frontier, the destination of immigrant laborers drawn to the industrial city, the cultural capital of the Middle Border during the maturing of urban America and the revolt against Main Street. Now it was at best like everywhere else and at worst a ruin.

Especially because the decline tends to treat the city like a single individual—who is getting old and fat, who once aspired to better things, and so on—it tends to reduce complexity to simplicity or mysticism. The imputation of general decline tends toward analytical vagueness, always prompting the question

"in what sense?" Because a city, like a nation, is complex enough to be simultaneously rising and falling by any number of measures, the story of decline acquires coherence and authority by both specifying and mystifying its terms to evolve a kind of symbolic shorthand. On the one hand, the story tends to range in great leaps across the spectrum of historical information, unifying disparate but evocative details into a grand impressionistic whole. For instance, the failure of Chicago to become a center for the manufacture of automobiles, the departure of important literary figures in the 1920s, and the passing of its great criminal entrepreneurs hang together thematically in Liebling's account in ways that suggest an across-the-board failure of the city's creative energies. On the other hand, the decline tends to condense drastically in order to make sense, identifying a particular Chicago in time and space and making it stand for the whole. Thus, the decline formula can be adapted to recount the transformation or disappearance of many different or overlapping golden-age Chicagos: the Middle Border capital raised by hard work and entrepreneurial inspiration from the swamps and the ashes of the Great Fire; the city of European immigrants negotiating through hard work and solidarity the passage from horseand-wagon days to American modernity; the Midwestern literary capital that produced stark realists, prairie modernists, muckraking reporters, and dialect humorists and was in turn produced discursively by them.

Although they infused the formula with different sets of meanings, most of the versions of Chicago's decline agreed upon the general contours of the story. All assumed that the city had enjoyed a golden age of promise more than a generation before. Lait and Mortimer only specify that in 1910 the golden age had not yet elapsed. Liebling dates the city's moment of ascendance from around 1890, when the census employed by Frederick Jackson Turner to argue for the closing of the frontier also showed that Chicago had passed Philadelphia to become the nation's second city, to about 1930, when Chicago mysteriously collapsed in the stretch of its run at First City status. He notes that in the 1920s Colonel Robert McCormick's incorrigibly boosterish Tribune was still printing daily on its editorial page a "Program for Chicagoland" that featured as Article I an injunction to "Make Chicago the First City of the World." By midcentury, the Tribune had dropped this grandiose program, which Liebling takes as tacit acquiescence to the notion of decline. The novelist James T. Farrell, a leftist who otherwise had little in common with the famously right-wing and antiunion McCormick, provides a similar periodization of the golden age. He remembered that he "grew up inside of the city of Chicago, and after the city had passed its period of greatest hope," which he defined as a stretch from 1880 to 1910 in which Chicago's bankers and industrialists had created a world capital and its progressive liberals had given the city intellectual life and conscience.'^[10] Farrell saw the city as somehow broken by its failure to deliver on its golden-age promise of high productivity tempered by social justice.

Like Farrell, Nelson Algren understood himself to have been born during the city's age of promise (Farrell in 1904; Algren in 1909) and come to maturity as the city declined toward eventual ruin. In the autobiographical City on the Make, Algren presents the end of the golden age as coinciding with his first disillusionments: the Black Sox scandal of 1919 marks in retrospect the end of "the silver-colored yesterday" dominated by "giants." The humiliations endured in preadolescence by the poem's autobiographical narrator for believing in his baseball heroes feed into a citywide sense of loss that has grown through the present day. Algren's account of the fall or departure of giants—Shoeless Joe Jackson, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, even self-serving "clowns" like the politician Big Bill Thompson and the traction magnate Samuel Insull—nicely illustrates Liebling's observation that, at midcentury, "Chicagoans are left in the plight of the Greeks at the beginning of history, when the gods commenced ceasing to manifest themselves."^[11] The present, then, constitutes a postheroic age extending from the 1920s to the distant but foreseeable end of history. ^{[ 12]}

What happened? How to account for postheroic Chicago's collapse into history? Each story of decline offers its own understanding of the engines driving it, but the various explanation systems tend to fall into two categories: those organized around material changes in the city of fact and those organized around discursive changes in the city of feeling. The former impulse, dominant in Lait and Mortimer's Chicago Confidential, produces a story that explains how and why the city and its people have changed; the latter impulse, dominant in Liebling's essays (collectively entitled Chicago: The Second City), leads to explanations of how and why the story of Chicago has changed. Algren's City on the Make, to which I will turn after discussing the other two examples, offers a synthesis of the two approaches, a grand unifying theory of decline.

Lait and Mortimer identify two intertwined historical processes as the motors of change: the city's development from frontier outpost to industrial center to suburbanized metropolis, and the ethnic-racial successions that have accompanied the stages of development. They "can fix Chicago's decline at about the time its founding fathers went to their Valhalla." The race of giants who built the city—"titans of the nineteenth century," "dynamic, hairy individualists who hewed and wrested a new world out of the woods and the mud"—dissipated their energies in reacquiring Eastern ways, losing their hirsute frontier virility when corrupted by the civilization they had enabled. The founding fathers' descent into history encapsulates the city's descent from heroic prehistory toward an exotically degraded, unproductive new order in the inner city. In Chicago Confidential's conventionally gendered account, neither the productivity of male entrepreneurs nor the civilizing influence of female reformers like Jane Addams has proven able to forestall or contain the bar-

barous new order's emergence. The creeping "physical decadence" of the city once "rebuilt fresh and new [by the titans] after the big fire of 1871 ," combined with "the overflow of foreign immigrants" and the succeeding "influx of Negroes," leads to the concomitant flight of "good families," followed by the "middle classes and the respectable lower classes," from "the smoke and the grime and the daily conflict to pleasant suburbs."^[13]

This is a précis of the rise and fall of the industrial city, but Lait and Mortimer are less interested in economics than they are in the sensational appeal and explanatory force of race. Like so many other narratives of decline, theirs treats folk migrations not as the highly visible tip of a larger iceberg of urban transformations but as the engine of history. Chicago Confidential's account of struggles among ethnic and racial types makes the turnover of neighborhood populations the change that causes all others, bending this particular story of decline toward a familiar simplifying formula: "there goes the neighborhood."

"Hundreds of thousands of whites still live in Chicago slums," report Lait and Mortimer, the "still" suggesting the eventual departure of these whites,

and lebensraum problems are as drastic throughout as they are anywhere. But Negroes, with full right to do so and virtually with none to hold otherwise, are entrenched as far south as 90th Street and are approaching Hyde Park, along the south shore of the lake, not too long ago a seat of white society. . . . In truth, an amazing American anti-climax emerges: instead of being hemmed in by whites, the Negroes are hemming in the whites.^[14]

Hyde Park, dominated by the University of Chicago and since the late nineteenth century a preserve of white professionals, is on the South Side, near the old Bronzeville ghetto that was expanding under pressure from an influx of black Southerners at midcentury. On the city's West Side, Chicago Confidential's account of change over time in the area around Halsted Street shows that white-ethnic urban villages are also about to be engulfed. Settled in waves by the Irish, Russian and Eastern European Jews, Poles, Bohemians, and Italians, this definitively immigrant neighborhood—where Jane Addams established Hull House—gradually lost these populations as "the older people died, the younger ones grew and many prospered, honestly or notoriously, and moved to more happy abodes. As the Europeans left, the new Negroes came." Lait and Mortimer paint a highly stylized picture of the neighborhood in its present state of racially heterogeneous decline:

Negroes live in hovels without roofs, caved in on the sides, steps missing, tilted like miniature towers of Pisa. As many as a hundred live in a shack meant for two families. . . . Filth overflows to the walks and weedy lots and everywhere junk is piled. At night, Halsted Street thereabouts is a fantastic riot of smells and colors,

a jammed jamboree of Negroes, Mexicans, skull-capped Jews, Filipinos and Levantines. . . . You can buy anything on the street from a girl, price $5, to a stiletto, price $2.50. Street-hawkers sell guns openly at $20, knives, Spanish fly, contraceptives and obscene pictures and other crude pornography.^[15]

In these images of enclaved white professionals (Hyde Park) and urban villagers (Halsted Street) hemmed in and displaced by blacks and other nonwhites living in extravagantly impoverished physical, social, and moral conditions, Chicago Confidential offers an early version of one of the most important stories of decline told by Americans about the postwar inner city: the breakup of the industrial neighborhood order and the emergence of a new social landscape dominated by the racial ghetto.

Ethnic succession and the city's physical and economic transformations mean little to Liebling, however, who does not believe that material changes account for the proliferation of narratives of decline. The decline formula, not the material city, is his true object of study. Although he touches upon the kinds of historical processes discussed in Chicago Confidential— the suburbanization of the middle class, the postwar housing shortage, the violent tension between expanding black neighborhoods and the established structure of whiteethnic blocs—he explains the "disparity between the Chicago of the rhapsodists and the Chicago of today" as largely a matter of perception. No city could live up to the rhapsodic story of Chicago's limitless ascent told in the early decades of the century. Dismissing suggestions that the city's economy has changed as "too materialistic to satisfy me," Liebling places more value in a second line of explanations suggesting that the narrative of decline proceeds from a discursive adjustment: deflated by the city's failure to live up to its boosters' impossible "first-or-nothing" aspirations and by the predictable exodus in the 1920s and 1930s of local heroes to the first-line cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, the overblown narrative of Chicago's incipient greatness has collapsed into the exaggeratedly grim decline.^[16]

Seen in this light, the notion of a golden age was a cultural "St. Vitus's Dance" whipped up through "mutual suggestion." The exit of major characters like Addams and Dreiser broke the spell, and each departure also provided a roadmark on the downward path traced by the narratives of decline that naturally appeared in the ensuing period of despondency among the city's house intellectuals. Liebling quotes in this regard a correspondent who admits that she saw the city "through the eyes of the Dell-Anderson-Masters-SandburgMonroe coterie," all writers prominent in the 1900s and 1920s. It is no surprise that as these figures recede into history and obscurity her "Chicago Dream has faded slowly but steadily," a kind of dreamwork that can proceed almost independently of any material change in the social landscape. ^[17]

Liebling's "rhapsodist" label fits Chicago's business boosters well enough

and embraces as well some of the critical boosters of its literary golden age, but the label fits badly with important elements of Chicago's literary tradition. Even Sandburg's canonical "big shoulders" poem, relentlessly quoted and misquoted by civic boosters, devotes itself as much to considering the industrial city's endemic brutality as it does to valorizing its heroic productivity. Algren and the other neighborhood novelists who dominated Chicago writing in the 1930s and 1940s—Farrell and Wright chief among them—were in no sense rhapsodists: social and cultural critics might be a more accurate label. But Algren did see himself as the last figure in a line of Chicago writers that extended back to Sandburg, Dreiser, and other writers of a clearly defined golden age. When Algren discussed Chicago, he did not mean the Chicago of boosters who "talked of growing bigger than New York"; but he did mean, at least in part, the composite Chicago assembled by a set of writers who aspired to literary significance in representing the city that exemplified industrial urbanism. One important chapter of the narrative of decline recounted the fading from prominence of a literary tradition that drew imaginatively upon the rich materials of Chicago to assemble a Chicago of feeling—a "Chicago Dream" built by writers.

Stories of Chicago's decline treat literary history as a significant case study, an important way in which the city has been diminished since the golden age.^[18] The story of decline's investment in literary decline proposes a two-way traffic between the city and its literature. During the golden age, great writers and great books moved Chicago stories to cultural center stage; conversely, the city's dramatically compressed experience of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization moved its writers to center stage by providing them with the most compelling social matter America had to offer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stories of Chicago's decline account in widely varying ways for the linked fortunes of the city and its canonical literary tradition, but they almost unanimously tend to assume the linkage itself.

Noting that the "shift from the cream to the skim-milk is reflected in every artery of the city's life," Lait and Mortimer observe that "Chicago forty years ago was the hub of a virile, vigorous circle of literature, art and, strangely, a center of poetry," as well as a publishing capital. Now, they claim, "Chicagoans no longer write books about their city, because it has few citizens left who can write and of those even fewer are brave enough to tell the real story."^[19] Although tossed off by Lait and Mortimer with their characteristic flippancy, the startling assertion that Chicagoans do not write about their city, or do so timidly and falsely, seems expressly designed to explode the notion of Chicago as a literary capital. Lait and Mortimer propose a city of illiterates who cannot write—given form in the horde of Negroes, swarthy foreigners, and the less than-respectable lower classes thronging Halsted—and of cowards who, in an age without entrepreneurial "hairy individualists," great reformers, or great

reporters, lack the resources to practice either the kind of muckraking social criticism or the forthright boosterism popularized by their predecessors. "For a city where, I am credibly informed, you couldn't throw an egg in 1925 without braining a great poet," agrees Liebling, "Chicago is hard up for writers."^[20] For Liebling, who argues that Chicago partisans are nostalgic for a golden age that took place largely in the imagination of its writers, the end of Chicago's literary renaissance constitutes the essence of Chicago's decline. Deprived of its most able proponents by the departure of first-class writers in the 1920s and 1930s, the myth of Chicago's importance as both literary center and literary subject cannot sustain itself.

The claim that there were no "Chicago writers" left, or that there was only one (Algren), is startling enough to merit further investigation. What did this self-consciously hyperbolic assertion mean? First, it meant that notable writers associated with the city tended to leave it. For writers, Chicago had not lasted as a central place of the first rank commanding its own cultural hinterland; it was, rather, a subsidiary way station, helping to funnel talent out of the vast mid-American plain east to the nation's literary and journalistic centers or west to the movie industry. Second, the notion of a city without writers provided a forceful way to figure the end of a particular tradition or traditions. The story of decline reported by Lait and Mortimer and Liebling had in mind a canon of novelists, poets, and journalists who had lived and worked in Chicago or had produced representations of Chicago, a group that typically included Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Edgar Lee Masters, Floyd Dell, Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe,Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Ben Hecht, Willa Cather, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright.^[21] These writers—gone from midcentury Chicago, no longer writing, or dead—had together in the first half of the twentieth century imagined a composite textual Chicago that had a significant place in American literature.

If Algren was the last of the Chicago writers, a label applied to him by more than one narrator of decline, it meant that he was the last well-known writer in Chicago with generally acknowledged ties running all the way through that tradition. Liebling presents Algren, who was in 1949-51 enjoying his greatest popular success following the publication of The Man with the Golden Arm, as the last of the Chicago writers who "had stuck by his West Side Poles after all the rest of the stark Chicago realists had fled to Hollywood." In Liebling's account, Algren becomes a 1930s writer adrift in midcentury Chicago. "Still wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a turtle-neck sweater"—which Liebling apparently regarded as an outdated proletarian-intellectual uniform—a forlorn Algren makes the rounds of dull literary parties at which he eats the free turkey, Virginia ham, and cocktail shrimp while besieged by "patrons of the arts and

the faculty of the University of Chicago."^[22] Liebling casts him as an embarrassed dinosaur whose nostalgia-inducing presence earns him treats.

Algren may not have been so self-deflating, but he proceeded from a similar assumption about Chicago's literary history: as late as the 1920s, he argues in City on the Make, Chicago was "the homeland and heartland of an American renaissance. . . . Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara with not a camel in sight" (54). Algren's story of Chicago's literary decline arrives at a midcentury scene of cultural desolation strikingly similar to that found in Chicago Confidential's account of the degrading of the city's gene pool. One should remember that Algren's narrative of Chicago's decline differed violently in most particulars from Lait and Mortimer's. He did not, for instance, share their understanding of "good families," "foreigners," the meaning of race, and the political left. (Chicago Confidential knowingly explains that communists, who made up important parts of Algren's literary and social circle in the 1930s, habitually compel white female party members to have sex with black men.) But Algren's version of Chicago's decline dovetails with Chicago Confidential's and Liebling's versions on the subject of literature: at midcentury, City on the Make argues, Chicago has become a cultural desert because its artists have abandoned their mission. In Algren's view, that mission is to stand up for "neighborhood" people against the power wielded by political and economic bosses; the writers have given up that fight in an age of suburbanization and consensus. More generally, the mission of Chicago realists, at least as it was grasped by narrators of the city's decline, was to write about industrial urbanism, and that appeared to be a dying subject. "It used to be a writer's town" (62), argues City on the Make: "It has had its big chance and fluffed it" (55). For Algren, good dreamwork, like good steady factory work in the changing inner city, was getting harder to find.

The Unmaking of Industrial Urbanism

The story of decline thus embraces the social landscape of urban villages and Chicago's literary tradition as two orders rooted in industrial urbanism and threatened by the city's postwar transformation. The pall hanging over the urban village in Algren's midcentury writing figures both the material prospect of urban change and the textual prospect of a literary tradition's exhaustion.

City on the Make, therefore, presents the decline of industrial urbanism as the defeat of an imagined alliance between factory workers and writers of the industrial city. Chicago is "a poet's town for the same reason it's a working stiff's town, both poet and working stiff being boys out to get even for funny cards dealt by an overpaid houseman weary long years ago" (63). The poets are allied with the working stiffs (i.e., "neighborhood" people) because, in Algren's

belligerently narrow definition of literature as social critique pure and simple, "literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity."^[23] The writers of Algren's Chicago tradition thus form a kind of collective social conscience as well as an aesthetic order, allied with the city's wage-earning and marginal classes against those who own the industrial and political machines. This latter group and their cronies make Chicago "also an American Legionnaire's town, real Chamber of Commerce territory, the big banker-and-broker's burg, where a softclothes dick with a paunch and no brain at all . . . decides what movies and plays we ought to see and what we mustn't" (63). The two factions have fought a war for Chicago, with battles contested in the streets and on the printed page, and the poets and working stiffs have lost, the game being fixed in favor of big business and its antiliterature of boosterism. Algren the neighborhood novelist runs up white flags flapping from laundry lines in the urban village.

This is not a dramatic reversal or surprise defeat but rather the playing out of a logic readable throughout the city's development: "An October sort of city even in spring" suggests that the seeds of decline can be found even in the city's rise. Chicago was founded by "marked-down derelicts with dollar signs for eyes" (10), and their more pious and respectable inheritors have defeated all challenges from City on the Make's honor roll of radical leftists, labor leaders, Lincolnian liberals, Progressives, and genuine Christians. When Algren refers to Colonel McCormick as "the inventor of modern warfare, our very own dimestore Napoleon, Colonel McGooseneck" (65), he both pokes fun at McCormick's empty military posturing and puts the McCormicks—an industrialist clan but also relentlessly boosterish newspaper publishers—at the center of the winning side in the "modern warfare" over Chicago. The naked exercise of stockyard logic has always been Chicago's social trademark—"Wise up, Jim: it's a joint where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up headdown from the hook" (56)—and McCormick's faction of industrialists and allied politicians, cultural arbiters, and civic boosters has grown fat in victory. In City on the Make, Chicago's golden age was a time when one could believe that this inevitable victory was as yet in doubt, that reformist "giants" could sway the industrial city onto another, less brutal course. But, in this most fixable city, the fix was in: "its poets pull the town one way while its tycoons' wives pull it another, its gunmen making it the world's crime capital while its educators beat the bushes for saints. Any old saints. And every time a Robert Hutchins or Robert Morss Lovett pulls it half an inch out of the mud, a Hearst or an Insull or a McCormick shoves it down again by sheer weight of wealth and venality" (57).

The city that staggers into middle age—"Up, down and lurching sidewise. . . . Small wonder we've had trouble growing up"—remains a capital for hustlers, operators, and thieves living by stockyard rules. In City on the Make's

account, the poets and the working stiffs disappear from the stage, hounded by cries of "'Hit him again, he don't own a dime"' (57). The "city that works" tends to disappear from City on the Make as the industrial city declines toward the present day. Urban villages and factory jobs increasingly belong to the bygone "silver-colored yesterday." The city of poets and writers disappears in a parallel movement, having been eclipsed by the city of American Legionnaires, the Chamber of Commerce, and a critical establishment captive to the McCormick faction and its successors, the progrowth and redevelopment ideologues. Only two classes remain in Algren's October city—big-time operators, who enjoy official authority, and the small-time losers they victimize. The nightly battle fought in postwar Chicago now pits a legion of anonymous scufflers against the annihilating city itself:

As evening comes taxiing in and the jungle hiders come softly forth: geeks and gargoyles, old blown winoes, sour stewbums and grinning ginsoaks, young dingbats who went ashore on D Plus One or D Plus Two and have been trying to find some arc-lit shore ever since. Strolling with ancient boxcar perverts who fought all their wars on the Santa Fe . . . Every day is D-day under the El. (59)

Algren, who saw himself as a lone survivor who made literature in the Chicago tradition, understood his job at midcentury to be to explore the imaginative possibilities afforded by these grim players in industrial Chicago's endgame.

City on the Make offers a version of decline in which militant capital defeats workers and their literary supporters, but, as Lait and Mortimer's account of entrepreneurial capital defeated by racial heterogeny should remind us, the decline genre allows great variation in representing the rise of the postindustrial city. There is, of course, a story of the 1930s and the 1950s in Algren's portrait of poets and workers defeated by the expansive postwar bourgeoisie and reaction against the political left. Algren was a Popular Front leftist, celebrated before the war as a proletarian writer, who saw fewer and fewer allies in the sphere of cultural politics as postwar America became Cold War America. But that familiar story, which Algren retold in City on the Make and often after that, does not do justice to Algren as a writer of cities: he was one of the great literary formulators of the postwar decline narrative, a genre contributed to by all manner of urban intellectuals across the political spectrum. The equation of poets and workers in City on the Make does gesture back to the Popular Front, but it also reminds us that industrial urbanism was a many-faceted artifact, of which Algren's brand of literary realism and the industrial villagers' way of life formed only two facets. The cultures of cities may have significantly nurtured the Popular Front but only as one among many cultural and social formations.

Besides thinking of himself as a social critic and a leftist, Algren, then, conceived of himself as falling within a specific genre of urban intellectual—a

Chicago novelist and poet on the prewar model. In this sense, he placed himself within a larger set of Chicago realists: a complex of urban intellectuals encompassing not only literary figures but also journalists (including cartoonish anti-communists Lait and Mortimer) and social scientists (especially the Chicago School of sociology associated with Robert Park), who had before the war produced a body of closely observed urban writing that responded to the formal, social, and political problems raised by the industrial city. At midcentury, Algren perceived an imminent crisis in the passing of the industrial urbanism that had provided Chicago realism with its defining subject. His identity as an urban intellectual was rooted in the industrial villages he wrote about, neighborhoods that had been since the 1930s the Chicago novel's home terrain. The suddenly foreseeable breakup of those neighborhoods, part of postindustrial transformation, formed an important part of the story of decline. Algren therefore saw himself in danger of being cast adrift from the materials he drew upon in doing his cultural work.

Algren's postwar writing bears the marks of its historical moment: the sense of literary-historical desperation, the flows of capital and population already transforming postwar Chicago's social landscape. Chapter 2 describes Chicago's midcentury transformation from an industrial city of downtown and neighborhoods into a postindustrial metropolis of inner city and suburbs, a transformation that shapes the story of decline and the reading of it that follows. The argument therefore plants one foot in the city of fact. It plants the other foot in the city of feeling: the story of decline also embodies and considers the postwar exhaustion of what Algren understood as his tradition of Chicago realism, which forms the second subject of chapter 2. These two structural supports undergird a reading in chapter 3 of Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, the definitive, if often obscure and deflected, story of decline in novel form and a culminative masterpiece of Algren's Chicago tradition. Chapter 4 begins where Algren imagines an apocalyptic end: it concludes part I by assembling the pieces of a post-Algren Chicago tradition, which revises (redevelops) the city of feeling he constructed as it maps the postindustrial inner city. Algren's postwar writing, which tends to give the impression that after he is done there will be nothing left to say about Chicago, thus introduces and underlies new generations of Chicago stories, landscapes, and urban intellectuals.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 follow Algren's lead in emphasizing landscape. Like Sandburg's personification of Chicago and various updatings of it, the landscapes constructed in texts embody the complex and diffuse idea of Chicago in a concrete form that can be infused with meanings. To the extent that the texts discussed here are about Chicago, their landscapes enter into conversation with

one another and with the city's changing social landscape. The landscapes we find in Chicago literature afford us ways to consider a historical moment suspended between the industrial and postindustrial eras, between a prewar urban literature and the genres that would rework and replace it. In particular, the pervasiveness of the El in the landscapes of Golden Arm and City on the Make affords a way to consider the relationship between Chicago and the city constructed by its literary tradition: both the city of fact and the city of feeling grew around their railroads, which thereby acquired a powerful symbolic charge that survives well into the age of the expressway that began around midcentury. The El's great rusting trestles, many of prewar vintage, continue to this day to serve as a resonant shorthand for Chicago: they still carry loads of meaning, just as they still bear trains filled with flesh-and-blood passengers. The El reminds us that with all the midcentury talk of decline, apocalypse, and the "disappearance" of Chicago, the prewar city did not fall overnight into ruin but instead became absorbed into a new landscape. The first act of that drama—the passing of industrial Chicago, with its habits of life and literature—is the subject of part I.

2
The Old Neighborhood: Industrial Chicago and Its Literatures

Sandburg's Chicago, Dreiser's Chicago, Farrell's and Wright's and my own Chicago, that was somebody else's Chicago. That was a play with a different plot.
Nelson Algren, Who Lost an American?

In Nelson Algren's Chicago, the photographer Arthur Shay makes a gorgeous record of the relation Algren cultivated to the city he knew. Pictures of Algren idling in bars and walking in the low-rise streetscape of his neighborhood, pictures of drunks on West Madison Street and petty criminals in court, pictures of resonant characters eager to tell their stories to the writer-these are dramatizations of the link between authorial persona and urban orders. In his introduction to the book, Shay folds the story of Algren's relation to the Chicago he knew—and the Chicago that supplanted it—into a narrative of decline.

Driving south toward downtown Chicago on the Kennedy Expressway in the late 1980s, Shay feels a professional appreciation for the skyline vista rearing up before him, for the aesthetic self-presentation of"a city that stretches from the John Hancock Building and the Gold Coast on the left all the way across the vaunted Loop to the world's tallest building, the Sears Tower, just about dead ahead."^[1] Shay accords to Chicago's densely redeveloped Loop and Near North Side lakefront the status of being "a city" unto itself, well defined and separate from the spreading low-rise metropolis of inner city and suburbs that stretches south, west, and north of this core for many miles. The expressway, connecting core and suburbs, passes above and through the inner city, carrying commuters

like Shay toward the steel-and-glass towers ahead—"all of them," the novelist Saul Bellow has written, "armored like Eisenstein's Teutonic Knights and staring over the ice of no-man's-land at Alexander Nevsky."^[2]

Moving south among the inbound commuters, Shay encounters an old friend's ghost, which rises disembodied from the inner-city neighborhoods below to impinge on the closed system of downtown, expressway, and suburban periphery:

The moment I cross Fullerton I glide over to the left lane and in a few seconds cross what was once the short stretch of Wabansia Avenue that intersected North Bosworth. Rolling over that sector of long-gone Wabansia, the part that was eminent-domained by Mayor Daley's myrmidons and turned from mangy gray twoflats into mangier gray roadway to hurry us Loop-ward, I think of Chicago novelist Nelson Algren and French novelist-philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who occupied that precise space more than a third of a century ago, sharing Algren's squeaky bed on the second floor of 1523 Wabansia. An air space vacated so long ago that a billion cars have long since occupied it momentarily, hurrying toward the city with which Algren had a lifelong love-hate affair.^[3]

Nelson Algren, "long-gone" novelist of the industrial inner city, offers Shay passage into a lost Chicago.

In Chicago, as in many American cities after World War II, a "progrowth" coalition of political and business leaders used governmental authority, federal funds, and the money and expertise of the private sector to help reconfigure the city for a suburbanizing, deindustrializing age. Slum clearance, housing projects, highway construction, and downtown redevelopment helped change the city's landscape, giving new form not only to the core but also to the neighborhoods that had since the late nineteenth century encouraged resident and visiting observers (Algren among the former and de Beauvoir among the latter) to characterize Chicago as a loose confederation of industrial villages. Some places, like 1523 Wabansia, ceased to exist; others were allowed to decay; others were made over by new infusions of capital.

These physical transformations intertwined with concurrent demographic change. The old neighborhood order was also an ethnic order, dominated by European immigrant groups that came to work in industrial Chicago in great numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Poles, Bohemians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, Greeks, Eastern European Jewsand by the earlier-established Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians. Describing the passing of Algren's Chicago, Shay sketches an ethnic succession that carries forward in a parenthesis from the 1950s to the 1980s:

[Algren's] neighborhoods and haunts changed. The Poles and Slavs he knew either had died or moved to the suburbs, and the language of the people who replaced them was alien to him. (After his death, when an admiring alderman

managed to get part of Evergreen Street [a nearby street on which Algren had also lived] renamed Algren Street, another alderman, following his Hispanic constituents' howls that they had never heard of Algren, got it changed back.)^[4]

Beginning during World War I, when a half-century of prolific European immigration came to a close, new waves of migration brought black and white Southerners to Chicago—a movement that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s—as well as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and, especially after 1965, immigrants from South and Central America, Asia, and the Caribbean. During those decades, many whites were moving out of Chicago proper to the nation's fastest-growing suburban area, pursuing opportunities for jobs, affordable homes, better schools, a restricted choice of neighbors. For many white ethnics, the move to the suburbs meant moving from the hyphenated immigrant-ethnic sphere into the larger community of the American middle classes; especially during the prosperous 1950s and early 1960s, they could imagine themselves securing a stake in a perfectible America. As the city's segregated black sections expanded and the mid-1960s round of violent inner-city upheavals got under way, more whites also saw themselves as moving away from street crime, racial conflict, or black (and Hispanic) people period.

The most important demographic change during the post-World War II period took place in the city's balance of black and white populations. By 1950, there were almost 500,000 blacks in Chicago, constituting 13.6% of the city's population, and by 1980 there were almost 2 million (39.8%). Hispanics formed another fast-growing ethnic bloc, increasing from 3% to 17% of Chicago's population between 1960 and 1983.^[5] Blacks and Hispanics took up residence in the postwar inner city, often in South Side or West Side neighborhoods that had once been occupied by white ethnics. At the same time, an expanded class of professionals, managers, and office workers employed in the service industries that supplanted Chicago's waning manufacturing sector took up residence in the band of redeveloped neighborhoods clustering on the North Side lakefront and around the Loop.

Contrary to the impression one might derive from Shay's expressway reminiscence and other narratives of white-ethnic decline, the industrial neighborhood order did not "fall" overnight like Troy (sacked by Myrmidons) or some decadent empire overrun by barbarian hordes (pathology-bearing "minorities" streaming over one border, gentrifying "yuppies" over the other), but Chicago's urban villages were drastically reduced and broken up by postindustrial transformation. Sociologists of the Chicago School had used the term "inner city" in the 1920s and 1930s to describe the industrial neighborhood order, but "inner city" has since the urban crisis of the 1960s become shorthand for a very different and distinctively postindustrial arrangement. The term now convention-

ally calls to mind for many Americans, as it already did for Lait and Mortimer at midcentury, a social landscape of black and Hispanic ghettos surrounding the city's redeveloped core, surviving enclaves of white ethnics, and expanding colonies of preponderantly white but ethnically neutral urban professionals; the whole surrounded in turn by an inner ring of older industrial suburbs (housing white ethnics and some blacks and often reabsorbed into the inner city) and beyond by a largely white suburban expanse. In the 1950s and 1960s, the suburbs and exurbs of "Chicagoland" expanded with unrivaled speed around Chicago's emerging postwar inner city, marching away to Indiana in the south, into the farm country of northern Illinois in the west, and toward Wisconsin in the north.

Algren's ghost, charged as it is with resonances of industrial urbanism and its decline, reminds Shay of the old Chicago—a city of fact, half-remembered—layered under the new. The quintessentially postindustrial Kennedy Expressway, literally built on the ruins of Algren's Chicago, carries Shay through the eerily persistent industrial city as he passes through the ghost of the building at 1523 Wabansia. Similarly, the encounter with Algren's ghost, charged with resonances of a tradition of Chicago writing about industrial urbanism, brings Shay into contact with another old Chicago—the city of feeling created by its writers. His approach by expressway echoes a long sequence of such scenes that extends back to late nineteenth-century scenes of entry into Chicago by train, a staple of industrial-era Chicago writing exemplified by the paradigmatic opening of Sister Carrie (discussed in chapter 3), with its long lines of telegraph poles, railroad tracks, and outlying houses telling a story of speculative desire as they lead Carrie's eye across the prairie into the big city.^[6]

The arriving motorist's view from the expressway is to postindustrial Chicago what the arriving passenger's view from the train was to industrial Chicago: a representational strategy that opens up a landscape for infusion with meanings. In Nelson Algren's Chicago, Shay enters from the northwest, passing through layers of social and literary history as he approaches the Loop. In the passage from Algren's City on the Make discussed in chapter 1, the reader soars up the lake shore and through the city's industrial history from the southeast but descends to Lake Shore Drive and suburbanization soon enough. In Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline, an economic and social study of postwar Chicago, a section entitled "The Rise and Fall of Smokestack Chicago" begins with an approach from the southeast, retracing the swoop along the lakefront in City on the Make, through "a gauntlet of industrial development that rivals any heavy industrial concentration in the United States." Passing first through the lakefront belt of steel mills and other heavy industry in the Northwest Indiana towns of Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond, the imagined driver enters the city proper via the Chicago Skyway, from which

you get a bird's eye view of Chicago's industrial backyard. You pass over the entrance to Calumet Harbor, which is relatively quiet compared to earlier years when Great Lakes ships carrying everything from grain to iron ore could be seen entering and leaving. The modest bungalows and two-flats in the surrounding blue-collar neighborhoods are framed by industry. USX's South Works dominates the lakefront and a few smaller factories dot the grid of streets.^[7]

The ships and factories establish the industrial frame that gives shape to the kind of neighborhood urbanism suggested by bungalows and two-flats. But the expressway, connecting suburbs to city and embodying priorities more characteristic of a metropolitan region organized by the demands of a service economy, places a postindustrial frame around the scene below. Like the dwindling ship traffic-more remembered than observed-the industrial vista is becoming a ghostly echo of the high-industrial moment, still perceptible but already tinged with the quality of anachronism that Shay ascribes to Nelson Algren's old neighborhood beneath the Kennedy. The entry by expressway, like the entry by railroad, is bewildering and enlightening because it creates a portrait of the city by peeling back the layers of urban order.

Passing through vestiges of the urban village as he navigates through the postindustrial social landscape, retrofitting the railroad scenes of industrial literature to do the work of representing that postindustrial landscape, Art Shay steers his car and his consciousness through an encounter with both of Nelson Algren's "old neighborhoods." One old neighborhood is the Polish urban village around 1523 Wabansia; the other is that section of the genre map of American letters occupied by Chicago realism, the tradition of writing that evolved around the project of representing the industrial city. Algren made literature from recognizing that both old neighborhoods faced the end of an era as Chicago entered into a period of postindustrial transformation at midcentury.

The Industrial City

The phrase "postindustrial Chicago" takes some getting used to: the word "Chicago" has built-in industrial connotations dating back to the late nineteenth century. Chicago was the right place at the right time, a city visibly produced at near-miraculous speed by the industrial transformations, population movements, and rapid urbanization shaping the terrain of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^[8] The central place of a vast region stretching from the Rockies to the Cumberland Gap and from the Mississippi Delta to the north woods, commanding the rail and water routes along which passed extracted resources and manufactured goods, a center of heavy industry as well as a center of commercial and financial activity, Chicago was early twentieth-century America's "national economic city"^[9] -the prototypical modern indus-

trial metropolis. As "the classical center of American materialism,"^[10] Chicago came to be understood as a place where the structuring economic forces of American life manifested themselves with unique clarity and vigor.

Chicago's relatively late start (in 1850 the fledgling city still had fewer than 30,000 inhabitants; in 1900 it had almost 2 million)^[11] and the wholesale rebuilding of large sections of the city after the Great Fire of 187  made for a city uniquely responsive to the shaping forces of a factory-based industrial order. "Chicago epitomized a major shift to industrial capitalism in the institutional base of U.S. cities," argues Sidney Bremer. "Postfire Chicago was designed—much of it literally from the ground up—to accommodate the expansion and consolidation of modern economic ventures."^[12] Large manufacturing and processing plants clustered around the urban core, lined the river and the rail lines converging on downtown, and expanded south and east along the lakefront into Indiana, seeking locations with access to coal and other raw resources, to "good intra-regional transportation and commercial linkages," and to "a large factory labor force" who walked and in time rode mass transit to work.^[13] Railroads criss-crossed the city, many of them running at grade level through residential streets, linking up at union stations and interchanges. Warehouses and department stores made the downtown core a commercial center; centralized stock and commodity exchanges and banks made it a financial center; an iconic cluster of ostentatiously "cultural" institutions—library, art museum, opera house—made it a cultural center. Many of these various functions were housed in skyscrapers, state-of-the-art factories, and distinguished municipal buildings that made Chicago an architectural exemplar. In the early twentieth century, Chicago had the look of the foreseeable urban future.

The city's neighborhood order took shape around the frame of industry. Professionals, managers, and the wealthy (especially white Protestants) gravitated over time toward the lakefront and to increasingly distant suburban removes, away from the industrial interior's clamor, dirt, and heterogeneous crowding, while a vast patchwork of neighborhoods housing the city's laboring wage earners spread inland from the core. These neighborhoods of apartment walk-ups and Chicago's characteristic blocks of close-packed bungalows developed in waves as established immigrants, pushed by new arrivals and the expansion of the factory belt, followed streetcar and elevated lines away from the Loop. This form of urban growth yielded a city of "industrial villages"—neighborhoods organized around workplaces and commuter lines and often dominated by a particular ethnic bloc-grouped concentrically around the downtown core and ringed by streetcar suburbs. A common reliance on manufacturing and the influence of ethnically ordered local political machines, which brokered among the various interests, stabilized this distinctively industrial form of urbanism.

Industrial Chicago was prototypically modern not only in the growth of its

industries but also in its ethnic heterogeneity. Three-quarters of its population was listed in the 1890 census as foreign born or as children of foreign-born parents. Chicago's population streamed to its neighborhoods from a complex of hinterlands: Midwesterners and Westerners, many of them European immigrants, came to Chicago from small towns and farms in search of a new, urban set of opportunities; Easterners came west in search of business opportunities and new starts in an industrial boom town; peasants, craftspeople, and others of modest means from Europe, the American South, Mexico, the Middle East, and Asia found their way to industrial Chicago's crowded immigrant neighborhoods and factory jobs.

European immigrants dominated the city's working population and neighborhood order. They tended to settle initially near the concentration of industrial workplaces in the city's core, then to follow streetcar lines further away from the core over time.^[14] The communities they established spread inland across the South Side and West Side, often solidifying into neighborhoods around institutions—not only workplaces but also national parish churches, banks, stores and around property owning. The typical ethnic neighborhood was not solidly settled by one group; typically one or two ethnic blocs dominated a heterogeneous mix through weight of numbers or political influence. The increasingly segregated Black Belt forming in the early years of the twentieth century on the near South Side (which wealthy white residents had begun to abandon for the North Side lakefront before the turn of the century) constituted a signal exception to this mixed pattern. Especially after the first great migration of Southern blacks to Chicago during and after World War I, the Black Belt's population and institutions grew together into what came to be known as a Black Metropolisa microcosmic city created by severe residential segregation—contained within the patchwork of villages but separate from them.

Describing early twentieth-century Chicago in Boss (1971), his study of Mayor Daley (the First), newspaper columnist Mike Royko definitively sketches the neighborhood order as remembered by the story of golden age and decline. Daley, the man most responsible for the shape of the transformed post-World War II city, "grew up a small-town boy, which used to be possible even in the big city. Not anymore, because of the car, the shifting society, and the suburban sprawl. But Chicago, until as late as the 1950s"—Royko's periodization conforms precisely with the appearance at midcentury of a body of decline narratives—"was a place where people stayed put for a while, creating tightly knit neighborhoods, as small-townish as any village in the wheat fields."^[15] The villages formed "larger ethnic states," which Royko maps in a grand panorama:

To the north of the Loop was Germany. To the northwest Poland. To the west were Italy and Israel. To the southwest were Bohemia and Lithuania. And to the south was Ireland.

It wasn't perfectly defined because the borders shifted as newcomers moved in on the old settlers, sending them fleeing in terror and disgust. Here and there were outlying colonies, with Poles also on the South Side, and Irish up north.

But you could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock.^[16]

The neighborhoods as Royko describes them were self-contained systems. Each had within it the institutional ingredients of a small town: a main shopping street, businesses (tavern, funeral parlor, vegetable store, butcher shop, drugstore, pool hall, clubs), locally famous characters (drunk, trollop, village idiot, war hero, sports star), a police station, a sports team, a ball field, churches. There were also factories: "Some people had to leave the neighborhood to work, but many didn't, because the houses were interlaced with industry." With characteristic nostalgia-deflating irony (to which I will return in chapter 4), Royko sums up his thumbnail portrait of the neighborhood order by emphasizing the tension between the security and the fragility of neighborhood in a typically urban climate of constant economic, demographic, and cultural change: "So, for a variety of reasons, ranging from convenience to fear to economics, people stayed in their own neighborhood, loving it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to move out."^[17]

All of Them Reek of Chicago

The Chicago of fact that flourished from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century was structured by a distinctive set of orders that expressed the industrial city's function and history: the pattern of urban villages that housed its heterogeneous workforce, the armature of railroads converging on the core, the complex of hinterlands with which the city exchanged resources, products, people, and capital. The Chicago of feeling that flourished in that same period was similarly ordered by a distinctive set of literary strategies that expressed the industrial city's effect on the American literary imagination. Representations of industrial Chicago accordingly developed a series of standard images and meanings associated with Chicago's signature forms: for example, the iron city of railroads, ordered by the pitiless processes of production and commerce, harder than human flesh or will; the rationalized bloodbath of business as usual in the stockyards; a landscape of large buildings and crowded neighborhoods that monumentalized class difference, the impulse to maximize return, and the wish to temper commerce with aesthetics or conscience; the shocks felt by hinterlanders (like Sister Carrie) and native sons and daughters (like Algren's characters) encountering urban modernity in the street.^[18] Chicago's astounding growth "variously fed the imaginations and

assaulted the sensibilities of observers the world over" from the aftermath of the fire of 1871 to the eve of World War II.^[19] Within the writing of this larger group of observers, though, we can make out a distinctive Chicago realist tradition—by which I mean a tradition of writing that placed primary emphasis on the thematic and formal problems posed by industrial modernity—that took shape around the task of mapping and considering the meanings of industrial Chicago.

A loose but cohesive complex of novelists, poets, critics, social scientists, and reporters guided industrial Chicago's entry into American letters, fixing for posterity the terms commonly used to understand and represent Chicago.^[20] Algren—a novelist who had set out as a young man to become a sociologist, trained and worked as a reporter, tried his hand at verse and prose poetry, and would eventually take to calling himself a journalist for the last two decades of his writing life—linked himself in a number of ways to the various networks of writers who had together created the canonical literary Chicago. When he chose to think of himself as the last Chicago writer, Algren placed himself at the terminus of a tradition rooted in the period identified by the story of decline as the city's golden age. He presented himself as the last remaining architect of a composite textual city fashioned by his literary ancestors and allies—writers he read, admired, took as models, and in many cases knew as professional colleagues.

In the past, the story goes, the city they imagined had aspired to the status of world capital, just as Chicago itself had seemed on the verge of becoming a world city of the first rank. The story of Chicago's decline, in its obligatory cultural chapter, usually makes reference to H. L. Mencken's repeated, unabashedly hyperbolic, and at least semi-serious contention that early twentieth-century Chicago was the emerging literary capital of America. Mencken wrote in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1917 that Chicago had produced "all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people." Nine times out of ten, the writer who "is indubitably American and who has something new and interesting to say, and who says it with an air . . . has some sort of connection with the abattoir by the lake," having been "bred there or got his start there, or passed through there during the days when he was tender." The writers he had in mind—he named Fuller, Norris, Dreiser, Anderson, Herrick, and Joseph Medill Patterson as exemplars—"reek of Chicago in every line they write."^[21] In 1920, Mencken again made his case for Chicago as the "Literary Capitol of the United States," this time in the Nation (London), adding the poets Masters and Sandburg and the newspaperman Ade as auxiliaries to his list of novelists. For Mencken, Chicago's reputation rested principally on the work of novelists: "With two exceptions," he concluded, "there is not a single American novelist, a novelist deserving a civilized reader's

notice—who has not sprung from the Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital."^[22]

The heroes of Mencken's scenario were authors whose work both figured and enacted principal social and cultural dramas of his time: the urbanization and industrialization of America, the arrival of new European immigrants, the emergence of literary traditions grounded in the speech and habits of the middle and lower classes rather than in the genteel tradition, the westering of the acknowledged wellsprings of American culture. Mencken's net thus sweeps up not only the authors producing representations of Chicago as the prototypical industrial city (e.g., Dreiser, Norris, Upton Sinclair, Sandburg) but also Midwesterners and Westerners looking back to the hinterland from the distinctly metropolitan perspective afforded by Chicago (e.g., Anderson, Masters, Herrick, Cather). The former strain dominated the Chicago literary scene at the turn of the century, while the latter strain formed the center of a second renaissance during the 1910s and early 1920s.

A third wave of fiction writers, the neighborhood novelists of the 1930s and 1940s, took up the representation of the industrial city at street level. They completed the movement of the Chicago realist tradition's primary focus from the urban core and the Midwestern hinterland to the inner-city landscape of the industrial villages. Mencken, reacting perhaps to the waning of the town-city conflict in Chicago writing, lost interest in the 1930s in his claim for the primacy of Chicago writing, but other critics came forward to lionize the neighborhood novelists as proletarian writers or latter-day naturalists.^[23] Farrell was the most celebrated neighborhood novelist during the 1930s, while in the 1940s Wright and Algren came to be seen as his principal successors.^[24] In mapping the world of the South Side Irish, Southern blacks in Bronzeville, and Poles in the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, these authors made a further move toward rendering as literature the language, habits, and daily routines of people largely excluded or exoticized by the genteel tradition. It was this movement away from the genteel that had originally attracted Mencken to what he called "the Chicago Palatinate." He was perhaps less sympathetic to the neighborhood novels' brand of social and cultural criticism, which considered the increasingly discouraging implications of industrial urbanism for a cast of characters drawn from the ranks of those transplanted hinterlanders who formed Chicago's working class.

Novels like Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-35), Wright's Native Son (1940), and Algren's Never Come Morning (1942) proposed a critique of industrial urbanism with a set of characters, landscapes, and urban processes grounded in close observation of neighborhood life. As a group, these novels ordered themselves around a line of inquiry that, at least in the literary world, enjoyed a charge of special urgency during the depression and its aftermath. As Wright put it in 1942 in his introduction to Algren's Never Come Morning, the

neighborhood novels directed "microscopic attention upon that stratum of society that is historically footloose, unformed, malleable, restless, devoid of inner stability, unidentified by class allegiances, yet full of hot, honest, blind striving." Wright predicted that "there will come a time in our country when the middle class will gasp and say (as they now gasp over the present world situation): 'Why weren't we told this before? Why didn't our novelists depict the beginnings of this terrible thing that has come before us?'"^[25] Algren, in mapping the neighborhood and the minds of its "boys on the street," was sounding a warning of future social crisis growing from the increasingly untenable condition of an economically and culturally impoverished urban proletariat. Wright's portentous tone and linkage of inner-city crisis to the rise of fascism ("the present world situation") typify a 1930s-vintage rhetoric of imminent crisis and class war, but they also anticipate future constructions of urban crisis (taken up in part 3 of this study) involving violent young men and the collapse of industrial urbanism: in the 1950s, juvenile delinquency; in the 1960s, urban riots and drug-related street crime.^[26]

Farrell, Wright, and Algren, then, brought the Chicago novel definitively to the neighborhoods; they also solidified the links joining the Chicago novel to allied forms, especially sociology and journalism. The Chicago tradition that formed Algren's usable intellectual past was something much broader than a school or circle of writers but narrower than the totality of fiction, poetry, criticism, social science, and reportage produced in Chicago in the sixty years before World War II. Algren identified himself with a strain running through representations of Chicago that emphasized close attention to the material city in the form of research, observation, and precise description of urban types, language, terrains, and processes: "My kind of writing is just a form of reportage, you might call it emotionalized reportage, but . . . the data has to be there. Compassion has no use without a setting. I mean you have to know how do the law courts work. You have to know how many bars there are in a jail cell. You can't just say, 'The guy's in jail.' You have to know."^[27] Applying to the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant to fund the writing of his novel Never Come Morning, Algren stated that his "ultimate purpose would be an accurate description of Chicago in his time," detailing "economic and political factors making toward juvenile criminality among some 300,000 Poles . . . on Chicago's Near Northwest side . . . through the methods of naturalism." He then listed a series of locations ("schoolyards, public playgrounds, churches, poolrooms, taverns") and authorities ("social workers, precinct captains, police lieutenants, and Mr. Frank Konkowski, an indicted alderman") that would provide "data."^[28] He could have been proposing a study plotting the incidence and sources of delinquency on the Near Northwest Side—and, in fact, the eminent Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth recommended him for the grant.

The neighborhood novelists' habits of observation brought the Chicago

novel close to the newspaper but closer still to the sociological study. Farrell and Wright, and to a lesser extent Algren, had significant connections to the University of Chicago's influential Department of Sociology, which in the first half of the twentieth century set the pattern for urban sociology's encounter with the industrial metropolis, from the "ecology" of its structural transformations to the daily round of its representative types: teenage gang members, taxi dancers, the social register's Four Hundred, anonymous roomers, blacks in Bronzeville, hobos, slum dwellers, immigrant laborers, single women, strong-arm thieves, and so on.^[29] These studies mapped the city metaphorically but also in the most literal sense. Ernest Burgess's map of the industrial city (fig. 3) as a set of concentric zones radiating out from the center served as one of the Chicago School's most important theoretical frameworks. Specific studies of particular areas and groups filled in the details of this master map at neighborhood level. The Chicago School's maps of the inner city literalized the overarching representational project of Chicago realism: to capture the city on paper in ways that revealed its structuring logic.

The field observers of the Chicago School practiced a kind of theoretically informed anecdotal reportage making for a markedly journalistic and even novelistic brand of social science. Robert Park, one of the Chicago School's central figures, had trained as a reporter and acknowledged that "we are indebted mainly to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life," calling for sociologists to produce studies "more searching and disinterested than even" (italics added) Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels.^[30] The Chicago novel overlapped at many points with this sociological-journalistic effort to map the city: Dreiser's mock-clinical asides on fashions and occupational types in Sister Carrie, Sinclair's heavily researched muckraking in The Jungle, the neighborhood novels' careful depictions of daily life in the gang, tavern, and slum.^[31]

Algren's Chicago realist tradition, then, consisted of writing that turned the spaces of the industrial city into places by mapping them in detail and investing them with human meanings, writing that found ways to represent the city's structuring logics and its inner life. This definition puts in the foreground representations of Chicago and Chicago people; it therefore consigns to the background much of the writing of Midwestern regionalists like Anderson, Masters, and Cather, as well as the institution building and criticism of Harriet Monroe, Floyd Dell, and Francis Hackett, all of whom helped to give form to Chicago's literary movements. However, the narrowed definition of Chicago realism as the project of writing about industrial Chicago does, whatever its limitations, identify a logic informing and connecting a vast body of representations produced in the first half of the twentieth century. If Algren read and wished to emulate a wide range of writers from Dostoevsky to Céline, his conception of himself as a Chicago writer took shape in a narrower forum: he placed himself

among the various realists of the Chicago tradition who "made American literary history"—as Doubleday's advertising copy for The Man with the Golden Arm claimed—in producing a composite set of landscapes, characters, narratives, and figures through which the industrial city could be known and understood.

Postindustrial Chicago

Between 1947 and 1982 Chicago lost 59% of its manufacturing jobs. The city's economic reliance on heavy industry made Chicago particularly vulnerable to a general decline of manufacturing in America's older industrial centers that accelerated in the years after World War 11.^[32] The suburbanizing of population and industry meant a spatial decentralization of capital—private investment, public funds, jobs, tax revenues—that redistributed resources outward from central cities into metropolitan regions. People who had power to direct the futures of central cities saw themselves entering into a crucial competition with one another and with the suburbs for remaining manufacturing jobs and the industries of the growing service sector. They responded by encouraging the reconcentration of capital in the urban core, not in the neighborhoods.

Chicago had taken form in relation to the flow of money, goods, and people typical of a manufacturing city embedded in regional, national, and international markets. As its position in those systems began to change, waves of change swept over the city: new political orders like the progrowth coalition eventually headed by Daley (who was not the simple "old shoe" political boss he appeared to be), new physical orders like clustered high-rise housing ("luxury" towers in some places, notoriously bad public housing in others) and the cutting of elevated freeways through the old neighborhoods, a new demographic order shaped by the outward movement of white ethnics toward the inner ring of suburbs and the southward and westward expansion of the city's so-called Black Belt. As John Mollenkopf puts it, postindustrial transformations "dismantled the mosaic of blue collar ethnic segmentation which developed within the occupational and residential order of the older industrial cities."^[33] From the powerful influence on Chicago's Department of City Planning exercised by the business leaders of the Chicago Central Area Committee to the decisions of the most modest taxpayers, private initiative combined with governmental decision making—however one interprets the relationship between the two—to reshape the city, clearing the ground for a postindustrial order by demolishing elements of the gradually obsolescent industrial order. By transforming the landscape, the redevelopment process also revalued land, especially around the downtown core and on the North Side, in ways that guided both private investment and government activity.

The group Art Shay calls "Daley's myrmidons," a progrowth coalition unit-

ing business leaders and city planners with political leaders organized into the Chicago Democratic machine headed by Richard J. Daley from 1955 to 1976, planned and executed the reconfiguration of post-World War II Chicago. Chicago's great age of urban renewal and redevelopment stretches from the first postwar projects of the late 1940s, through the federally funded redevelopment boom of the 1950s and 1960s, to the demise of urban renewal as a social program in the 1970s and Daley's death in 1976. In that period, Daley's progrowth coalition responded to (and helped to shape) two fundamental changes in the great industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast: the contraction of the industrial manufacturing sector and complementary expansion of the service sector, and the interlocking folk migrations that brought black Southerners to the inner city and white urbanites to the suburbs in unprecedented numbers.

The movements of people in large numbers were dramatically apparent, especially to the racially sensitive American eye. The economic transition was harder to recognize, but "even as early as 1947," report Gregory Squires and his coauthors in their account of postwar Chicago's economic transformation, "one could see changes on the horizon."

These changes were in part geographical: "Chicago's manufacturing base was starting to move from the city to the suburbs," as well as to the South and West of the nation (and to other parts of the world), where operating costs were lower and labor more easily managed.^[34] The post-World War II boom in construction, major appliances, and automobiles, all tied to the tremendous expansion of America's suburbs and the redevelopment of its urban cores, helped to obscure the decline of older heavy industries—railroads, steel, meatpackingthat had flourished in Chicago until the depression and again during wartime. Although the complex and long-term process of deindustrialization in the larger cities had begun as early as 1920, the depression and the subsequent manufacturing boom and prosperity associated with World War II had slowed and masked its effects. This made all the more dramatic a massive wave of postwar suburbanization assisted by the federal government's unprecedented investment in suburban industry, home ownership, and the highway system.^[35] Soon after the war, factory employment in Chicago, which had increased steadily until the depression and then again during the war, began a gradual decline from "a twentieth century high of 688,000 [in 1947] to 277,000 factory jobs" in 1982. During the same period, manufacturing jobs increased 131% in suburban Cook County and 195% in the surrounding counties of the extended metropolitan area. "This employment shift," conclude Squires and his coauthors, "follows a pattern of disinvestment and plant relocation, marking Chicago as the loser and the suburbs as the winners."^[36]

"The changes were also sectoral; Chicago's economy was starting to shift away from manufacturing toward the service sector."^[37] As was the case with

other Midwestern and Northeastern cities that came to be known collectively in the 1970s as the Rust Belt, Chicago's physical arrangements and cultural character derived from the industrial imperatives of transportation and manufacturing (in Chicago's case, especially railroads and heavy manufacturing done in large plants). But after World War II Chicago increasingly became a service city, a regional and national center for corporate headquarters, banking, legal and other ancillary business services, real estate, insurance, government, education, health care, conventions, tourism. These functions required office towers, hotels, and convention centers rather than factories; more expressways and airports to move people rather than more railroads and port facilities to move goods; new apartment buildings and the renovation of old buildings to house the professionals, managers, and office workers employed in the service sector rather than more cheap housing in the aging urban villages for incoming industrial workers. Construction also boomed, therefore, becoming one of the city's leading industries as the progrowth coalition built a new core and a new set of connections to the suburban periphery and the national transportation network.

The redevelopment of Chicago centered on the Loop, not the neighborhoods; most of the enormous expenditure of resources and expertise devoted to redevelopment in the inner city went into remaking the core and its connections to the region, nation, and world. After a decade of early slum clearance and redevelopment projects and preliminary planning, the Department of City Planning, working closely with business groups like the Chicago Central Area Committee, codified the thinking behind postwar redevelopment in its "Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago" of 1958. Squires and his coauthors point out that the development plan was "strikingly post-industrial," making almost no provision for the production of goods in the urban core.^[38] Declines in manufacturing and the railroad industry, which had been steeply undercut by the new interstate highway system and air travel, had left a belt of abandoned factory buildings, vacant lots going back to prairie, and disused rail facilities around the Loop, which were mixed to the south and west with rundown residential sections. At the same time, large retailers in the Loop were losing business, both relative to the suburbs and in absolute volume of sales.

The plan's principal objective, therefore, was to create a densely developed, attractive, efficient core in the Loop and Near North Side that provided the entire Chicago metropolitan region with a concentrated central place for office work, shopping, entertainment, tourism, and "cultural activities." The plan emphasized channeling service-sector workers, shoppers, and goods from the suburbs (and the national highway system beyond) via new expressways to the core, which would be densely built up with skyscrapers devoted to office and retail uses. New housing developments around the Loop and on the lakefront would accommodate professional and managerial workers in the service industries. Outdoor plazas, beautification of the river front and lakefront, a new civic

center, a downtown subway system, and a new University of Illinois campus southwest of the Loop would clear away encroaching "blight" and support the city center's management, finance, retailing, and other service functions. The development plan of 1958 argued that the dense tangles of railroad lines that had been one of industrial Chicago's signature forms were now obsolete and were in fact a form of "blight" that retarded the city's present transformation by keeping property values low in adjacent areas.^[39]

The railroad yards south and west of the Loop now provided likely locations, easily cleared, for new high-rises and townhouses to house well-paid office workers. These private developments, subsidized in part by public funds, would become part of a new middle- and upper-class landscape surrounding the Loop and reaching north and south along the lakefront. On the South Side, new development extended down from the Loop to the new Michael Reese Hospital complex, the new Illinois Institute of Technology campus, housing developments like Prairie Shores and Lake Meadows, and to Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago took steps to stabilize the borders and population of its neighborhood, which abutted largely black and lower-income neighborhoods on three sides. Southwest of the Loop, inland, a new facility for the University of Illinois's Chicago campus replaced a predominantly Italian neighborhood known as the Valley. On the North Side, intensive private development reached all the way up the lakefront from the Loop to Evanston, eventually producing a solid strip of luxury high-rises buffered inland by variously fashionable, bohemian, and transitional neighborhoods. This high-rise development rarely reached more than a few blocks from the lakefront, but the gentrification of older low-rise housing stock has extended irregularly inland.

Loop- and lakefront-centered redevelopment deepened the traditional division between the core and the neighborhoods. On his first visit to Chicago in 1938, riding in from the airport through the neighborhoods of the West Side in an age before expressways, A. J. Liebling prefigured Art Shay in observing two cities: in the neighborhoods, "the low buildings, the industrial plants, and the railroad crossings at grade produced less of a feeling of being in a great city than of riding through an endless succession of factory-town main streets"; arriving downtown, "the transition to the Loop and its tall buildings was abrupt, like entering a walled city. I found it beguilingly medieval."^[40] As public and private resources poured into the Loop and lakefront, and the industrial order structuring the "factory-town" neighborhoods unraveled, the difference between walled city and surrounding villages became more pronounced. From the progrowth coalition's perspective in the 1950s, the decaying industrial landscape encroaching on the core posed a threat to Chicago's postindustrial future. The neighborhoods and the old plants harbored the disease of "blight," which could spread to infect the core and cripple the city's service sector.

The concept of blight provides one key to the postindustrial fate of the urban

villages. Originally introduced into the lexicon by progressive housing reformers seeking to improve living conditions in the industrial city's immigrant slums, blight came to serve as a rationale for clearing away the industrial-era infrastructure to make way for a variety of redevelopment projects. Once an area was identified as blighted—and "blight" became a verb used by planners and city officials, as in "we blighted that neighborhood"—the apparatus of redevelopment could be brought to bear on it. The city could exercise its right to clear the land (as Shay puts it, Algren's block was "eminent-domained"), and government-funded housing or government-subsidized private redevelopment could go forward. Housing that was crowded or dilapidated or otherwise substandard, factories and warehouse blocks, railroad tracks, densely packed residential areas without green spaces or boulevards—in other words, foundational elements of the industrial city that by midcentury had reached advanced middle age—had to be torn down to make way for expressways, open spaces, university and hospital buildings ("urban renewal for MDs and PhDs," as one commentator termed it),^[41] offices and municipal buildings, stores, and housing that people from the old neighborhoods could not or would not live in. The concept of blight became a powerful tool in clearing the crowded ground of the old industrial inner city for the new inner city emerging from it.

As early as 1949, the Chicago Plan Commission (a forerunner of the Department of City Planning) used criteria like age and condition of buildings and overcrowding to classify 22.6 square miles of Chicago as "blighted" or "near-blighted" (fig. 4). In Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest (1955), Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield explain that this territory "lay in a half circle around the Loop . . . and around the wholesale and light manufacturing areas adjacent to the Loop. The half-circle of slum areas was irregular, but for the most part it extended about five miles from the Loop. About one-fourth of Chicago's population lived in these areas, although they comprised about 15 per cent of the land in Chicago devoted to residential use." Around the "blighted" and "near-blighted" areas was a ring of"conservation" areas which, in the commission's judgment, could be saved from encroaching blight by judicious investment of resources. Meyerson and Banfield note that "the validity of the criteria" for blighting and conservation "was doubtful" and "left a good deal to interpretation": the age of buildings alone was not a reliable measure of their value or condition; good and substandard units were often mixed together on the same block; and plaintiffs in a court case charged that "when in doubt the Plan Commission classified blocks blighted if they were occupied by Negroes."^[42] The "conservation" areas were typically white-ethnic neighborhoods that showed signs of breaking up; planners considered racial heterogeneity a sign, or a form, of blight.

This last item touches upon a second key to change in the neighborhoods: "the slums of the northern cities," noted Meyerson and Banfield in 1955, "had

become increasingly Negro."^[43] The arrival of a new wave of Southern blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) in the inner city formed an interlocking migration with the departure of white ethnics toward the city's outer edges and the suburbs. The traditional borders of Chicago's old Black Belt on the South Side and smaller segregated black areas on the West Side could no longer hold a rapidly growing, overcrowded population. "Every week during the 1950s, three-and-a-half blocks changed from white to Negro," as one geographical history of the city somewhat breathlessly puts it, and these blocks were typically located where the growing black neighborhoods met white neighborhoods in rapid transition.^[44] In this manner, Chicago's black population grew enormously, moving south and west into what had been the white-ethnic heartland, without becoming any less segregated. The new black Chicagoans entered the city—drawn by manufacturing, especially defense, jobs available during and just after World War II—at a time when the manufacturing sector was beginning its long-term decline. The economic, cultural, and spatial constraints on blacks helped to confine them to the inner city at a time when opportunity and capital were moving to the suburbs. If the coincident black and white migrations of the 1940s and 1950s, to city and suburbs, respectively, were responses to the "pull" factors of opportunity, the maturing of the black and Hispanic inner city in the 1960s became a greater "push" factor for those whites who now saw themselves as being left behind in an increasingly alien landscape.

This expansion of the black inner city set the stage for the transformation of the industrial-era ghetto—the Black Metropolis that matured between the wars—into the second ghetto: the expanded ghetto produced in the 1940s and 1950s by South-North migration, governmental attempts to lock the black inner city in place with monumental housing projects and expressways, continuing deindustrialization of the inner city, and the departure of those members of the black middle class who could break through the barrier of residential segregation.^[45] The second ghetto's signature form is the high-rise housing project, built in great numbers under the auspices of federal urban renewal programs during the 1950s and 1960s. These projects, concentrated in the older parts of the inner city within a few miles of the Loop, were built to house the inner city's black population and to contain its spatial expansion.

Projects, expressway construction, and the complex politics of housing and public education produced a kind of spatial stability by the mid-1960s-and produced as well a great deal of violent social instability in the form of racial conflict over succession, segregation, and their consequences. After the rapid neighborhood turnovers of the 1950s and early 1960s, the old immigrant-ethnic neighborhood patchwork now looked more like a series of white-ethnic enclaves isolated—or fortified—by postwar construction. Like the expressways cut through the old low-rise city to the Loop, the new high-rise public

housing, concentrated in areas that were already considered part of the black inner city, helped to fix the new boundaries of neighborhood in place. Expressways and projects together express the postwar progrowth coalition's primary concerns—saving and remaking the urban core as a regional center, housing the postindustrial workforce, confining "blight" to the neighborhoods, and protecting the white-ethnic neighborhoods that remained.^[46]

And Chicago, I Mean Really

At midcentury, then, the industrial neighborhood order was still robust—indeed, it appeared to be in full flower during a time of general prosperity—but a perceptive observer could already see signs of the contraction and dissolution to come. Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm and City on the Make imagine precisely this crisis. If industrial Chicago "fell," Chicago realism as Algren understood it would cease to be, because the literature took life from writers' close contact with the familiar landscape, processes, and problems of industrial urbanism. Even in 1949 and 1950, at the moment of his greatest success, when everybody who mattered agreed that Algren was the next big thing, reviewers compared him to Hugo, Dostoevsky, Gorki, and Dickens, and (perhaps best of all) Golden Arm was the best-selling book in Chicago, Algren argued that Chicago was entering a literary dark age.^[47] In City on the Make, Algren imagined himself the last of his kind: Chicago realism, unappreciated in both civic and critical circles, and with no new generational influx of talent to revitalize it, had come to the end of the line with him.

Algren saw in this decline of Chicago's literary reputation a sign of a larger postwar reaction against the kind of social criticism, pursued across a center-toleft spectrum from progressive to radical, he believed to undergird his line of Chicago novelists and poets. This view fits neatly with a standard reading of American literary culture in the 1950s—pursued, for example, by Algren's biographer Bettina Drew—that identifies a new valuation of formal sophistication and a devaluation of realism. This formalist turn is often regarded as a kind of political centrism correcting for the perceived excesses and limitations of 1930s-style "social realism" and the conventionally "political" engagement (characterized by vital centrists in the 1950s as extremist politics) from which it was assumed to proceed. Both the ascendance of New Criticism, which was supposed to be less overtly "political," and the apparent decline of the big, well-researched realist novel's critical reputation were thus in keeping with the intellectual climate of liberal anticommunism and consensus.^[48] The ascendance of a new complex of academically credentialed writers and the institutions that supported their hegemony also helped to shift to the margins of American letters Algren and his line, who had established authority by positioning themselves as imaginative observers within the industrial city's social fabric. As

Algren told it in 1960, the "new owners" of American literature "arrived directly from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and short story would have to conform." These critics "formed a loose federation, between the literary quarterlies, publishers' offices and book review columns, presenting a view of American letters untouched by American life."^[49]

Algren thus saw himself operating in a cultural climate in which, during the 1950s, influential critics turned against him as part of a centrist or right-wing reaction against prewar radicalism. At the more elite end of the critical spectrum, an increasingly university-based pack of critics and writers began to find Algren tiresome. Bettina Drew reports that by the mid-1950s Alfred Kazin and Orville Prescott had turned to panning Algren's work, that Norman Podhoretz "couldn't fathom why '[Algren] finds bums so much more interesting and stirring than other people,' " and that "Leslie Fiedler dubbed him 'the bard of the stumblebum,' and after a long tirade against [Algren's 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side ] finally dismissed him  as a 'museum  piece—the last of the Proletarian writers.' "^[50] Describing Algren's rapidly diminishing critical status in the 1960s, Conrad Knickerbocker paired the reputational declines of Chicago as a literary subject and of the social realism associated with the 1930s: "So by that time, who was Nelson Algren? The world's oldest living W.P.A. writer? The winner, for God's sake, of the first National Book Award?. . . and Chicago, I mean really."^[51] Knickerbocker, who admired Algren's work, captured the sneering tone of critics' conventional wisdom: in the 1950s, a significant number of influential critics seemed to regard the problems of industrial urbanism as no longer a fit subject for serious literature.

At the more popular end of the critical spectrum, boosterish newspaper reviewers, book clubs, and the ethnic press (led by Dziennik Chicagoski and Zgoda ) rejected Algren as a troublemaker telling dated stories populated by depression types about whom nobody wanted to hear anymore. While literary critics applauded a new set of writers with a new set of credentials, the Chicago Sun-Times parroted the emergent progrowth coalition in expecting that slums were soon to be a thing of the past in postwar America: "we have a feeling . . . that squalor is going out of fashion in Chicago. Perhaps it's been largely due to our mayor's efforts in brightening up and tidying our streets, the popularity of cheering colors and the Schenley advertising display of modern masterpieces in the subway concourse."^[52] It appeared that the "bard of the stumblebum" was indeed an odd man out in postwar culture: his very subject was "going out of fashion."

Algren, Drew, and Knickerbocker tell this standard story of social realism's decline, meshing it with the story of Chicago's decline. Algren wrote a letter to critic Maxwell Geismar in which he claimed (in Drew's paraphrase) "he could make a list longer than his arm, of writers who had given up as soon as the thirties were done, and were silent or trying to live in the suburbs as if the spiritual

uneasiness of the fifties and the American disease of isolation did not exist."^[53] Giving up, in this context, means refusing to serve as a literary social conscience, and Algren maps that defeat on the metropolitan landscape as a retreat from the inner city to the suburbs. Like the decline it partakes of, it is a good story, with heroes and villains moving across an expressive landscape, but there are other, less wounded, ways to tell it.

For instance, we might look to the intimate association of Algren's Chicago tradition with an industrial city that was at midcentury beginning to slide into the past. The post-World War II transformation of Chicago still has not authoritatively unfixed the terms bequeathed to posterity by the Chicago tradition, terms with which Chicago has been discussed for a century now. (Sandburg's big-shouldered young laborer is well past his eightieth birthday.) Because Algren's Chicago tradition originally evolved to describe a late nineteenth-century city, this persistence of representational habits led to a growing disjunction between a stock literary palette of industrial vintage and the transformed postindustrial subject to which it is applied. Even those representations that set out to go against the conventional grain still find it necessary to devote their energies to repeating the fixed terms in order to contest them—they must labor to show that Chicago is no longer, or never was, "the city that works" or "the city of neighborhoods."^[54] The post-World War II decline of Chicago's literary reputation might also be explained as a process in which the generic stories, vocabulary, and subject matters evolved by Algren's Chicago tradition gradually lost their authority to articulate American dramas of pressing importance and national application as they lost their close fit to contemporary urbanism in transition. At midcentury, after depression and world war, the problem and promise of industrial urbanism and the literary complex that evolved by considering it no longer compelled the attention accorded to it in the first half of the twentieth century.

The post-World War II transformation of cities, and of thinking about them, helps to explain as well the Chicago School's decline from its prewar dominance in the field of urban sociology. The ecological model, with its natural successions and formalized competition among groups, seemed badly fitted to account for the postwar inner city's seemingly permanent black ghetto and the purposive city-shaping of agents like progrowth coalitions. The Chicago School, so closely associated with the industrial city, had begun to lose its uncontested preeminence in American sociology during the late 1930s and 1940s. After the war, the Chicago School's ecological model was revised and pursued by a number of sociologists, but the original ideas of its founders were increasingly supplanted by new theoretical apparatus. However, the Chicago School's pioneering studies of topics of postwar interest, like juvenile delinquency and the ghetto, remained current well into the 1960s, when a widely recognized urban crisis moved the American inner city back to a center-stage

position it had not occupied since the Chicago School's heyday, the late Progressive Era.^[55]

The period between the early twentieth-century fixation upon industrial urbanism and the next great surge of thinking about the American city, the urban crisis of the 1960s, forms a kind of limbo into which Algren felt his critical reputation falling. As parts 2 and 3 of this study will argue, in the decades after World War II various genres and emerging traditions elevated the postindustrial inner city-repopulated by migrations, destroyed and remade by renewal and redevelopment, racially divided, racked by new rounds of violence, increasingly cut off from the suburban periphery—to and perhaps beyond the eminence in national discourse once enjoyed by the Chicago tradition's industrial city. These developments helped to make Richard Wright enduringly canonical as one of the first "ghetto writers" but only helped to move Algren further into the margins—although more than one reader, seeking a historical or sociological rationale for rehabilitating Algren, has pointed out that his pioneering depictions of drug addiction and the homeless underclass of drifters become more timely every day.^[56]

The historical and conceptual transformation of the city as a subject of inquiry, combined with Algren's (and others') notion of a critical turn away from his brand of social realism in the 1950s, help to explain how Algren managed to go from being the next great urban realist and a budding major writer —so anointed by Farrell, Wright, Hemingway, various critics, and the judges who awarded the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950—to being a colorful regionalist character. By the 1960s, he was the vaguely embarrassing has-been to whom critical darling Richard Brautigan patronizingly imagines mailing a drunk named Trout Fishing in America Shorty in Trout Fishing in America.^[57] Algren's literary star, and to a lesser extent that of Farrell (who had been Chicago's "next big thing" in the 1930s), went down with that of industrial Chicago and its characteristic types and terrains.

Algren's and Farrell's critical declines are fancifully explained in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 1990 essay "Canon Confidential: A Sam Slade Caper," a private eye pastiche that considers the process and stakes of literary canon formation. At the end of his investigation, Slade finds his way to "a vast industrial atrium" where "thousands and thousands of books" judged unworthy of the canon are being ground into pulp.^[58] Among the once-lionized books riding the conveyor belt to obscurity, Slade sees "fat novels by James Jones and Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell and Pearl Buck," as well as "thin novels by Nelson Algren and William Saroyan" and other "literary has-beens of our age." Both Farrell and Algren, apparently, fall into this doomed category; they will soon be as one, so to speak, with those who went down on the Eastland and the Chicora. Slade discovers that the canon is a fixed game, "the biggest scam since the 1919 World Series" (fittingly enough, given the

iconic resonance of that disillusioning event for Algren), a massive conspiracy managed by a few well-placed critics who serve a shadowy conglomerate. Although he was less amused by the prospect than Gates, Algren anticipated by three decades this view of his critical fate. At midcentury he already felt the conveyor belt moving beneath him, and by the 1960s he considered himself a forgotten man of American literature.

The Milwaukee Avenue Corridor

This is the Nelson Algren—succeeded but persistent—who confronts Art Shay on the expressway, who made literature from the neighborhood beneath the wheels of Shay's car. The transformation of that neighborhood around 1523 Wabansia—actually a congeries of neighborhoods between Humboldt Park and the North Branch of the Chicago River, arranged in a rough triangle around the diagonal spine of lower Milwaukee Avenue—encapsulates the postwar transformation of the urban village.

The lower Milwaukee Avenue corridor, just northwest of the Loop and uncomfortably close to the Near North Side, lay within the giant half-circle of blight identified by city planners in the late 1940s and 1950s. To the redevelopment-minded eye, the Milwaukee Avenue corridor at midcentury fit the profile of the obsolescent industrial-era landscape. Many of the residential buildings in the area were old and overcrowded by conventional standards. Manufacturing plants and tanneries that lined the banks of the North Branch and Goose Island were part of the belt of industrial infrastructure that had to be cleared away from the service-oriented core. Blacks and Hispanics—regarded by planners as indicators and agents of blight—were beginning to move into the area's oldest and most decayed housing.

The Milwaukee Avenue corridor, then, provided a good example of the industrial neighborhood order in late middle age. After the Chicago fire, the area had developed rapidly around rail, streetcar, and elevated lines. It was settled in turn by waves of German, Scandinavian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrants. The various groups supplanted, jostled, and mixed with one another over the years as new immigrants took up residence in the older sections on lower Milwaukee and more-established groups moved northwest away from the Loop. Poles dominated the area by the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Avenue corridor became the city's—and perhaps America's—leading Polish neighborhood. Not only were the local parishes, St. Stanislaus Kostka and Holy Trinity, the city's most distinguished Polish parishes, but the Polish Roman Catholic Union and its rival the Polish National Alliance established offices a few blocks apart near the three-way intersection of Milwaukee Avenue, Ashland Avenue, and Division Street. The

concentration of Polish institutions and businesses near that intersection gave it the title of Polish Downtown. More generally, the area between Humboldt Park and the North Branch became known as the Polish, or Polonia, Triangle.

Nelson Algren moved to the area in 1940, living at various addresses (including 1523 Wabansia) until he left Chicago for good in 1975. His ancestry was Swedish and Jewish, not Polish, and although he had been raised in the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago (around Seventy-first Street and Cottage Grove on the South Side and, later, on North Troy Street on the far Northwest Side), his presence in the urban village went against the grain of his class trajectory. His father was an industrial worker—a machinist for Otis Elevator, Packard, McCormick Reaper, and Yellow Cab—but Nelson Algren's degree from the University of Illinois and his access to G.I. Bill benefits after the war destined him for the middle class. Algren's presence among immigrant-ethnic workers in the Polish urban village, face to face with his literary material, was the result of a conscious effort on the writer's part, not some mystical or genetically encoded identity. He had expended considerable effort to establish himself in the urban village, but after the war it began to change around him.

In the early 1950s, when Algren had lived in the area for more than a decade and was enjoying his greatest acclaim as a Chicago novelist, a combination of ethnic succession, economic change, and physical redevelopment began to work a profound change on the neighborhood he had written about in Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, and The Man with the Golden Arm. Puerto Ricans and blacks began moving into older and more run-down sections abandoned by Italians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Some of the Puerto Rican arrivals were part of the massive out-migration from Puerto Rico that began after World War II, but others were Chicagoans who had been displaced by urban renewal on the North Side and by the growth of the black ghetto on the South Side.^[59] The departure of white ethnics accelerated when construction began on the Northwest Expressway, later renamed the Kennedy, in the late 1950s. This highway cut a path through the stretch of neighborhood between Milwaukee Avenue and the North Branch, further separating the "blighted" Near Northwest Side from the opulent Near North Side as it connected the Loop to the northwest suburbs and to the new O'Hare Airport. The parishioners of St. Stanislaus managed to divert the expressway around their church and school, which were to have been demolished, the first of several fights over urban renewal projects in the area that carried well into the 1970s. These struggles were typical of the urban crisis of the 1960s, as were other, more violent conflicts: "the first major urban Puerto Rican riot in the history of the United States" took place on Division Street in the summer of 1966.^[60]

Since the 1950s, the Milwaukee Avenue corridor has taken on the conventional aspect of the new inner city's social landscape, with the old inner city

half-submerged beneath. Postwar construction—especially government projects like the Kennedy Expressway, the Noble Street housing projects, new community centers and schools—has been grafted onto older landscapes of industrial-era vintage: the residential mix of low brick apartment houses and bungalows; the older homes and graystones around Wicker Park and Humboldt Park; the institutional infrastructure of churches, commercial buildings, older schools. Buildings along the North Branch and on Goose Island that once housed industrial plants have fallen into disrepair, but others house new uses: a brewery and restaurant, loft spaces, even a small high-tech steel plant (a return of heavy industry, much changed, to the inner city).

A similar mix of persistence and succession characterizes the area's population. In parts of the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, Hispanic and black neighborhood orders have both replaced and layered onto the old white-ethnic order. People of Eastern European descent still live in the area, more immigrants from the Old Country have arrived since the end of the Cold War, Polish and Ukrainian businesses remain on the principal shopping strips, and descendants of the old parishioners still worship, among variegated congregations, at the old churches. The existence of white-ethnic enclaves has provided, as it so often does, a kind of social and institutional scaffold (composed of good food, an infrastructure of neighborhood services, and the reassuring presence of white faces) for an influx of artists and service professionals. A sizable stretch of neighborhoods in the corridor, especially in Wicker Park and Bucktown, were in the 1980s and early 1990s the city's "hottest" area for "artists initially attracted by cheap rents and professionals who fled the crowded lakefront"—people who might once have insisted on a lakefront location but who went inland in search of good, affordable housing stock and satisfying urban texture.^[61] The Chicago Tribune Magazine's account of their arrival in Algren's old neighborhood, accompanied by a photograph of "[t]uckpointing at 1958 W Evergreen Ave., former home of the late Chicago author Nelson Algren," finds "an edgy quality here, a tension in the air, perhaps a product of the forced interaction of longtime white ethnic, Hispanic and black residents and the more-recent arrivals.^[62] "

On the one hand, then, Nelson Algren's neighborhood disappeared: in the decades after World War II it has been broken up and rebuilt (and tuckpointed) in significant ways and repopulated with a new cast of characters; the white ethnics of the old neighborhood have moved away in great numbers; the industrial plants have for the most part fallen into disuse or been demolished. What remains of the old order has been transformed and recontextualized by the new social landscape in which it persists. On the other hand, the old neighborhood remains, both in the interstices of the new order and as the bony substructure underlying layers of physical development and population typical of postindustrial Chicago. Art Shay, passing through the Milwaukee Avenue corridor as

he heads downtown on the Kennedy, is driving parallel to the elevated train lines built by the Metropolitan Elevated Company at the turn of the century. The El trains run on this original structure between Division Street and Logan Square, next to Milwaukee Avenue and through the heart of the corridor, making connections to O'Hare Airport and the redeveloped Loop; they run everywhere through Algren's prose, as well, making connections to the trains that run through Sister Carrie and to the railroad city that confronted both Carrie and Dreiser.

3
Closing Time: The Man with the Golden Arm

Even as early as 1947 . . . one could see changes on the horizon.
Squires et al., Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline

Some nights she could scarcely breathe for seeing the flat unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.
For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it.
Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

Nelson Algren moved to the Near Northwest Side in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression decade and just before the United States embarked on a war effort that would help to drive the transformation of Chicago in the decades to come. He set his best work in the Polish urban villages near the intersection of Milwaukee and Division. That body of mature work culminated in The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren's most virtuosic and best-received book. Published in 1949, Golden Arm captures the delicately balanced feel of a tran-

sitional postwar moment, as dramatic movements of people and capital began to shape the long urban crisis associated with postindustrial transformation. That crisis was, as well, a literary-historical one: part of Golden Arm's apocalyptic charge derives from its sense that Chicago realism had reached its terminus as the industrial city in which it thrived entered into a postwar decline.

Golden Arm simultaneously encourages and frustrates the impulse to trace its relation to its historical moment. The novel encourages that impulse because its characters move through the neighborhood under the threat that something large, terrible, and obscure is about to happen. I argue below that this sense of imminent, unspecified disaster gives expression to a set of anxieties about the transformation of both industrial Chicago and Chicago literature on the prewar model that Algren identified as "his" Chicago. As this chapter's epigraphs suggest, the novel "sees changes on the horizon," but much of Golden Arm's power derives precisely from the novel's restricted representational range and its characters' restricted understanding. The impending catastrophe always seems to be taking shape just out of sight over the novel's horizons, even as those horizons close in until they have crushed the life out of the neighborhood types trapped by them.

The challenge of articulating Golden Arm's engagement with its historical moment is that the novel does not have City on the Make's historical imagination. Golden Arm assumes a pervasive exhaustion rather than identifying and figuring the engines driving this change. Algren does not pull back from the novel's action to fill us in on the deep background: there are no passages in Golden Arm that lay out in overview the situation of midcentury Chicago as does City on the Make or as Dreiser sketches nineteenth-century Chicago's "peculiar qualifications of growth" in chapter 2 of Sister Carrie.^[1]  Golden Arm does not offer representations of urban renewal, deindustrialization, or suburbanization. The novel does leave the Polish urban village to visit the Lake Street ghetto but does not devote its energies to bringing the reader up to speed on black migration, white flight, and other relevant aspects of the midcentury encounter between the white-ethnic neighborhood order and the black inner city. The novel does assess the situation of white-ethnic industrial workers during the postwar transformation, but it conducts the assessment without recourse to scene-setting historical argument.

These narratives and historical processes are not directly available within the diegesis as explanations for the sense of crisis enfolding the Division Street rooming house in which most of the novel's characters live. The "flat unerring line" of the vista outside Sophie Majcinek's window renders her breathless with fear and a sense of entrapment, but the messages the landscape sends to her remain below the threshold of understanding: the telephone wires' "endless humming" is an insane murmuring, never "saying a word above a whisper that

a really sensible person might understand." The "city too was somehow crippled of late . . . . Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it,"^[2] but the logic ordering this turn for the worse operates at one remove from the novel's diegesis, maddeningly beyond Sophie's and the novel's range of perception. Golden Arm's engagement with its historical moment takes place at a similar remove: the novel engages indirectly with the postwar transformations of Chicago as it imagines and enacts the exhaustion of industrial Chicago's characteristic genres of life and literature. These include Nelson Algren's two "old neighborhoods," the white-ethnic neighborhood order and the Chicago realist tradition.

Golden Arm takes place in an interim between the beginning of the end of "the old days and the old ways" and their final passing. This interim fits neatly with the situation of midcentury industrial urbanism. In the years just after the war, after more than fifty years of development and on the heels of a wartime boom in manufacturing, the industrial neighborhood order was still in full flower, but at the same time it showed signs of erosion, change, and eventual breakup under the action of suburbanization, long-term deindustrialization, inner-city redevelopment (in its early stages), expansion of the second ghetto, and the accelerating dispersal of immigrant-ethnic cultures into postwar America's expanding middle class. Golden Arm both makes a living portrait of the entrenched white-ethnic neighborhood order and imagines its final collapse —at a moment when observers were beginning to see that the way of life harbored in the vast system of ethnic preserves would be transformed as the postindustrial metropolis began to take shape.

On the one hand, then, Golden Arm grounds itself in a historical place and time. It maps the neighborhood landscape of the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, marks carefully the round of seasons from fall of 1946 to spring of 1948, and plots movements and figures that would become central to representation of the postwar inner city: the twilight of the white-ethnic neighborhood order; a visit to the expanding black ghetto; the life and times of a soon-to-be canonical street type, the criminal intravenous drug user.

On the other hand, Golden Arm takes place in an imagined place and time: a city beneath the El, lit by arc lamps and neon, gridded by the El's iron framework and criss-crossing wires; a city where it is always October, somewhere between the first chilly intimations of the year's decline and the dead of winter. This imagined city represents a final refinement and reduction of the composite Chicago of feeling mapped by Algren's Chicago tradition, completing several movements readable in the span of texts connecting Algren to Sandburg and Dreiser by way of Farrell and Wright: a gradual movement to the neighborhoods and the street, an increasing constriction of landscape and horizon, a shift from prospective to retrospective modes. Golden Arm thus also inhabits its

historical moment as a culminative text that proposes and embodies the exhaustion of a literary tradition that Algren and others associated with industrial Chicago.

The following discussion of Golden Arm undertakes to account for the novel's extreme character: its portrait of neighborhood people in a condition of dire extremity, its self-conception as occupying the last extremity of the Chicago tradition, its extreme habits of language and metaphor. It will be impossible in this space to do exegetical justice to Golden Arm, which remains one of the most disciplined, sustained, and virtuosic pieces of overwriting in the urban literature—an extreme novel, deserving and rewarding extended critical treatments. I will confine myself, in the interests of this chapter's and this study's larger project, to exploring the sources and meanings of the sense of ultimacy running everywhere through the book. I will read Golden Arm as a sort of requiem for Nelson Algren's Chicago, a combination of historical and textual cities that have come at last to "closing time." To that end, I will begin with the novel's claustrophobic portrait of the old neighborhood in decline and then work outward along the textual connections that bind the novel to City on the Make, Sister Carrie, and the larger literature and history of Chicago.

The Narrowing Hours

Golden Arm recounts the decline of poker dealer Francis Majcinek, known to all as Frankie Machine, a son of Polish immigrants who lives on Division Street in the heart of the Milwaukee Avenue corridor. Although it devotes much of its energy to texturing subplots and explorations of the neighborhood order, Golden Arm takes dramatic shape around a story of crime and punishment. Frankie, a morphine addict, semi-unintentionally kills his supplier, Nifty Louie, in a desperate rage one winter night. Solly "Sparrow" Saltskin, Frankie's best friend, is a habitual criminal of the most petty sort—dog-stealer, shoplifter— but the police at the Saloon Street station pressure him with the threat of a long prison term into implicating Frankie in the murder. Frankie goes into hiding in the Lake Street ghetto, on the Near West Side, a short ride on the El to the south of Frankie's neighborhood. He is in the company of Molly Novotny, a young barfly, who supports them for a while by dancing in a black strip joint, but the combination of his weakness and the blackmailing scheme of Molly's ex-lover Drunkie John, who discovers their hiding place, forces him into the open. Finally, wounded by the police and unable to acquire the morphine he needs to carry on, Frankie hangs himself from the chicken-wire ceiling of a West Madison Street flophouse stall. Frankie's wife, Sophie, meanwhile, has been going irretrievably mad and is committed to an insane asylum, where she withdraws into near-catatonia, counting cards and reciting all the names of neighborhood characters she knows in the vague hope that completing these cata-

logues will somehow return her to the world she has lost. Molly and Sparrow survive, although both face jail terms.

This narrative plays out in the October city. In Golden Arm, industrial urbanism grinds on in the long moment between last call and closing time. The city's mechanisms continue like clockwork: "the music and the traffic passed, great freighters forced the river ice, the murmurous bridges strained slowly upward, paused and slowly fell. The clocks in all the railroad depots were synchronized to a second's fraction" (314). Except for Sophie's fear of "the spades" moving in (to which this discussion will return), Golden Arm does not figure the massive transformations already under way in the neighborhoods of the Near Northwest Side. There are no abandoned and razed industrial buildings, the "rusty iron heart" of City on the Make's final image, on view in the Majcineks' neighborhood. (Such sights were beginning to appear in the Milwaukee Avenue corridor and catching the attention of city planners during the 1940s and 1950s.) Rather than imagining the moment of the rusty iron heart, in which the machines stop, Golden Arm imagines an extended winding-down in which the human orders that took form around the machines approach exhaustion at their logical extremes.

"That was the way things were because that was how things had always been. Which was why they could never be any different. Neither God, war, nor the ward super could work any deep change on West Division Street." The traditional mechanics of life on Division Street dictate that the ward super, the Democratic machine's local functionary, "puts in the fix for all right-thinking hustlers and the Lord, in turn, puts in the fix for the super" (7). Small-timers like Frankie Machine and Sparrow know their place in the process. The two friends are in the Saloon Street station lockup, as Golden Arm begins, because their boss, Zero Schwiefka, fell behind on his payoffs to the police. As low-ranking subalterns, they understand that they have to suffer for this failure to conduct business as usual. The ward machine—an arrangement among a local set of predominantly Polish politicians, criminals, and police—runs relentlessly, like the machines of the resonantly named Endless Belt and Leather works near Schwabatski's rooming house, at 1860 West Division Street, where Frankie lives. Frankie and Sparrow navigate among the moving parts of the industrial neighborhood order, imagined as a perpetual-motion machine that constantly expresses and manufactures its political arrangements as well as its factory products.

However, there are new things in the postwar world beyond the understanding of West Division Street's traditional gods. Neither "the super's God nor the super" knows about "the hypo Frankie kept, among other souvenirs, at the bottom of a faded duffel bag in another veteran's room" (8). On the one hand, the drug addiction and eventual suicide of the ironically nicknamed Frankie Machine do not interrupt the West Division Street machine's smooth working.

The Chicago of the neighborhood novelists has always ground up people like him. On the other hand, the narrowing and final collapse of Frankie's world, a deadly consummation accelerated by his morphine addiction, suggests a more general exhaustion. Golden Arm imagines the end of a way of life for a representative cast of characters whose Division Street rooming house suggests the urban village in microcosm. The winnowing of the weak and damaged who populate the novel's world leaves the aging machinery of the industrial neighborhood order to operate in a wasteland, like the ceaselessly passing empty El trains.

For all the massive, inhuman permanence of its perpetual-motion machines, Golden Arm is pervaded by a troubled sense of imminent, thoroughgoing, and ultimately unspecified change. "'We got all kinds of new ways to do things since you came back"' (15), Sparrow tells Frankie, the returned veteran, and Frankie explains their friendship by saying that Sparrow "'Knows the way it used to be 'n how it's gettin' now' "(10). " 'You fellows remember me?'" asks a lush in the lockup who " 'used to be a night watchman on the old Wabash"' and receives no reply because "those who remembered were gone with his strength, all down the drain with last year's rain; friends and family and foes together and the blood soon to follow the rains" (19-20). The detritus of an entire familiar world—friends, family, foes, the old Wabash railroad resonant of the industrial city's vigorous youth—washes down the drain, having been "ground slowly in the great city's grinder" (16). Characters move dreamily through familiar evolutions under this pall, each imprecisely aware that something has been lost, gone wrong, or slipped out of reach.

At Antek Witwicki's Tug and Maul, downstairs from Schwabatski's rooming house, the specter of the new Club Safari across the street unsettles the barflies. Antek's remains a bastion of"the old days and the old ways" reaching back well into the nineteenth century—no neon or fluorescent lights, "plenty of butchershop sawdust on the floor and an old-fashioned golden goboon for every four bar stools," and no TV ("'I give it an honest chance,"' Antek says of television, "'and it don't work"' [44].) The Safari is all indirect lighting, mood music, and tablecloths; there are no drinks on the house, and customers gamble for drinks with a bar game called "twenty-six" (the ubiquity of which in Chicago's downtown night spots drove A. J. Liebling into a tavern purist's rage). Upstairs at the Safari, Nifty Louie Fomorowski reminisces about all the old neighborhood gangsters he has outlived and sells morphine to junkies, Frankie Machine among them. Frankie's youth and force having been spent on ceaseless petty hustling and in the war (he is in his late twenties when the novel begins and beginning to go soft under the strain), he goes to Louie to buy a respite that Antek's traditional alcohol can no longer provide. "'Fix me. Make it stop. Fix me"' (56), Frankie asks: sometimes he wants to be strong enough to be a working cog; sometimes he wants the machines to stop.

Frankie, like every one of the novel's characters, can specify local and personal sources of the regret and nostalgia for a better time that beset him. In particular, he regrets the drunken night at the war's end when, having had too many of Antek's A-Bomb Specials, he had insisted on going for a ride and crashed spectacularly on Ashland Avenue. The crash put his wife Sophie in a wheelchair, although nobody can tell if she was crippled by her injuries or by the need to bind the habitually negligent but now guilt-stricken Frankie to her once and for all. Dealing the cards in Zero Schwiefka's all-night every-night poker game, where the players' talk turns to nostalgia for long-dead hustlers and the Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s, Frankie misses "the old days, the old ways, before all the stoplights turned to red and there was still time between deals for a laugh or two over a nickel beer" (117). When he and Sophie lurched out of Antek's at closing time on the night of the accident, the jukebox was playing "one last sad bar of the final song of a world that had known neither A-bombs nor A-Bomb Specials," a song that lamented "There's nothing left for me/Of days that used to be" (67).

Frankie's personal story of decline speaks to a general malaise. He universalizes his own regret—the stoplight he missed becomes "all the stoplights" in the world—and it speaks to similar feelings in the other players. The mood of the game, like the mood of the novel, takes on a desperate endgame quality: "Thus in the narrowing hours of the night the play became faster and steeper and an air of despair, like sickroom odor where one lies who can never be well again, moved across the light green baize, touched each player ever so lightly and settled down in a tiny whiff of cigar smoke about the dealer's hands" (119). Both space (the "sickroom") and time (the "narrowing hours of the night") seem to contract, and the whole process proceeds "faster and steeper." The narrowing world in which the players move has that "sickroom odor": that which has gone so obscurely wrong can never be put right again.

Sophie, wheelchair bound and confined to her apartment as if to a sickroom, also reads a more general disaster into their smash-up. "Ever since that night [of the accident]," she thinks, "everyone had become afraid of closing time everywhere, of having the lights go out in the middle of the dance while the chimes of all the churches mourned: a requiem for everyone trapped beneath the copper-colored sky of noon or the night-lit ties of the El" (97). Golden Arm, and all of Algren's postwar writing about Chicago, is pervaded by this unanimity and ubiquity—"everyone," "everywhere," "all the churches"—that generalize the travails of a few hard-luck nobodies into a citywide drama. Each mean reverse and failure multiplies itself endlessly through the novel's known world. That world's tightly circumscribed landscape, confined for the most part to a few blocks on Division Street west of Milwaukee Avenue, also extends by suggestion as far as the endlessly multiplied girders of the El and neon tavern signs reach: in a novel that imagines only "the neighborhoods," its landscape reach-

ing almost but not quite to the Loop, Frankie's neighborhood serves as the type of everybody's neighborhood.

Church bells mark "closing time," the end of time that the neighborhood obscurely fears. Dozing at the window as the bells ring late one night, Sophie remembers her years of courtship with Frankie "like remembering an alien land." In that alien land—the same urban village they live in now, but remembered as a kind of Old Country—time passed in a seasonal round of Polish Catholic religious observances and the singing of "soft and wild ancestral songs." Together, "she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St. Stephen's for Father Simon's blessing." In Sophie's reconstruction of them, these were "years when everything was so well arranged. When people who did right were rewarded and those who did wrong were punished. When everyone, in the long run, got exactly what was coming to him, no more or no less. God weighed virtue and sin then to the fraction of the ounce, like Majurcek the Grocer weighing sugar" (62). In the hindsight afforded by the story of decline, the old neighborhood's landscape of churches, factories, and crowded walk-ups becomes an ethnic paradise ruled by that icon of neighborhood nostalgia, the corner grocer, as presiding deity.

Sophie is the novel's most sophisticated mythographer of decline. Haunted by echoes of prewar tunes drifting through the rooming house from the radio of "some old fool in pin curls" who "fancied it was 1917 again" (94), she tells herself a story of a better, larger, unbroken era receding into the past. Laboriously pasting newspaper articles and other raw materials into her "Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence," she constructs an account of the city's decline from order into chaos. The neighborhood landscape itself, not just the newspapers, speaks to Sophie in a coded language of apocalypse. Church bells and factory sounds, the girders and lights of the El structure marching away into the distance, the roar and spectacle of the trains, one of the city's countless cross-hatching wires tapping on the window, the thumping of ceiling fans from Antek's bar downstairs, kitchen noise and radio music drifting through the rooming house—she synthesizes these messages into grand visions of ruin. A passing fire engine suggests a second Chicago fire: she rouses the rooming house by shrieking, "'It's goin' up! Loop 'n all! It's all goin' up,"' and, when told it was merely a short-circuit down the street, laments that "'The whole fire was in my head'" (241). There is, indeed, in her head a disaster on a par with the fire of 187 I, when the city did "go up," downtown and all. A secret destiny, almost revealed by certain cryptic signs but finally inscrutable, threatens the world she knows, the Chicago that took form in the Great Fire's aftermath.

Sophie, then, is a type of urban intellectual. She observes the novel's material city outside her window, traverses textual cities in what she reads, assembles her stories—and even a book—out of both evidence and fantasies. She ends up in a mental hospital because the stories she tells herself, the city of feel-

ing she imagines, lose touch with the city of fact she inhabits. She retreats into delusions that alternate between paranoid fantasies of unseen oppressors and achingly sharp recall of treasured memories. If that makes her sound like Nelson Algren, soon to be alienated from both the city he knew and the critical consensus of the 1950s, it is because she inhabits his historical moment and does parallel work with a similar anxiety about what comes next.

Although the inner lives of people like the Majcineks were hidden from his view in the "juxtaposed dimnesses" of the neighborhoods, Liebling captured both Sophie's and Algren's turn of mind in his crack about Chicagoans "left in the plight of the Greeks at the beginning of history, when the gods commenced ceasing to manifest themselves."^[3] Waking from a doze and looking out the window at the El, hearing church bells tolling midnight, Sophie feels her life and the history of her world condensed into one autumnal moment:

And her whole life, from her careless girlhood until this crippled night, seemed caught within that fading chime. For now, as though no time had passed but the time it had taken to dream it, the leaves were stiff with age again, sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away.

"God has forgotten us all," Sophie told herself quietly. (99)

Moving out of the Neighborhood

The hardscrabble losers who populate Golden Arm are not the kinds of people who need to worry about breaking up the neighborhood by moving to the suburbs. The novel does not, as so many identity-obsessed white ethnics of the 1970s did, lament the postwar attenuation of immigrant-ethnic cultures by upward social mobility and dispersal from the slum.^[4] But the novel does offer a story of a neighborhood's dissolution, and, in a text that confines itself so rigorously to imagining the urban village as the vessel in which industrial urbanism is contained, that dissolution reads as a world-ending catastrophe in which the content of neighborhood life runs out of the broken vessel and down the drain. The novel does not imagine transformation as the overlap of orders: it imagines only half of that process, the end of what is, not the shape of what is to come. In that sense, Golden Arm develops the literary possibilities suggested by a familiar formula—"there goes the neighborhood"—so often applied by Americans to the shifting of neighborhood orders that characterizes ethnic succession, suburbanization, and other aspects of the dramatic urban transformations that were already under way at midcentury.

Golden Arm is the most extreme of neighborhood novels, representing a last step in the Chicago tradition's gradual move over time to the neighborhoods. It almost entirely eschews the metropolitan for the local, reducing Chicago in essence to the area around Division and Milwaukee and a handful of secondary

locations bound together and contained by the El. Even Farrell's and Wright's characters occasionally leave the neighborhood, especially to go downtown; the Loop never appears in Golden Arm. Frankie's world conforms to the insular model of the neighborhood order drawn by Mike Royko in Boss, an order that Royko describes as beginning to disappear precisely at the moment of Golden Arm's publication. Following Royko's model, the neighborhood in Golden Arm forms a self-contained system with its own main streets (Division, Milwaukee), church (St. Stephen's), taverns (Antek's, Widow Wieczorek's), factory workplaces (Endless Belt and Leather, an icehouse, the conveyor company), police station (the Saloon Street station), and local types: war hero (Frankie by default: he was wounded and no one else seems to have served), sports heroes (the hapless Endless Belt and Leather Invincibles), drunks (Drunkie John, Umbrellas Kvorka, many more), trollop (Molly Novotny), village idiot (Sparrow, Poor Peter Schwabatski, the simple-minded Umbrellas), and so on. This neighborhood order has arrived at the paradoxical state in which, although nothing changes in the internal mechanics of West Division Street, the end of time approaches.

In the fall of Frankie Machine and his associates can be read a prophecy of the fall of an urban people they represent, as the mechanical action of business as usual grinds up the way of life created by the Polish immigrants (the Majcineks' parents among them) who lived and labored in industrial Chicago's urban villages. The nameless apocalypse imagined by Sophie and the mundane downfall of a few Chicagoans recounted by Golden Arm express in fantastically melodramatic form the consequences of a then-incipient historical process in which the biggest perpetual-motion machine of all, the city itself (guided by the progrowth coalition of business interests and Democratic machine, of which the West Division Street political machine forms a small piece), reconfigured itself for a postindustrial age. This reconfiguration transformed the urban world remembered by the narrating voice of City on the Make, by Sophie, by Royko, and by other purveyors of decline. The railroad had always been the Chicago literary tradition's particular figure of the city as a machine for making money, and the complete domination of Golden Arm's terminal landscape by the El suggests that the industrial city is machining all its orders into ruins as it replaces them with new ones. The pieces will wash "down the drain with last year's rain," passing into history.

Frankie himself represents an aging version of Carl Sandburg's personified Chicago—the young, big-shouldered, productively laboring man. In his late twenties, Frankie has begun to go soft in the belly, his facade of toughness fools no one except the adoring Sparrow, and he has lost the will to stand up to the work of living in Chicago, relying on morphine to make his talented arm hold up. He is, in an updating of Sandburg's "young fighter who has never lost a battle," "tough and weak, like . . . a fighter who knows he's beat trying to convince

everyone he can still take more" (316). Furthermore, like so many of the novel's characters (and like so many of the young male protagonists of the neighborhood novels), he differs from Sandburg's laboring man in that he cannot or will not do honest work. There are hard-working people in Golden Arm, but they form a nearly faceless minority. Sparrow, staggering drunkenly into the rooming house late at night, identifies some of its residents as such while he tries loudly not to disturb their sleep: "all the doors belonged to hard-working people . . . . All the people worked too hard, all the people deserved something nice in their declining years"( 129). The keyword "declining," appearing in conjunction with "hard-working," reinforces the message sent by the echoes of Sandburg. Frankie, personifying "the city that works" and the urban village, shows every sign of having been used up by the city of machines.

Frankie and Sophie are relatively young—not yet thirty when Frankie hangs himself—and Molly Novotny younger, but the pattern of their lives has already been set. In each successive Chicago novel—Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning ( 942), and Golden Arm (1949)—Algren's characters start out older, more defeated, more aware that their lives run on tracks according to a rigid pattern almost legible in the El-bounded landscape.^[5] Frankie's industrial Chicago is similarly old before its time but not yet on its last legs, the contracting neighborhood order slowly destroying rather than reproducing itself. The novel's prematurely aging, childless, for the most part unemployed characters move through the once-familiar, once-sustaining neighborhood terrain with the regretful nostalgia of people twice their age.

The two families of Frankie's upstairs neighbor Violet frame this extended interim in a generational progression from decline to collapse. Her first husband, the doddering immigrant industrial worker Stash Koskozka, caricatures the older generation on its last legs. He only wishes to work at the icehouse, find bargains on cheap food, and live out his days in peace and quiet. He takes inordinate pleasure in rituals of resignation: reading the temperature on his thermometer, tearing the pages off the calendar. ("'I'm glad tearin' days off the calendar is all he wants to tear off"' (156), says Stash's younger rival Sparrow before Vi's sexual vigor wears him out as well.) Stash monitors the weather, a practice given added meaning by Sparrow, who proposes the notion of a changing climate as a metaphor for the largely unspecified changes coming to the old neighborhood. The Tug and Maul's dissolute beer-drinking dog Rumdum, Sparrow claims, has become a barroom regular because he can catch only one particular breed of squirrel, which is "'gettin' kind of rare over here account of the climate changin' so fast,"' leaving Rumdum "'nothin' to do but hang around taverns 'n wait for the climate to change back a little"' (53-54). Even the dogs, unfit to do a dog's work, hang around in bars and wait for the approaching end of time. The hard-working miser Stash, then, reads in his calendar and thermometer the elapsing of his time and his way of life, the passing

of the orderly world as he was taught to conceive of it. Speaking a comic-opera version of immigrant English, and with the imprint of icehouse tongs permanently etched on his jacket (the mark of a job to be rendered obsolete by the postwar boom in household appliances), Stash embodies industrial Chicago's immigrant-ethnic past.

Vi's second family figures the breakup of the neighborhood order. After Stash's death (when he leans too far out the window to take a temperature reading), Vi takes up with her landlord, "Jailer" Schwabatski. The two of them go on the wagon, become Jehovah's Witnesses, and begin saving their money, immediately distancing themselves from the neighborhood's most fundamental institutional and situational bonds—bar, church, subsistence-level hustling— and making them likely candidates for an eventual move out of the neighborhood. (With luck, always in short supply in an Algren novel, they may even make good their escape to Cicero or Berwyn.) Unlike Vi and Stash, Vi and Jailer also form a full-blown family, the novel's only one, but the neighborhood order's inability to reproduce itself recurs in a new form. Jailer has a simpleminded adult son named Poor Peter, whose main activity has been to plant paper daisies on the rooming house's stairways while praying for an indoor rain. The novel's only family thus appears to be at a dead end in relation to the neighborhood, breaking its ties to the old order, offering no prospect of generational continuity, and proposing an embodiment of barrenness in the adult child Poor Peter. Despite his father's efforts to teach him a trade, Peter cannot even fix the rooming house's perpetually loose stair and wishes only to tend paper flowers that refuse to grow. The next generation, like Stash's generation of immigrants, is just waiting for the weather to change.

Vi, still young and vigorous but (like everyone else in the novel) unable to form a family that will reproduce the neighborhood order, takes desperate measures to save herself from a neighborhood order in collapse. Jailer's Division Street rooming house, in which she still remains at the novel's end, has been catastrophically depopulated by the departure of most of the novel's main characters. In a novel that represents the world beyond the neighborhood as a series of terminal institutions—police station, prison, mental hospital, skid row, potter's field—where weakness and entrapment give out into death, moving out of the neighborhood takes on an apocalyptic tenor: Frankie dies; Stash dies; Sophie is committed to the mental hospital; Sparrow, a regular visitor, goes to prison; Molly faces a prison term for helping Frankie avoid the police. The constriction of the novel's landscape gives special meaning to the notion of breaking with the neighborhood: Golden Arm, having completed the Chicago novel's move to the neighborhoods, cannot imagine a viable way of life other than the old neighborhood's.

Sophie, surprisingly, wants to move out of the neighborhood—because she fears that blacks are encroaching on it—but Golden Arm maps no tenable des-

tination for such a move. Her increasing confinement, as the single furnished room in the shadow of the El gives way to the "cornerless room" of insanity in the mental hospital, illustrates the narrowness of the novel's landscape. When Frankie and Sparrow are arrested together for the last time, on a serious charge entailing a long jail term for Sparrow, Frankie tells him "'Looks like you're goin' to move out of this crummy neighborhood just like you always said you was goin' to"' (266). The continuity of prison and neighborhood compounds the joke. Prison figuratively falls within the boundaries of the El: the Elbounded city is "an open-roofed jail," and the jailhouse interiors double the El's form—from the bars endlessly repeating like the El's girders to the bulbs burning "in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier" (1 5) like the signal lamps along the tracks. Early in the novel, when Frankie and Sparrow leave the police station after having been locked up overnight, they mount "the narrow steps toward a narrower freedom. On the street they waited for a northbound car" (25). They move seamlessly from prison to the track-bound streetcar and thus to Division Street and the El once more. The novel, like Sophie, cannot imagine anything outside the El's "flat unerring line."

The only alternative to the Polish urban village represented in Golden Arm is the Lake Street ghetto on the Near West Side—the degraded condition of which Lait and Mortimer describe so extravagantly, and not the place to which Sophie, who fears blacks, would move—and the Lake Street El runs, as well, by the door of Frankie and Molly's ghetto hideout. Frankie, an exemplar of white-ethnic Chicago, moves to the ghetto; Sophie worries about racial succession: the novel considers the encounter of the old and new inner cities in the form of an exchange between neighborhoods, one shrinking and one growing, under the shadow of the El. The railroad, condensing the inhumanly regular, irresistible action of urban money-making and power-ordering machines, also contains the inner city's transformation. Fittingly, when Frankie makes his final run from the police closing in on his Lake Street hideout, the El's iron stairs guide a policeman's misaimed bullet into his heel, hastening the final narrowing of his world to nothing.

The movement of blacks into the West Side that forms a key element in Chicago Confidential's account of Chicago's decline becomes, like Frankie and Sophie's car crash, an element in Sophie's story of decline. Anticipating the reception he is sure to get from Sophie when he returns home from a night in the lockup for a minor offense, Frankie mimics Sophie's typical tirade: "'If she starts that screamin' about What was it for this time Why don't I get a broom in my tail 'n go to work on the legit Why don't we move out of the neighborhood the spades are movin' in it's gettin' smokier every day 'n if it wasn't for me she could be out dancin' . . ."' (26). In that last breathless phrase, the car crash and Sophie's paralysis run together with the encroachment of blacks from their domain farther south along the El tracks to suggest the breadth of provenance

for Sophie's sense of a world in decline. Her personal encounter with the city's unyielding terrain—the crash occurred when Frankie had scraped a trolley (a close cousin of the El) and then plowed into a light standard and a billboard—conspires with a broad social transformation (the neighborhood's "gettin' smokier") to ring in closing time for the order she idealizes as a lost world of her youth, in which she was always dancing or singing or going to church.

Sophie's fear of racial succession, and her use of it to specify a larger anxiety about coming change, suggests that the notion of moving out of the neighborhood also derives a special apocalyptic charge from the novel's historical moment. Chicago at midcentury was a city in flux, with whites and blacks beginning to move in large numbers and coming into conflict at the boundaries of changing neighborhoods. Golden Arm does not imagine any blacks in the Polish urban village. As far as the reader knows, these rumored new arrivals in the old neighborhood, like the second Chicago fire, exist only in Sophie's head (as opposed to the blacks in the Lake Street ghetto, who exist outside her experience).^[6] In Sophie's reasoning, racial succession is not so much a proximate cause as an effect of decline: her feverish logic suggests that the grocer-god's withdrawal broke the world, making it possible for Frankie to ruin her life and for "the dark people" to come. However, Sophie's conviction that, since the accident, everyone everywhere is afraid of closing time resonates with the kind of anxiety historically inspired in midcentury Chicago's white-ethnic neighborhoods by the prospect of racial succession.^[7] In the narrowing world of Golden Arm, to think about incipient change and to think about moving out of the neighborhood means to conceive of a local apocalypse, either imminent or already in effect, that has pushed the "old days and the old ways" of the urban village almost out of sight into the past.

The Slope of the Years

Toward the end of Golden Arm, when the police are looking for Frankie because he has killed Nifty Louie and run off with Molly Novotny and what is left of the neighborhood is collapsing around her, Sophie Majcinek goes completely mad. Waking in the "low, sad light" of her room in the mental hospital "'at the end of the Irving Park [El] line"' (322), Sophie tries to work back along the path of her mental collapse to a sense of order. Figuratively, she tries to take the Irving Park El back to the old neighborhood. She tells herself that the "low animal moaning" from the next room is "that Drunkie John beating that poor hide of a Molly Novotny again" and draws a neighborhood moral: "'If he loves her, what are a few blows?' Sophie thought with a sudden clarity. 'If a man tells you you're his—what are a few slaps to that?' " (313). The superimposition of her rooming house neighbors on the mental hospital's terrain provides "sudden clarity." She further pursues clarity by telling the nurse "all the

names she knew," running through the novel's main characters, supporting cast, and a few others we never meet. These last—Chester from  Conveyor, Shudefski from Viaduct—suggest that the catalogue extends out into an entire industrial neighborhood order: a people living among conveyor belts and railroad viaducts. Last on the list comes "'Francis Majcinek. We got married in church'" (313), a church we know to be Old St. Stephen's. Closing her catalogue with Old St. Stephen's, the centerpiece of both her rhapsodic neighborhood nostalgia and the closing-time scenario in which church bells toll a requiem for her people, Sophie discovers with regretful clarity that even the neighborhood of feeling she constructs in her mind has arrived at the end of the line.

The same might be said of Algren's literary-historical situation as he understood it. Sophie's "neighbors" include not only the people of the changing Milwaukee Avenue corridor who provided Algren with material for his literary work but also Studs Lonigan, Bigger Thomas, Jurgis Rudkus, Carrie Meeber, and the other citizens of his Chicago tradition's composite city of feeling. This latter group of fictional characters forms a kind of shadow contingent continuous with the list of neighborhood characters Sophie recites in the madhouse, and their stories similarly form a shadow text continuous with her "Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence": Native Son's grisly and titillating interracial murder, The Jungle's horror stories about the meatpacking business, Sister Carrie's tale of embezzlement, adultery, and suicide involving a well-known actress, and so on. Perhaps the most illuminating relation is between Golden Arm and Sister Carrie. these two texts form end points of the tradition that Algren and others had in mind when they wrote about "Chicago" writers and novels, and especially when they thought of Algren as the last of the Chicago writers. Golden Arm plays out to their conclusions a set of logics put in motion in Sister Carrie, suggesting that the Chicago tradition, like West Division Street, is reaching the terminus of its period with the aging and transformation of industrial Chicago.

Golden Arm shares a set of narrative contours with Sister Carrie. Their stories are by no means identical, but a rough common narrative bridges their differences, and in this sense they can be said to tell the "same" story. In this common narrative, a man (Hurstwood, Frankie) escapes an unsatisfying marriage to be with a younger woman (Carrie, Molly) temporarily allied to a weak paramour (Drouet, Drunkie John). The man spends most of his time in a particular bar (Fitzgerald and Moy's, Antek's), which provides an alternative to an increasingly suffocating and embattled domestic space (the Hurstwoods' stylish house near Lincoln Park on the North Side; the Majcineks' furnished room on the Near Northwest Side). The younger woman trades on her looks and sexual attractiveness to make a living (Carrie accepts lodging and money from Drouet; Molly hustles drinks and probably turns tricks). The crisis comes when the man

semi-unintentionally commits a serious crime (Hurstwood steals from his employers; Frankie kills his dealer), precipitating a drastic break with his home life as he flees with his mistress. Once formed, the illicit couple moves to the limits of the novel's world (New York, the Lake Street ghetto) and sets up housekeeping. The woman goes onto the stage to make a living (Carrie rising in the theater; Molly eking out a living in a strip joint), while the man, at loose ends and increasingly exposed as brittle and unfitted for survival in the streets, wanders about and eventually drifts into more trouble. The man's suicide in a flophouse forms the story's dramatic climax, the arc of his descent into ruin contrasting with the stronger woman's survival.

The two novels place very different systems of emphasis on the narrative elements they do share, so that even the most strikingly similar elements have dissimilar contexts, but the existence of a common narrative serves as a jumping-off-place in comparing two diegeses, two urban worlds. The common narrative schematized above provides a spine along which to begin arranging a reading of Golden Arm together with Sister Carrie. That reading could take many different forms and could indeed expand to great length in comparing the language, spatial and temporal plots, historical moments, and provenance of the two novels. Dreiser and Algren speak to one another in many different ways, from their interlocking plottings of naturalist decline to their shared tendency to mix journalistic-sociological reportage with the languages of melodrama and the urban surreal. The character systems of the two novels also suggest a wealth of comparisons, especially the matched sets of Carrie-Hurstwood-Mrs. Hurstwood and Molly-Frankie-Sophie. What follows, though, is a limited, preliminary comparison intended to establish the two novels as end points for Algren's Chicago tradition. This discussion centers on the novels' complementary landscapes, which, read together, tell a story of decline that plots on the grand scale the flat, unerring line of descent Dreiser calls "the slope of the years." The plotting of Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's fall tells the story in miniature; the plotting of Carrie's rise and Frankie's fall tells it against the backdrop of industrial Chicago's period, from golden age to the end of the line, as defined by midcentury stories of decline told by Algren and others.^[8]

Arriving by train in the traditional manner in 1889, Carrie enters the prospective, expanding landscape of an industrial city on the make: "They were nearing Chicago. Signs were everywhere numerous. Trains flashed by them. Across wide stretches of flat, open prairie they could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward the great city. . . . Frequently there were two-story frame houses standing out in the open fields, without fence or trees, lone outposts of the approaching army of homes."^[9] That city is organized around its industrial infrastructure, indicated here by the converging rail lines that arrange the view. The processes of growth, exchange, and speculation

shape the spokes of development radiating out from the region's central place. The city is organized, as well, around the promise of growing into its role as the model city of industrial modernity, in which all aspects of urban life derive from the city's central function of collecting resources for processing into finished products to be circulated and consumed. Among those raw materials flowing from the hinterland into the city is Carrie, whose small-town training has made her a kind of half-baked urbanite aspiring to bigger things. Philip Fisher has traced the parallels between Carrie's prospects and those of Chicago, which are readable from the train window in the landscape of the developing West Side that offers "a gigantic sketch of its own future":

The Chicago that Dreiser describes is a mediating term. It is simultaneously a synecdoche for America, of which it is the most compact and representative part; and, on the other hand, it is a metonymy for Carrie whose small, future-oriented self with its plans and expectations extending out into reality like trolley tracks and strings of gas lamps, the surrounding city magnifies and gives expression to. . . . [T]he miniaturization of social and political fact is superimposed on the magnification of deeply interior psychological states.^[10]

Reaching Chicago, Carrie enters the complex of social, economic, and cultural orders that characterize industrial urbanism. Having executed a kind of introductory pas de deux with the salesman Drouet during the train ride from Wisconsin to Chicago, during which the two establish the understanding that will underlie their affair, Carrie is crossing a boundary into ways of being that Dreiser presents as emblematic of industrial urbanism. She will learn to finesse the grinding processes of production and consumption as she moves from the "lean and narrow" constrictions of wage labor and neighborhood life to the "walled city" of privilege downtown, and she will do so by making both a more valuable commodity and a more efficient company of herself. She learns to bank on her unspoiled youth (a species of futures trading), to capitalize on the sentimental appeal of the "emotional greatness" she projects on the stage as an actress, to preserve her worth as she trades Drouet for Hurstwood and then drops Hurstwood when he runs out of money and desire. As Carrie and Drouet approach Chicago in the novel's opening chapter, they exchange addresses: that is, they place themselves in relation to the landscape through which they are passing, thus offering an account of relations between themselves and the circulation of resources and meaning in the city. They are "nearing Chicago" in the fullest sense of the phrase, a Chicago growing into its role as America's type of the modern industrial metropolis. The rail lines form the bones and arteries of a growing body, still awkward but still on the upslope of its development: "It was a city of over 500,000, with the ambition, the daring, the activity of a metropolis of a million" (13-14).

This is the opposite of Golden Arm's Chicago, which is narrowing rather than expanding, aging rather than maturing, contained and exhausted by its rail lines rather than extended by them into a richly prospective future. If Carrie's story runs on deterministic tracks toward her entrance into the "walled city" of privilege and money, those tracks provide access to an expanding terrain: Chicago, Montreal, New York; department stores, the stage, Broadway. Frankie's story, like Hurstwood's, runs on tracks toward an ever-narrowing vanishing point. The second line of junkie's "tracks" running down Frankie's arm underscores the distance between the prematurely aged morphine addict and the "future-oriented" Carrie, two personifications of Chicago. Even the space momentarily opened up to Frankie by travel along the tracks made by the injection of morphine, which "hit[s] the heart like a runaway locomotive" (Golden Arm, 58), narrows into a "terrible pit" between "glacial walls" (57) as the euphoria of the high gives way to the addict's need for more. The train lines in Sister Carrie have, in Golden Arm, bent back upon themselves into an impassable boundary enclosing a narrow and airless terrain. Looking upon it from her window (one of Carrie's most characteristic positions), Sophie can "scarcely breathe."

Sophie's perception of an obscure threat of annihilation in the streetscape has roots in the earlier novel: Sister Carrie initiates and Golden Arm completes the Chicago tradition's movement to the street, parallel to but distinct from its movement to the neighborhoods. The move to the neighborhoods, linked to the emergence in American letters of the urban industrial order and especially of the white-ethnic immigrant groups who dominated its laboring classes in cities like Chicago, reaches an end point in the imagined disappearance of industrial workers and the world they made. The Chicago tradition's move to the street comes to fruition in Golden Arm's variegated catalogues of hustlers, drifters, drunks, operators, hoods, and other types who collect at the lower margins of the neighborhood order where it verges on the street life. To be "out in the street"—a combined physical and experiential condition—is to encounter the city without buffers. In Sister Carrie, Hurstwood gradually moves from well-buffered interiors like Fitzgerald and Moy's and his home into the street, where he is utterly destroyed; but Carrie and most of the other characters maneuver to remain in or near the "walled city" of privilege, insulated by wealth, social placement, and mastery of urban technique. When she has no money and little familiarity with urban technique, the streets of Chicago become a place of menace where she fears she cannot mediate or influence the forces acting upon her, the concatenation of desires that make the city go. She experiences moments of vertiginous terror in the streets, feeling "a sense of helplessness amid so much evidence of power and force" (15) during her search for employment, the period when she begins to see that she might be consumed by the city—forced into the kind of hardscrabble existence pursued by her sister Minnie, menaced

with the fate awaiting Hurstwood. In New York, insulated by money and position and a better grasp of urban technique, Carrie promenades on Broadway as if on a stage, protected even on the streets by invisible buffers of privilege.

In Golden Arm, conversely, everyone is always in the street. Some characters are better equipped to maneuver in and around the annihilating structure of the El, like the cats who pervade the novel, but the street extends everywhere. There is no walled city, and the unraveling of neighborhood orders breaks down even the modest buffers of community evolved by the industrial village. The "guttercolored" light of the rooming house suggests a continuity between interior and exterior, and the constant intrusion of the El confirms that continuity. Passing Els rattle Frankie and Sophie's latch, as if city-structuring forces were demonstrating their access to the meanest furnished room. Upstairs at Vi's, the approaching Garfield Park Express sounds as if it "were running straight through the house" (130). The Loop-bound El roaring overhead makes Molly's curtain billow stiffly, "passionately and white" before it "slowly fell and went limp" (I 12), as Frankie and Molly sleep together, so that the El superimposes itself on their union and makes of it another show of the white flag of surrender to the city.

Golden Arm marks out as its key social terrain the line where the neighborhood order gives out onto the street life, something at once very old (like Hurstwood's Bowery) and very new—like the inner-city milieu of junkies that would become an object of fascination in the 1960s. In drifting below that line, as so many of the novel's characters are irrevocably doing, Golden Arm imagines as well a drift below the level of mass culture, which was introduced as a constitutive element of modern urbanism in Sister Carrie and vigorously critiqued as such by the neighborhood novels.

Carrie swims in a sea of urban mass culture as it takes form around her in the late nineteenth century, and her speedy acculturation opens the gate to the walled city. Clothes in the department store speak to her, helping her to finesse Drouet's attentions; the stage and its satellite world of newspaper coverage provide her with a model of behavior and a profession; she comes to understand the play of desires eddying around her as a young woman in the street, an actress, an urbanite. The department store's interior space expands infinitely in her subjective experience of it, presenting her with goods that represent the building blocks of a persona with access to an entire way of life and thus with access to a particular urban landscape—the residential hotels, Broadway promenades, and stage life of New York. Passing from the street to the store, she passes from anxiety to a sense of "relief from distress": "the whole fabric of doubt and impossibility had slipped from her mind" (Sister Carrie, 63-64).

The neighborhood novels of Farrell, Wright, and Algren (before Golden Arm) together launch a critique of exactly this numbing, easing effect of mass culture, arguing for the cultural impoverishment of the industrial proletariat

Figure 1.
 Chicago. University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

Figure 2.
 Detail map of Near Northwest Side and Near West Side, Chicago. 
University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

The anatomy of the City.—The above chart discloses the gross anatomy of the city, the
typical  zones into which every city segregates as it expands. The chart shows, further, the
segregation of typical cultural areas of Chicago within these zones (chart after Burgess).

Figure 3. 
Ernest Burgess's scheme of "urban areas," with caption, summarizes an "ecological" overview
 of the industrial city that the Chicago School's studies sought to flesh out in detail. Algren's
 Near Northwest Side would fall across zone II (rooming-house district and underworld) and
 zone III  (workingmen's homes, second immigrant settlement). (From Harvey Warren, Zorbaugh, 
The Gold Coast and the Slum,  p. 230.) Copyright 1929, 1976, by The University of Chicago Press.
 All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.

Figure 4.
 Chicago Plan Commission's overview of blight in Chicago, ca. 1950.
 Note the concentration of blighted, near-blighted, and industrial areas
 around the core. The commission identified "conservation" areas as
 neighborhoods that could be saved from blight through government
 intervention. (From Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield,  Politics,
 Planning, and the Public Interest,  p. 331.) Copyright © 1955 by The
 Free Press;  copyright renewed 1983 by Martin D. Meyerson and
 Edward C, Banfield. Reprinted with permission of The Free Press,
 a Division of Simon and Schuster.

inhabiting the neighborhood order. They present department stores, movies, advertisements, radio, newspapers, and magazines as promising escape from a sense of one's immediate situation while reinforcing the circumscription of opportunity that ushers their young protagonists down narrowing paths to early destruction. "Most of us 20th century Americans are reluctant to admit the tragically low quality of experiences of the broad American masses," asserted Wright in his introduction to Algren's Never Come Morning.^[11] Thus, the neighborhood novels typically contain extended descriptions of invented movies that illustrate the impoverishment of mass-cultural formulas; characters develop extravagantly circumscribed fantasies of power or fulfillment based on the repertoires made available to them by billboards, radio jingles, and movies.^[12] The limits of mass culture double the tightly defined geographies of the neighborhoods, narrowing the neighborhood characters' sense of the world and what it has to offer, and those characters respond with ignorance to opinions and impulses external to their cultural repertoires. The constriction of cultural avenues available to people on the street and in the neighborhoods creates dissonance with the inchoate desires for more and different life fostered by mass culture. That dissonance motivates Carrie to upward mobility, which she accomplishes by exploiting the frustrated desire of urban theatergoers for more and different sentimental life, but in the neighborhood novels the dissonance makes for a violent and confused set of dispossessed young men-Bigger Thomas, Studs Lonigan, Cass McKay (Somebody in Boots ), Bruno Bicek (Never Come Morning ).

Golden Arm posits the exhaustion of this dissonance. Frankie has a dwindling and quickly expended supply of frustrated violence left in him. Describing Frankie's fellow inmates during a stretch in jail, Golden Arm describes the condition to which the inmates of the novel's "open-roofed jail" of a city are sinking. Not only are they "the ones who just wouldn't work" (as discussed earlier), but "they were the ones who had never learned to want. . . . They were secretly afraid of being alive and the less they desired the closer they came to death" (208). The engine of desire that drives Carrie's world, making its trains run and ordering its social strata, has wound down to a near-standstill. So has the neighborhood novel's cultural critique: three paragraphs later, the observation that these people without desire "didn't even read comic books" carries no particular charge. What can one say about the cultural impoverishment of people sliding below the threshold of culture as Algren and the neighborhood novel understood it? Similarly, Frankie and the others are sliding below the level of politics. Antek tells Frankie, who is being hotly pursued by the police for the murder of a universally despised drug dealer, that the police are acting on the orders of a machine politician who wants to appear tough on crime; Frankie tells Antek to "skip the politics" (321). Pressed so closely by the law, Frankie does not have the luxury to consider the reasons for his dire situation.

Preoccupied with their ceaseless subsistence-level hustling, then, Frankie and his associates are falling into a world below both politics and mass culture, which were two of Chicago realism's favored contexts for evaluating the situation of the industrial working classes. The characters in Golden Arm move behind and beneath the billboards that indicate how power and meaning are arranged in the inner city. Fleeing back to his hideout after visiting the old neighborhood to gather information, Frankie hurriedly passes a billboard that begs "shamelessly in five-foot letters: VOTE FOR UNCLE MIKE" (324), the man behind the manhunt. The barflies at Antek's drink beneath a row of liquor ads depicting alien beings in alien landscapes: "some usurer togged out in woodsman's gear . . . in a clean green land of night-blue lakes and birch trees so straight and tall they looked like ivory-tipped cues"; "a pink-cheeked, overstuffed illiterate" in a private library. "This freshly blooded race bred by the better advertising agencies looked down upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul, trying to understand how it was that these battered wrecks could look as though not one of them had ever seen a land of night-blue lakes with poolroom cues for trees. Nor any man's private library at all. They appeared not even to have discovered the public ones" (233). Like Hurstwood reading about Carrie in the papers, Sophie receives fragments of information from the world of mass culture and struggles to make sense of them by pasting them into her scrapbook. Sophie has yet some stirrings of desire—for a golden age receding into the past, for a real family with a real dog (as opposed to the flatulent Rumdum, given to her by Frankie), for order and clarity on the old neighborhood's model—which help to drive her mad. Many of the others are sinking toward the fate of Hurstwood, who loses access to any reserve of desire as he slides toward skid row and then suicide, asking, "'What's the use?"' (Sister Carrie, 458), a question that vitiates the impulse to consume on which mass culture depends. Frankie and Sparrow go to Gold's department store on Milwaukee Avenue to half-heartedly steal the period's novel consumer items (like ""lectric eyerons"'), not to shop or to refine their consumer personae. Rather than opening up a vista of cultural repertoires, these expeditions deliver Frankie and Sparrow directly into the narrowest landscape of all: they are routinely caught and put in prison.

Drained of desire, Hurstwood and Frankie arrive at remarkably similar places in the final narrowing of their worlds to nothing. Moving within a "disgruntled mass" of Bowery characters "pouring in between bleak walls" into a flophouse, Hurstwood finds himself in a dingy cubicle—"wooden, dusty, hard" (Sister Carrie, 457). Wounded and dying for a fix, Frankie goes to ground in a flophouse on Madison Street, in a little alcove roofed with chicken wire. The two men take very different routes to arrive at this anonymous suicide hotel. Sister Carrie deflects the story of Hurstwood and its distinctly October-city conclusion away from Chicago in the springtime of its golden age to the "old

world" of New York City. Hurstwood rides a series of trains across America to New York, then a series of streetcars through Brooklyn during his stint as a strikebreaker, before the tracks deliver him onto skid row. During that passage, he falls from the upper middle class into anonymous drifterhood, from the walled city into street life—in short, he falls into Nelson Algren's track-bound October city. Frankie never leaves it, riding the closed system of Els and streetcars back and forth, around and around the inner rim of the novel's "constant boundaries," until the final chase delivers him onto Chicago's most notorious skid row with no options left to him.

Frankie hangs himself in a hotel on Madison just east of Racine—within a few blocks of Carrie Meeber's first place in Chicago, the home of her sister Minnie. Minnie and her husband Hanson, a hard—working immigrant ethnic of Swedish parentage, lead a "clean, saving" life, paying "monthly instalments on two lots far out on the West Side" (Sister Carrie, 10 ). Like Vi and Jailer, they have little margin of error separating them from the street: if they both work hard, save, and do not weaken or suffer bad luck, they might eventually own a home in the developing neighborhoods of the West Side. Sickness, bad judgment, or a failure of thrift, on the other hand, will start them on the long downward slope toward the world of The Jungle's Jurgis Rudkus or of Frankie and Sophie. Entering their home, Carrie instantly grasps this precarious situation: "She felt the drag of a lean and narrow life" (11). Minnie and Hanson, with a baby and a hope to own some property, are staving off the process of narrowing that has for the most part run its course in Golden Arm. Vi and Jailer constitute the heavily ironized exceptions to the rule: everyone else in the rooming house at 1860 West Division Street, childless and without prospects, exists far below the possibility of owning or even wanting anything, and in particular of owning a home. The bums in the lockup, the ones whose world has gone down the drain and who expect their own blood to follow, are privy to "the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all," a guilt that, fittingly, lies "crouched behind every billboard" (Golden Arm, 17).

When Carrie and Hurstwood flee to the edge of the world, they run to New York; when Frankie and Molly flee to the edge of the world, they go a few blocks down the El line to "where the dark people live, drinking cheaper beer" (127) in the Lake Street ghetto at the base of Milwaukee Avenue, where they take up residence in a tenement apartment on Maypole Street. The Lake Street ghetto resembles Polish Division Street, with its own bars, its own beer, its own Saturday night dancing and music, and its own domestic landscape of furnished rooms under the shadow of the Lake Street El. Even though Golden Arm does not understand the ghetto to present an explanation of decline—as opposed to Lait and Mortimer, who regard racial succession as a principal engine driving Chicago's decline—the ghetto serves to figure the terminal future of Frankie's world. Hurstwood and Carrie's flight to New York clarifies Sister Carrie's com-

posite urban landscape: there are two cities representing two ranges of possibility, the walled city and the Bowery. Fleeing from the white-ethnic inner city into the black inner city, Frankie and Molly discover that they have only narrowed their options a little further—only the faces and the music have changed.

Golden Arm imagines only one city, the October city under the El. It is almost springtime in Golden Arm's expanding ghetto, but, as City on the Make declares, Chicago is "an October sort of city even in spring": "across the littered Negro yard next door . . . February's first touch of thaw was glinting along the rubbled earth. A wheelless, one-fendered chassis of something that might once have been a Chalmers or an Overland stood there with little puddles along its single fender. How many wheelless, one-fendered years it had rusted there no neighbor could have told" (Golden Arm, 315). The ruined machine—an avatar of City on the Make's "rusty iron heart"—constitutes black Chicago's inheritance, what Frankie's people have left to turn over to their successors. Algren was taken with Carl Sandburg's reading of Chicago's race riots of 1919—"The slums take their revenge"—which he repeats in City on the Make.^[13] Not only do the slums take their revenge on their inhabitants, but that revenge extends to cover all those living in Chicago's inner city after the industrial city has reached the end of time prophesied in City on the Make. Black Southerners poured into Chicago during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, drawn in great part by precisely those industrial jobs that were leaving the inner city during this period (or would leave soon after). If Golden Arm does not speak directly to this linkage between industrial transformation and folk migration that helped to form the second ghetto, it does so indirectly by putting the ghetto in the shadow of the El and the "rusty iron heart" as the novel brings the October city down the course of "wheelless, one-fendered years" to a final winding-down.

Resonances between Golden Arm and City on the Make, like those between Golden Arm and Sister Carrie, suggest a larger story coded into Golden Arm's claustrophobic landscape and narrative. In retrospect, City on the Make reads like a historical concordance to Golden Arm, providing precisely the big picture that Frankie and Sophie never quite grasp: the undefined doom hanging over their neighborhood is the decline of industrial urbanism that embraces both the urban village and Algren's literary tradition. Golden Arm, in turn, explores in rich and local detail the world of those people subsisting below the threshold of City on the Make's historical imagination. Seen in one of City on the Make's aerial passes, Chicago gives the viewer a "pang," a feeling that "something priceless is being left behind in the forest of furnished rooms, beneath the miles and miles of lights and lights" (76), but City on the Make cannot work down from the level of overview at which it operates (100 years of history and a large cast of famous Chicagoans in perhaps 20,000 words) to make a sustained examination of ordinary human figures moving at street level in the neighborhoods. City on the Make, outlining the story of decline, argues that the Chicago real-

ist tradition must fall with industrial urbanism; Golden Arm aspires to be that tradition's culminative masterpiece, "the last of the Chicago novels" by "the last of the Chicago novelists."

City on the Make is a slim poetic survey, following the model of Sandburg's Chicago Poems and The People, Yes (and dedicated to Sandburg); Golden Arm is a thick realist novel, the Chicago realist tradition's principal literary form.^[14] But the two books, both assembled in part from material Algren wrote in the 1930s, contain one another in shared figures and bits of language. Among other things, they share an autumnal mood and an El-enclosed landscape: they both map the October city. City on the Make's landscape, extending much further in space (including the South Side, the Loop, and the suburbs) and in time (from early nineteenth-century prairie through the golden age to the rusting ruins of the future), contains the drastically narrowed midcentury neighborhood terrain of Golden Arm. One epithet for the El in particular, "the constant boundaries of the night," appears repeatedly in both texts, suggesting that the El runs between them, joining microcosm (the landscape of Golden Arm) to big picture (the landscape of City on the Make) as it joined past to present in City on the Make's survey of industrial Chicago's history. The story of Chicago and the story of Frankie Machine take place in one composite landscape defined by the El, positioning the narrative of Frankie's decline and fall to double and condense that of Chicago.

The sense of regret pervading this landscape operates at both scales—primarily traced to a series of citywide failures and historical windings-down in City on the Make, traced to a series of intensely local and personal defeats in Golden Arm. City on the Make argues that there are "no more giants," by which it primarily means that a set of heroic historical figures—writers, reform intellectuals, political leaders, star athletes—active in shaping the city's golden age have no successors in the contemporary city. In Golden Arm, the corpses of anonymous drifters collect in a basement morgue until carpenters come to build coffins for them, "clean pine boxes" all in one size because "there were not many giants any more" (18). Appearing in Golden Arm, the notion of the giants' passing floats free of the frame of reference provided for it in City on the Make. Without sufficient reference to put the line in a suitably outsize narrative frame, this kind of mock-epic diction—"no more giants," "'God has forgotten us all,"' the tendency toward unanimity and ubiquity—grates against the inability of the characters to account for the Atlantean world in which they move. How could one car crash have made everyone everywhere afraid of closing time?

The events that form the history of Golden Arm's world are intensely personal or essentially mythic—a car crash, the withdrawal of neighborhood gods—but these sub- or nonhistorical explanation systems gain much of their literary power precisely from their inadequacy. The pall over the neighborhood

suggests an incomprehensible, annihilating process beyond the grasp of the novel's characters. The car crash, not deindustrialization and suburbanization, is therefore responsible for Sophie's highly developed apocalyptic sense. But the resonances between the city she sees from her window and the models on which it is based—the Chicago outside Nelson Algren's window and the Chicago tradition's Chicago as found in literary antecedents like Sister Carrie —allow a relatively concise, finite, discrete event like the car crash to figure the messy, complex, open-ended, and only intermittently visible transformations of urban life and literature under way in midcentury Chicago. The intertextualities binding Golden Arm to City on the Make and Sister Carrie encourage us in this project of extending Sophie's sense of ultimacy into a historical and literary realm beyond her horizons of understanding. If we read City on the Make together with Golden Arm, City on the Make's sweeping decline seems to grow out of the story of Frankie Machine and his associates, who move through a world supercharged with ultimacy by the decline of industrial urbanism—a story too metropolitan and generational in scale to be articulated by such a relentlessly local-minded novel. Only Sophie can see the fall of industrial urbanism encoded in the world of Golden Arm, and that insight lands her in an asylum.

If Sophie Majcinek, neighborhood type and mythographer of decline, serves as a figure of urban intellectuals like Algren—living in the industrial city of fact and in a city of feeling that drew upon it for sustenance and order—then her conviction of imminent apocalypse begins to make sense. The entangling of neighborhood order and Algren's Chicago realist tradition begins to account for Golden Arm's pervasive ultimacy and extremity. One of Golden Arm's most jarring qualities is its willingness to imagine the industrial neighborhood order, still extensive and thriving in the late 1940s, on its last legs. Similarly, one of City on the Make's most jarring qualities is its willingness to imagine the "monstrous forges" of heavy industry standing like a "rusty iron heart" in a landscape going back to prairie, a vista that did not become standard in depictions of Chicago until the 1970s, when the city's remaining heavy industry went through a highly visible latter phase of deindustrialization. Nelson Algren was not predicting the future, nor was he ready to believe that the phase of his most productive engagement with Chicago was at an end, but when we read Golden Arm as his last Chicago novel it becomes an elegy for industrial urbanism, the way of living in cities represented by both smokestacks and Sister Carrie.

4
After the End: The Story of Decline as Act One

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing.
Carl Sandburg, "Chicago"

The dawn rises
Uuuhhh,
Like sick old men,
Oh, Lord,
Playing on the rooftops in their underwear,
Yeah. . . .
Stuart Dybek, "Blight"

In the 1950s, as Chicago changed around him, Nelson Algren worked intermittently on a Chicago novel about the drug scene entitled Entrapment, but he gave up on it. From 1949 until his death in 1981, more than half of his professional writing life, Algren experimented with other styles and genres—nonfiction essays, prose poetry, cultural criticism, New Journalism, antic existentialism. As we look back on Golden Arm from this perspective, the novel's urgent sense of impending disaster proceeds not just from Algren's sense of urbanism in transformation but also from a writer's panic: as Chicago changed into something new and strange, he was running out of things to say about the city he had staked out as his literary bailiwick. The Chicago sociologist Gerald Suttles reports that during the mid-1960s he and Algren spent a drunken night visiting Algren's old stomping grounds on the West Side. Suttles portrays

Algren as a writer out of touch with the landscape in which he moved, already receding into the half-remembered ghost city in which Art Shay encounters him: "Our ramble took the course of an homage to those places he had been before. He was so occupied with telling me what they were 'really like' that neither of us could notice what was going on. As he stood, absorbed, before an empty lot where his mother had run a boarding house, unmindful of the traffic around him, it came over me that he was trying to reink a dry pen."^[1] Algren's pen was not dry in any absolute sense—it still had many essays and poems and one last novel (discussed in the conclusion of this study) in it—but he had nothing original left to say about the neighborhoods of Chicago. By the 1960s, Algren was writing himself out of the picture: "Sandburg's Chicago, Dreiser's Chicago, Farrell's and Wright's and my own Chicago, that was somebody else's Chicago. That was a play with a different plot."^[2]

Having written his last Chicago novel, Algren observed and recorded the limitations of his engagement with Chicago. As the redeveloped core and suburban periphery grew and solidified in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Algren removed his authorial persona from the landscape of the postindustrial metropolis. In 1961, a decade after the publication of Golden Arm and City on the Make, he employed one of his favorite figurative strategies—an expressive landscape—to imagine his literary-historical situation: "On the day that the double-tiered causeway is merged with the expressway that merges with the coast-to-coast thruway making right-hand turns every mile into a hundred solid miles of mile-high skyscrapers, each rising a mile hope-high to the sky out of a mile dream-deep in the earth, my own name will not be brought up."^[3] In other words, Algren understood his writing self to be so conjoined to the industrial city that to imagine a completed postindustrial transformation—its completeness indicated by the mile-high, mile-deep seamlessness of the landscape of skyscrapers and expressways—was to imagine his disappearance as a writer. This fantasy of literary obsolescence predicts that he and the people of this new city will have difficulty recognizing one another: he will not be equipped to tell their stories or map their city's social and psychic terrains, and his "name will not be brought up" by them (or attached to the landscape, as demonstrated by the unnaming of Algren Street). He will be a "Chicago writer" only in a historical sense. Having already split his time for many years between the Near Northwest Side and a lakefront exurb in Indiana, Algren left Chicago for good in 1975, going east to New Jersey and then to Long Island, where he died in 1981. He became one of postindustrial Chicago's ghosts—Suttles calls him one of its "casualties"^[4] —rising up from the long-lost building at 1523 Wabansia to haunt Art Shay in the landscape of expressways and skyscrapers.

Algren was an early and definitive mythographer of postwar urban decline, committed to plotting one particular layer of urban development—the high-industrial order—to the exclusion of all others. Golden Arm, City on the Make,

and Algren's other postwar Chicago writing render the decline as naturalist tragedy, taking it almost to the end of the line—the narrowing landscape, impending apocalypse, the city collapsing into Atlantean ruin. Having arrived at the end of time in Golden Arm and City on the Make, one must remind oneself that Chicago continued to produce and devour itself in the physical and discursive realms. The narrowing and collapse of Nelson Algren's Chicago exemplifies one narrative understanding of postwar Chicago, the story of the industrial city's decline told by Algren and others, but one could turn as well to complementary narratives detailing a set of expansions and rises: for instance, black Chicago, the city's suburban periphery, and the new postindustrial urban core were all booming at midcentury, competing and combining to shape the revised metropolis.

By the same token, one has to remind oneself that Algren's telling of the decline imagines itself as a culminative act of imagination: it argues that there cannot be any Chicago writers after Algren or Chicago stories after Golden Arm—City on the Make. Of course, postwar Chicago continued to produce writers, some of whom in turn produced a thriving city of feeling. This latter group were doing the urban intellectual's business of representing the city by repeating, reworking, and replacing the stories and figures created by Algren and his predecessors. Some of these writers who did not aspire to Algren's position at the end of a Chicago tradition, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Saul Bellow, were in the 1950s attaining precisely the kind of critical status that Algren was so rapidly losing.

In City on the Make, which presents his most extended account of Chicago's decline as a literary capital, Algren makes the decline's standard assertion that there are no writers left in Chicago. The city at midcentury is "a cultural Sahara" abandoned by its artists; Algren's narrating persona toils through it all alone, "with not a camel in sight."^[5] Algren portrayed the artists of postheroic Chicago as shills for the progrowth coalition, bloodless academics out of touch with the world beneath the El tracks, or exiles. In an essay written in the early 1960s, Algren argued further that the postwar city's quiescent culture and the "lack of love of Chicagoans for Chicago" were made self-evident "by the fact that we make no living record of it here, and are, in fact, opposed to first-hand creativity. All we have today of the past is the poetry of Sandburg, now as remote from the Chicago of today as Wordsworth's."^[6]

There is not much to be gained in holding writers responsible for keeping abreast of the work of other writers, and there is not much to be gained in pointing out in great detail how indefensible Algren's notion of a city without artists was. He was being cantankerous when he made the claim and could not have expected to sustain it against even casual counterargument. So what was he about in making the claim, and what value is there in examining it? Part of the answer is that, as I argue in chapters 1-3, he was recording the increasing strain

of the relationship between an urban intellectual frozen in a prewar mold and a postwar city in dramatic transformation. Another part of the answer, which I will pursue in this chapter, has to do with the character of the urban intellectuals Algren refused to acknowledge in City on the Make. Algren's refusal to see others doing precisely what he thought Chicago writers should do—making literature from the materials of neighborhood life, investigating the arrangements of power and meaning that shaped neighborhood life—leads us to read those other writers for signs of literary-historical situations and generic repertoires different from Algren's. Algren's turn away from fiction and toward criticism, and the sweeping quality of his self-conception as the last of the Chicago writers, asks us to read other writers with and against him. He therefore affords us an opportunity to move beyond the decline and consider some of the literary and cultural orders that succeeded Algren's Chicago tradition in the business of representing the city.

In this chapter, then, I consider three writers—Gwendolyn Brooks, Mike Royko, and Stuart Dybek—working beyond the limits of Algren's literary sensibility. They took up the task that Algren refused to take up after midcentury: representing postindustrial Chicago. Brooks was already prominently at work in and on the city of Chicago, especially its growing black inner city, at midcentury. Algren knew her work, and that of other artists of the period, and still chose not to see it when he imagined the city without artists.^[7] In the early 1960s, Algren did choose to see Royko, a newspaper reporter, as a successor to him because Royko could trace his pedigree to both of Algren's old neighborhoods: Royko grew up on the Near Northwest Side and knew how to tell the story of Chicago's decline. But Royko left Algren and the old neighborhood behind, making a career out of both retelling the decline and exploiting its inadequacy as a representational formula. Dybek also grew up in and wrote about the kind of neighborhood that Algren once regarded as his literary domain. Dybek's body of work begins at ground zero of Algren's terminal landscape, the Polish urban village in transition, but maps a distinctively postindustrial context in which that older order takes on new life through a series of fusions with newer orders.

These urban intellectuals and many more like them, both Algren's contemporaries and his successors, confronted a transformed object created by the layering-under of the industrial city by the postindustrial. Algren narrates this transformation as a decline, the collapse of the industrial city he knew; Brooks, Royko, and Dybek offer something other than the decline. For them, the revised city enabled and demanded revised formal strategies, new stories, a modified set of meanings. Read as a group, these postwar Chicago writers make the industrial city's decline the first act in the larger story of the postindustrial city's emergence.

No Living Record

Algren's claim that there was "no living record" of Chicago in the 1950s points up the limits of his understanding of Chicago and its representative forms. The claim very aptly describes the Chicago he imagines in Golden Arm-City on the Make —a city abandoned by its artists and populated by barflies who do not even read comic books—and it tacitly acknowledges that Algren was losing the will and capacity to make his own literary record of Chicago. Behind the claim is a kind of stunted historical reasoning: if Algren was the last of the Chicago writers on the prewar model, as he (and others) recognized himself to be, then it was because World War II and the subsequent transformation of the city had finished Chicago as a cradle of poets, realists, and reporters. In City on the Make, he argues that midcentury Chicago is no longer "an artist's town. It has had its big chance, and fluffed it. Thirty years ago we gave musicians to the world; now we give drill sergeants and 'professional informants.' . . . You can't make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its cities to produce artists."^[8]

In the historical case of Chicago, and especially in the case of Chicago's black inner city, Algren's opposition of arsenals to art is dead wrong. It was precisely the conversion of Chicago into an arsenal during manufacturing booms associated with the world wars that helped attract black Southerners to the city in the twentieth century. The second, much greater migration peaked in the 1940s and 1950s but continued into the 1960s, well after the wartime boom had receded to reveal a long-term process of deindustrialization and its difficult consequences for the inner city. Among these migrants were the practitioners and initial audience for Chicago blues, that series of generic innovations in the blues form that would become postwar Chicago's most enduring contribution to American, and world, culture. In adapting Southern blues forms to Chicago, and in adapting Chicago stories to the blues form, artists like Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells, among hundreds more (and often in collaboration and conflict, one should note, with white ethnics like the Jewish immigrants from Poland who ran Chess Records), developed the genre of electric blues that became postwar Chicago's signature cultural form. Chicago blues—really a collection of subgenres, many of them rooted in Southern and Western hinterlands—has flourished across generations in postwar Chicago, as all manner of practitioners balance tradition and innovation in the perpetual process of generic renewal. Chicago blues is nothing if not a living record (or CD, these days) of Chicago's social and cultural history.

Golden Arm has a great deal of music in it but very little blues. Most of the music in the book takes the form of standards, like "Paper Moon," which

always seem to float down rooming-house hallways from somewhere else, as if leaking into the present from the past. The novel typically uses music to mark boundaries—between past and present, between the local experience of neighborhood and a wider world beyond it—and to mark the boundaries of its own representational range. Golden Arm makes a gesture at representing what is probably a blues house party, for instance, but the party happens just offstage. Frankie, hiding out in the Lake Street ghetto tenement, listens to the "music-making" coming from upstairs. In a standard portrait of blues as an art form shaped by a way of life (in other words, a living record of that way of life), the tenement's mundane sounds—"a snatch of rhythm by the door, shouts from porch to porch and laughter rocking down the stairs"—build through the week into "a single Saturday night shout, when the whole house shook with Negro roistering. To the din above his head, Frankie would tap away on his practice board though hardly able to hear the radio's beat for the slap and slam, the shambling and the clattering of heavy feet, right overhead all night long."^[9] Frankie Machine, drumming along with music he can barely hear that filters downstairs to him from a place he cannot see, aptly stands in for Algren the neighborhood writer. Algren, so closely engaged with industrial orders rapidly acquiring the nostalgic charge of old songs, places the Chicago blues tradition and the emergent second ghetto (as something other than a black variant of the urban village) beyond the novel's imaginative and representational reach.

Algren was a writer, not a musician, and his notion of his cultural tradition was largely restricted to writers. If he was not equipped to recognize blues as a living record of postwar Chicago, and of black Chicago in particular, what writers did he see as doing that cultural work? Like many other urban intellectuals and readers who regarded the black inner city as exotic underworld, dark continent, or a variant of the urban village, Algren turned to Richard Wright for insights into it. From the perspective afforded by his self-positioning at the tail end of Chicago's industrial-era literary tradition, Algren recognized Wright as the link between black Chicago and his own bailiwick. Algren and Wright, who were friends, understood themselves to be engaged in sympathetic projects, both of them exploring the human consequences of the brutally circumscribed cultural, economic, and social opportunities afforded by the modern industrial city and its hinterlands. In City on the Make, Algren identifies Wright as the last "giant," "the only party of over-average height to stop off here awhile since the middle '20s," but takes Wright to task for joining the exodus of Chicago writers. "For the artist lucky enough to come up in Chicago there ought to be a warning engraved on the shinbone alley tenement which was once Wright's home: Tough it out, Jack, tough it out." In moving to Paris and "becoming a Café Flore intellectual," Wright had, apparently, sold his literary patrimony and failed to "tough it out."^[10] Thus, Wright joins Dreiser and all the other literary giants who have moved on, given up the fight, or otherwise left to Algren the

Chicago tradition's task of representing urbanism in the neighborhoods. There was, in the aggressively blindered mode of reasoning pursued by City on the Make, no writer in Algren's Chicago tradition left to represent Chicago's growing black inner city.

If Wright was no longer doing the business of representing Chicago's neighborhoods, then what about Gwendolyn Brooks? Like other narrators of Chicago's literary decline, Algren never mentions Brooks in his account of the extinction of the Chicago writer, even though at midcentury she was already launched on a notable career. A shrewd handicapper might already have been betting in 1950 that she would eventually succeed Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois, which she did in 1968. By the time Algren wrote City on the Make, Brooks was already Chicago's most illustrious practicing poet. She won the Pulitzer for Annie Allen in 1950 (beating out Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams), the same year in which Algren won the National Book Award for Golden Arm. People like Algren who cared about such notions as "commitment" to a neighborhood could not fail to see her obvious investment in Chicago's South Side: she lived there, she wrote about it; her literary persona was, by Algren's standards, "toughing it out" with no signs of slackening attention to the lives of neighborhood people. The development of both her poetic style and her subject matter from A Street in Bronzeville to Annie Allen demonstrated that she was rising to the demands of making literature about neighborhood life in the postwar city.

Algren knew Brooks and liked her. They had been acquainted since the two of them had worked for the WPA-funded Illinois Writers' Project in the 1930s.^[11] Brooks wrote in 1972 that Algren was one "notable among the whites who have befriended me and assisted me"; he had been "kindly" to her "for thirty years."^[12] In particular, she credits Algren with securing her first magazine commission, to write a piece on Bronzeville for Holiday's special issue on Chicago in 1950. Algren's contribution to that very issue of Holiday, an essay entitled "One Man's Chicago," was the first published version of the prose poem that would appear, expanded and revised, as the book Chicago: City on the Make. Thanks to Algren's influence with the editors, Brooks's essay was right there in Holiday with his own, and with Carl Sandburg's tentative version of decline ("Is Chicago less vivid?"). So why did Brooks not appear in Algren's literary landscape as he mapped it in Holiday and City on the Make? How could Algren fail to see Gwendolyn Brooks as a fellow traveler in the cultural desert?

What some people might regard as the easiest response—because Brooks was black and a woman—can only be part of the answer. Yes, Algren tended to treat the white-ethnic urban village as the subject of urban literature, but his failure to recognize Brooks as a Chicago writer certainly does not indicate a programmatic exclusion of blacks from Nelson Algren's Chicago. Wright was one of his heroes, the last of the "giants," and Algren would argue in 1961 that

blacks in the emergent civil rights movement had picked up the standard of social justice dropped by the exiles of the failing Chicago tradition, "forcing the return of the American promise of dignity for all."^[13] The argument that Algren overlooked Brooks because she was a woman has more authority but still does not satisfy. Yes, he made a practice of saying and writing stupid things about women, and he tended with other self-styled "regular guy" intellectuals of his day toward a buffoonishly masculine conception of literary work (captured in all its silliness by Algren's disappointment in Wright, whose move to France seems to render him effeminate in Algren's view), but Algren was not incapable of regarding women as social critics and artists. If he could enjoy being dismissive of "women's writing," he did count Jane Addams, Harriet Monroe, and Edna St. Vincent Millay among Chicago's giants. So, if the narrowness of Algren's sense of a Chicago literary tradition can be

explained only in part as an unwillingness to value the work of a woman writer, how else to explain City on the Make's omission of Brooks from the ranks of practicing Chicago writers? We might trace differences in Brooks's and Algren's literary antecedents, but my answer has more to do with the kinds of stories Brooks told. While it is true that Brooks's sonnets and ballads advertised their connection to the English poetic canon and other traditions very different from the Chicago realists among whom Algren wished to be counted, Algren's list of his own influences (which includes Whitman, Kuprin, Dostoevsky, and Céline) was more eclectic than a simple roster of those Chicago realists. Algren could easily have chosen to find common ground with Brooks in the democratic styles and themes of Whitman or Sandburg. But he chose not to find such common ground, at least not in City on the Make, and we can trace an explanation for that choice in the fact that Brooks was not writing declines. Algren had in mind, as a Chicago tradition, a particular line of Chicago writers concerned with mapping a particular Chicago and exploring its meanings, and he perceived that tradition's industrial city to be in steep decline at midcentury. Algren seemed to believe that Chicago writers, as he understood that genre of urban intellectual, were at midcentury obliged to tell the story of decline, and he did not recognize as genuine any Chicago writer who did not.

One is hard pressed to find arguments at midcentury for black Chicago's decline from past glory to a reduced present, which may help to explain why Algren never mentions Brooks or anyone else writing about black Chicago after Wright's departure. In the 1940s and 1950s, Chicago's black population was growing in numbers, expanding farther into the South Side and West Side, and negotiating as a people the crucial phases of a complex transition from Southern agrarianism to Northern urbanism. "We are now constructing the baby figure of the giant mass of things to come," conclude Drake and Cayton in their massive sociological study Black Metropolis;^[14] they sound like Dreiser describing industrial Chicago's "peculiar qualifications of growth." At midcen-

tury, many representations of the Black Metropolis still pursued a narrative line that tended up and out, even if that tendency was frustrated by social constraint, as in Lorraine Hansberry's drama of social mobility on Chicago's South Side, A Raisin in the Sun. The grave disappointments associated with the failure of Northern industrial urbanism to deliver on the promise of economic and social opportunity—the failures associated with the second ghetto—had not yet become truisms, as they would during the urban crisis of the 1960s (when writers like Claude Brown would begin to assemble the elements of decline narratives about the aftermath of black migration). In detailing the inner lives of black Chicagoans, Brooks and others pointed up continuing moral and social failures readable in a racially segregated social landscape, but they were not telling the story of black Chicago's decline. Brooks therefore operated beyond Algren's literary neighborhood as it is mapped in City on the Make. That neighborhood, like Frankie Machine's Chicago, was shrinking around him while Brooks's dramatically expanded.

If Brooks did not write declines, she did pursue social critique, making art from the impulse to protest divisions in the social landscape and in consciousness between blacks and whites—and also between men and women, between haves and have-nots, and between fractions of each group (making color prejudice among blacks, for instance, a recurring theme of her early work). One of the principal impulses discernible in her first two books and in her Holiday essay is to dissipate the exotic quality of black urbanism, to expose to view the simple fact of universal humanity shared by blacks and whites. In her poetry, that simple fact struggles always to find expression against the constraints on both black and white Americans' access to and experience of blacks' humanity. The racial imagination of Brooks's early poetry manifests the balance of protest and measured optimism characteristic of the "Double V" campaign and other initiatives of the 1940s led by urban blacks, many of whom regarded the investment of American blacks in the war effort and the wartime economic boom as the basis of a postwar push for social equality. "His lesions are legion/But reaching is his rule," Brooks wrote in Annie Allen, an apt image of her understanding of urban blacks at midcentury.^[15] This may be a humanist brand of protest—and the injuries, defeats, and bitter constraints of daily life form one of Brooks's main subjects—but it is not decline. The social landscape and imaginative world inhabited by her characters are artificially narrowed by social injustice, as residents of Chicago's burgeoning black communities in the late 1940s found themselves penned in by systematic residential segregation, but her poetry seeks and expects to explore the ways to a larger, more expansive, more fully realized future.

The sense of a narrowed landscape that pervades Brooks's early poetry should, however, remind the reader of Algren's own neighborhood vistas. The irony of Algren's inability to see Brooks as a Chicago writer is reinforced by the

resonances between their writing at midcentury. The proximity of subjects is obvious: Brooks makes art out of details of daily life in the neighborhood landscape of kitchenette apartments, sidewalks, and spaces under the El, the world of men in bars and housewives. If her poetry is more inclined than Algren's to imagine moments of transcendence, and more inclined to represent the respectable poor than spectacularly ruinous losers, Brooks is still always concerned with one of Algren's central themes: the limits, imaged as a narrowing of space, imposed by urban modernity on the daily experience of people of modest means.

Reading the early Brooks with Algren in mind reveals resonances of form as well. As Algren does in his writing, Brooks uses pavement-tinged shades of gray to consider the problem of making a life in the world of rented rooms, without buffers from the street, where the city's gears grind up the powerless people of the neighborhoods most efficiently:

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent," "feeding a wife," "satisfying a man."^[16]

Similarly, Brooks follows the body of De Witt Williams, in its hearse on the way to Lincoln Cemetery, "Down through Forty-Seventh Street:/Underneath the El" as the poem plots the tension between the "plain black boy['s]" blind, truncated life and the expansive set of aspirations and possibilities mapped on a landscape of black migration stretching from Alabama to Bronzeville. ^[17] The El operates here, as it does in Algren's work, as a figure of all that delimits and constrains a young urbanite's life.

Perhaps the most resonant language suggesting the sympathies between Brooks's and Algren's work is found in the opening lines of Annie Allen, published in 1949, the same year as Man with the Golden Arm and two years before City on the Make. After a dedicatory poem, the story of Annie Allen begins in the poem numbered I, "The Birth in a Narrow Room," with the lines "Weeps out of western country something new./Blurred and stupendous. Wanted and unplanned."^[18] The parallel here is not to Golden Arm but to City on the Make, which begins with an image of the city that, like Annie, is a stupendous and unplanned creation shaped by desire (and its dispossessed correlative, want) and rising out of the western country:

To the east were the moving waters as far as the eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach.

Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea.

City on the Make is Algren's definitive statement of Chicago's historical decline: this moment of natural balance will collapse when the "marked-down derelicts with dollar signs for eyes" arrive to initiate the business of urbanism, and by the poem's end the mechanized, iron-bound city they built will have used itself up.^[19]Annie Allen starts with an eerily similar moment of birth that takes place in the expansive western country and is juxtaposed with an image (in the poem's title) of Annie's "narrow" social situation that echoes Algren's sense of social order as unnatural constraint—but Annie Allen travels in another direction altogether. The volume's last poem, "Men of Careful Turns, Haters of Forks in the Road," makes Brooks's most explicit statement of racial protest to that time. The poem's narrating voice asks the men of careful turns to "Grant me that I am human . . . . /Admit me to our mutual estate," a change in social and cultural relations rendered in familiar terms as an expansion of a constricted landscape: "Open my rooms, let in the light and air."^[20]

It is a crowning irony of Algren's impoverished understanding of Chicago writing that "Men of Careful Turns" seems in retrospect to address him as well. Algren was no man of careful turns in the poem's sense of a white man who prefers to "sugar up our prejudice with politeness" rather than support genuine changes in the racial arrangements of American urbanism. But he was a hater of forks in the road in the sense that he responded to the transformation of Chicago under way at midcentury, a transformation that crucially involved the expansion of the black inner city and the contraction of the white-ethnic neighborhood order, as a crisis threatening his writing and his Chicago. Algren knew Brooks's work and helped her to prosper, he expressed sympathy for the struggles of Chicago's growing black population against economic and social constraint, he understood that a black writer (like Wright) or a woman (like Addams) might take up the standard in what he thought of as a literary struggle for social justice—but in City on the Make he did not recognize Brooks as a major artist who would carry the representational project of writing Chicago into the city's next age. Rather than narrating the decline of the city Algren knew, Brooks was developing an account of what came next, a literature that grew out of the changing terrain of the midcentury inner city. "We are lost," assert the last lines of Annie Allen's last poem in a final image of this social, historical, and literary situation: "must/Wizard a track through our own screaming weed."^[21]

The track was to be wizarded in all the ways that urbanism makes available and demands, including by way of a literature that found the language and narrative forms to represent the epic of black urbanization—a story inextricably intertwined with the epic of European immigration and its epilogue, the white-ethnic decline. "Men of Careful Turns" seems, ironically, to speak to Brooks's friend and admirer Algren, as well to the others who shared Algren's narrow

sense of a Chicago realist tradition, enjoining these haters of forks in the literary-historical road to make room in their canons for a new order of Chicago writer who would soon enter the first rank of American poets:

Reserve my service at the human feast.
And let the joy continue. Do not hoard silence
For the moment when I enter, tardily,
To enjoy my height among you.

From midcentury until 1967, Brooks continued to make poetry that asked, insistently but politely, that blacks be admitted to the American feast. In the late 1960s, when the cumulative urban transformations of the 1950s and 1960s finally captured the national imagination (and hers) as an "urban crisis" centered on the black ghetto, her poetry took a militant turn. Poems like "Malcolm X," the sermons on "the Warpland," and a series of heroic portraits of the Blackstone Rangers street gang stopped asking so nicely, or asking at all, and began to imagine the second ghetto as a black "Nation." Brooks's poetry and politics developed in close engagement with the social and literary consequences of the inner city's transformation. That engagement with postwar Chicago was already evident in her work at midcentury, when Algren was recording the attenuation of his own engagement with the same subject.

Bungalow Man and High-Rise Man

The narrative of decline is best equipped to imagine the fall of what is, not the coming of what is next, but even the most terminal vision of decline can become the first act of subsequent accounts that represent what does come next. Algren, for all his apocalyptic self-absorption, recognized this layering of narratives and representations. By 1961, he did see one camel out there.

Algren recognized the newspaper columnist Mike Royko—a reporter singularly without literary pretensions, in keeping with Algren's portrait of the city without artists—as the most fitting successor to him among Chicago's next generation of urban intellectuals. In a rambling poetic survey of Chicago life and letters entitled "Ode to Lower Finksville" (published in 1961), Algren identifies Royko as extending the Chicago tradition's dual project of urban realism and social criticism: Royko is "not only unconcerned about the image of the city as projected by the mayor's office . . . he clouds it up." In Algren's rendering, Royko's role takes shape in opposition to the grandiose redevelopment schemes of Daley's progrowth coalition, which believes that a city is made great by "a seventy-million-dollar exhibition hall rising from the ashes of a thirty-million-dollar exhibition hall . . . an airport in the lake to accommodate out-of-towners . . . any improvement of thruways, subways, opera houses or

construction in the Loop which accommodates investors."^[22] Royko's work, then, will be to write against the grain of the progrowth coalition's redevelopment-obsessed imagination, to tell stories continuous with those told by Algren and the Chicago tradition—stories about the grinding of individuals in the gears of urban process, about the unaccountable persistence of humor and sentiment in the quintessential city of the machine. These stories can be found in the interstices and shadows of the monumental new landscape of redevelopment, the same landscape that Algren cannot recognize as a sustaining literary subject, and Royko's job will be to cover them.

Royko became Chicago's leading newspaper columnist in the 1960s; and from the publication in 1971 of his book Boss until his death in 1997 he was the dean of America's white-ethnic urban newspaper columnists (although he became increasingly erratic in the 1990s, when even many of his faithful readers believed he ought to retire). These "regular guy" columnists form an influential subset of those urban intellectuals who position themselves on the ground of "the old neighborhood" that mythic space derived from the urban village. From that vantage, deep among the postindustrial city's industrial roots, they claim authoritative insight into contemporary urbanism.

Boss, a biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley, offers an inspired account of twentieth-century Chicago. Daley's character emerges from the prewar neighborhood order but takes shape in its engagement with racial succession and redevelopment, the two principal narrative lines defining the inner city's postwar transformation. As I argued in chapter 2, Boss depicts Daley as a "smalltown boy" from the early twentieth-century urban village. This is the world in which Royko (born in 1932) was raised, like Daley (1902) and Algren (1909) a generation before him, the world that Algren made his literary turf, and the world that Daley helped to disassemble as a leader of the progrowth coalition. Boss made Royko's a definitive "old neighborhood" persona coming to grips with the task of writing the new inner city that Algren assigned to him.

Over the years, Royko has been dutiful in identifying Algren as his literary godfather. Royko's 1981 obituary for Algren makes the case most succinctly:

I remember almost to the moment the first time I saw the name Nelson Algren.

It was in a tent in Korea about three decades ago. The guy in the next bunk flipped a paperback book at me and said: "Hey, here's a book about Chicago. You want it?"

I glanced over the blurbs on the jacket to see what it was about. The blurb said something to the effect that the book was set in a "slum" in Chicago. And it described the slum as being the Division Street area.

Slum? I was offended. That was no slum. That was my neighborhood.^[23]

Having placed himself in Algren's neighborhood on the map of Chicago's social landscape, Royko presents Algren as providing entry into the literary

neighborhood of Chicago writing on the genre map of American letters. "It had never occurred to me, growing up in that neighborhood, that it contained the stuff a great book can be made of." The great book under discussion here is Algren's; but in showing how Royko's own writing persona emerged from that neighborhood (and was tempered, like Algren's, by military service) the story also explains the existence of another great book, Royko's own Boss. Algren serves, in this light, as more than the terminus of an exhausted line of writers. Appearing in Royko's account of his own literary origins, Algren enables a succeeding order of writing that springs from its roots in both of Algren's old neighborhoods—the Polish preserve around Division Street and the tradition of Chicago realism as Algren understood and practiced it.^[24]

Working from a story of literary origins founded on Algren's example, Royko fashioned for himself the role of commentator on the emergence of the contemporary metropolis and its encounter with the industrial inner city it supplanted. For more than three decades, he told pieces of a story that has as its first act the story of decline that Algren rendered as epic in Golden Arm. That first act was a crucial part of his stock-in-trade (and it was Royko's mastery of the decline that Algren recognized as genuine "Chicago" writing). In a newspaper column in 1967, for instance, Royko rewrote Sandburg's industrial chestnut "Chicago." Royko's parodic updating shows the personified city's decline from producer to consumer, from industrial giant to "smooth salesman," from "Hog Butcher for the World,/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler" to "Hi-Rise for the World/Partygoer, stacker of stereo tapes,/Player with Home Pool Table and the Nation's Jets." Joining, rather than challenging, "those who sneer at this my city," pointing out that Sandburg is the name of an upscale housing development (Sandburg Village) rather than a poet, he endorses as well as makes sport of the decline narrative that argues Chicago has gone "to hell in a martini mixer":

Come and show me another city with razor-cut head singing so proud to have a
    mustang and a white turtleneck and reservations for dinner.
Fierce as a poodle with tongue lapping for dog yummies.
Wig-headed,
Skiing,
Spending,
Twisting,
Tipping,
Purchasing, discarding, repurchasing.^[25]

The story of decline conventionally genders and moralizes the postindustrial transformation as a loss of civic manhood. Royko's bewigged, poodlelike consumer—as opposed to Sandburg's laboring producer, who manifests all the raw vigor of "a dog with tongue lapping for action"—advances the effeminacy of

the personified city already evident in Frankie Machine, who produces nothing. In "Ode to Lower Finksville," the poetic essay in which Algren anointed Royko his successor, Sandburg's "painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys" become undercover cops in drag entrapping harmless drifters; in Royko's version they become transvestite hustlers, "painted men tossed in jail" for luring the farm boys. Royko, then, extends Algren's personification of Chicago in decline by continuing to invert and deflate the conventions of robust manhood established in Sandburg's iconic poem.

Nothing is easier than dismantling Sandburg's poem like this, and for Royko that task is only a preliminary step in a larger, more demanding project. In succeeding Sandburg and Algren, Royko also developed a body of writing that moves beyond the decline formula to detail the thickness and irony of daily life accruing in that seemingly oxymoronic place—postindustrial Chicago. For all his poking fun at the types he associates with postindustrial Chicago, especially the service-professional type he calls High-Rise Man, Royko differs from Algren in placing himself within the landscape of this revised city and in seeing the city's contradictions and new orders at play in himself. Some of Royko's best columns are those describing the alternately belligerent and sympathetic accommodation of his old neighborhood-trained persona to a maturing postindustrial Chicago. Those columns assemble a city of feeling populated not only by old neighborhood types—white-ethnic aldermen, developers, barflies, and reporters increasingly cut off from the half-remembered urban villages that produced them—but also by Southern blacks and their descendants, by what Royko used to think of as hippies and liberated women who have found their way to City Hall, by Asian immigrants and their Ukrainian landlords negotiating the terms of a changing inner-city urbanism, by High-Rise Man in many incarnations.

Royko's portrait of his own movements in the landscape of this city points up his tendency to look for ironies in the overlaps that make up both the city of feeling and the city of fact. In a column entitled "Why I Moved to the Lakefront," he describes his own transformation into High-Rise Man for the purposes of pseudo-social scientific inquiry into a new and widely influential kind of urbanism native to the redeveloped core. "I was born Bungalow Man. Or Bungalow Baby," he begins, then traces his evolutionary movements through the low-rise landscape of the old neighborhood order: he evolves into Basement Flat Child, Flat Above A Tavern Youth, Barracks Man as a soldier, then Attic Flat Man, Two-flat Man, then Bungalow Man again as a husband and father. He is "familiar with the ways" of all these "species that form the general classification Neighborhood Man. That's because I was one, from my shot glass to my long underwear from Sears to my new linoleum."^[26] But the late twentieth-century city creates new objects of inquiry—Suburb Man, for instance, and High-Rise Man—and, as an urban intellectual dedicated to representing the

metropolis, Royko heeds the call to become a participant-observer in the Chicago School tradition. He goes among the lakefront's Mustang-owning, martini-drinking service professionals, preserving his old neighborhood guy's critical detachment but also becoming familiar with the ways of his new neighbors. A mock-ethnographic photograph bristling with numbers and labels accompanies the column. It shows Royko, with a supercilious look incongruously pasted on his homely Division Street mug, lounging with two young women in a well-appointed lakefront apartment packed with all the accoutrements of High-Rise Man's consumption-intensive way of life.

In placing himself in the landscape, then, Royko adds an explicitly literary chapter to his account of the emergence of postindustrial urbanism in Chicago. Royko writes precisely about the overlap of Chicagos in space and time, the tensions to be found in the overlaps, and he shows himself moving, living, and writing in those overlaps. Algren, the narrator of decline, uses the metaphor of his own and his characters' relation to the landscape to show himself silenced by postindustrial transformation; Royko, who builds the decline into a narrative of transformation, uses the same metaphor to show how postindustrial transformation makes him who he is and gives him something to say.

Royko, a relentless ironist, plays his own situation for laughs. The joke of "Why I Moved to the Lakefront" rests on the shabbiness of Royko's explanation for his move, on the way in which he scrambles to account for an apparent lapse from regular-guy orthodoxy as he enters the "walled city" of privilege. Royko made it his business to foreground the authoritative old neighborhood persona, the standard voice that articulates the decline, as a self-interested strategy pursued by urban intellectuals like himself. He distrusted those who deploy the persona without any sense of its inherent contradictions-literal-minded drones like the Boston Globe's studiously regular Mike Barnicle or ex-would-be ethnic shaman turned free-enterprise apostle Michael Novak.^[27] Royko distinguished himself from them with his rich sense of the ironic distance between the textual neighborhood inhabited by his authorial persona and the material neighborhoods he admittedly mythologized. In Boss, Royko sums up his evocation of the white-ethnic industrial neighborhood order with a characteristic tension between the virtues our narrators of decline increasingly choose to remember and the dynamics of class mobility and cultural ambivalence they often choose to forget: "So, for a variety of reasons, ranging from convenience to fear to economics, people stayed in their own neighborhood, loving it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to move out."^[28] God, capital, or black migration did not just break up the old neighborhood from "outside"; that transformation required the participation of the very same people, Daley and Royko among them, who claimed to represent the old ways.

Similarly, part of what makes Boss a great book is Royko's exploration of

the ironic distance between Daley's stereotypically "old neighborhood" political persona and his leading role in disassembling the industrial neighborhood order that produced him. As Daley prepared to make way for new postindustrial infrastructure (the new Circle Campus of the University of Illinois) by tearing down the Valley, a classically Italian neighborhood of industrial vintage he had promised to preserve, he said one thing and did another. "With the elections [of 1960] behind him," Royko writes in Boss, "Daley returned to the task of making life better in his city, a city of neighborhoods, by plotting the elimination of one of the city's oldest and most colorful neighborhoods."^[29] Reproducing Daley's mantric "city of neighborhoods" rhetoric in this ironizing context, Royko warns the reader that old neighborhood personas like Daley's and Royko's, and the narratives of decline (or decline reversed, in Daley's case) they purvey, are historically and politically situated constructions to be read with care.

Royko's old neighborhood muses, his biographical subject Richard J. Daley and his literary godfather Nelson Algren, make an instructive pair: both born in the century's first decade, both in the business of representing (Daley in the political sense, Algren in the literary) the white-ethnic neighborhood order, they told opposed stories of Chicago's transformation. Daley spoke the progrowth coalition's language of decline reversed into progress and prosperity, albeit in the machined accents of the regular guy: he argued that the city of neighborhoods would rise to "higher and higher platitudes" under his care (to cite one of his most famous malapropisms), even as he concentrated his efforts on redeveloping the downtown core and getting re-elected.^[30] Algren spoke a language of exhaustion and failure that readily lent itself to telling stories of the old neighborhood's decline: he liked to say that he countered the city's official motto, "I Will," with an unofficial one, "But What If I Can't?" Daley and Algren represented and derived authority from orders that took form in the industrial city and still invoke its memory by association—the white-ethnic political machine, the Chicago realist tradition, paragons of the industrial neighborhood order like Irish Bridgeport and the Polish Triangle. Both men, however, came to prominence through their engagement with postwar Chicago in transition. They are transitional figures, major players in the redevelopment of the Chicago of fact and the Chicago of feeling that grew from it. For urban intellectuals engaged with the industrial neighborhood order and its enclaved postindustrial remnants, Algren and Daley are principal authors of the palimpsest that is postwar Chicago.

That palimpsest is a complex of persistences and successions, the tensions between which demand and enable representation. Royko puts Bungalow Man and High-Rise Man in the same landscape, in the same authorial persona, and in conversation with one another. That is, he maps a city of feeling in which the ghost of Nelson Algren, rising up disembodied from the ruins of 1523

Wabansia and industrial urbanism, can find its way downtown from the old neighborhood to serve as Royko's muse.

Hail ta Dee, Blight Spirit

If Mike Royko is one leading successor to Algren the realist and social critic, then Stuart Dybek—born a decade after Royko—is one leading successor to Algren the writer of neighborhood-inflected literature. Writers like Algren "demonstrate that it's possible to make poetry of urban dialects and city rhythms," Dybek explained in a writers' roundtable discussion. "One doesn't necessarily say, 'Well, I'm going to write like Algren,' . . . but one says this opportunity for poetry in urban language exists."^[31] Dybek, born in 1942 (the year that Algren's novel Never Come Morning was published), grew up in Pilsen/Little Village, an area southwest of the Loop but similar to Algren's Near Northwest Side in its industrial infrastructure and Polish-Hispanic-black succession. Having come out of the same kind of neighborhood milieu that Algren so definitively mapped, Dybek engages with Algren's Chicago while at the same time seeking to get past Algren and his association with a terminal narrative of industrial urbanism's decline. Like Royko's newspaper columns and Boss, Dybek's short stories are charged with meaning by the narrative of decline but ultimately work against its grain; like Royko, Dybek both engages with the ghost of Nelson Algren's Chicago and lays it to rest.

Dybek's short stories, collected in Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1986) and The Coast of Chicago (1990), are full of ghosts. As Algren confronts Shay on the Kennedy Expressway, the ghosts of an older city appear to Dybek's characters as "apparitions in broad daylight" of a peddler with horse and wagon or a "mute knife sharpener pushing his screeching whetstone up alleys"; El trestles, bridges, and tenements encased in decades of pigeon droppings; a Brigadoon-like restaurant that serves life-saving sauerkraut soup.^[32] Landscapes and characters out of previous historical and literary moments crowd Dybek's postindustrial inner city, which is thick with accrued urban forms. The central drama of Dybek's writing, like the most sophisticated of Royko's, involves his and his characters' search through those accrued forms, sorting and absorbing disparate pieces to create a viable postindustrial urbanism that is rooted in the old city and equipped to engage with the new.

Dybek, again like Royko, turns to Richard J. Daley to explore the relation between old city and new. In Dybek's story "Blight," Mayor Daley pervades and broods over a landscape in transition, where even the boarded-up grocery stores and cleared lots bear his signature. Set in "those years between Korea and Vietnam, when rock and roll was being perfected" and when the narrator's neighborhood "was proclaimed an Official Blight Area," "Blight" is suffused with Daley's presence. Ziggy Zilinsky, an "unreliable" purveyor of postindus-

trial magical realism even before being beaned with a thrown bat by Stanley "Pepper" Rosado during a game of "it," has constant visions of Daley—on the street, scrounging through garbage, "riding down Twenty-third Place in a black limousine flying one of those little purple pennants from funerals, except his said WHITE SOX on it." In this latter apparition, the mayor sits "in the backseat sorrowfully shaking his head as if to say 'Jeez!' as he stared out the bulletproof window at the winos drinking on the corner by the boarded-up grocery." The narrator concedes that "Mayor Daley was everywhere" during the early 1960s: "The city was tearing down buildings for urban renewal and tearing up streets for a new expressway," and every sign announcing civic improvements prominently featured Daley's name.^[33]

"Blight" shows how the narrator, Dave, and his friends weather the transformation of inner-city urbanism in the 1950s and early 1960s, when both rock and roll and the notion of "blight" requiring "renewal" were being perfected. In a nameless Chicago neighborhood modeled on Pilsen/Little Village, in an aging and predominantly industrial landscape of "factories, railroad tracks, truck docks, industrial dumps, scrapyards, expressways, and the drainage canal," Poles and the Mexicans and blacks who are succeeding them have "managed to wedge in their everyday lives."^[34] The expressways are the dissonant element—a postwar intrusion of suburban-downtown linkage grafted onto this landscape of prewar vintage. The obsolescence of its industrial infrastructure has earned the neighborhood its blighted status: like Algren's Near Northwest Side, it falls within the region of blight designated in the 1950s by planners concerned with making the downtown core the vital center of a suburbanized metropolis. With lots cleared for urban renewal, grocery stores boarded up, and a growing division between those who look to the suburbs for entry into the American middle classes and those increasingly at loose ends in the neighborhood, the immigrant-ethnic neighborhood order has begun to break up. Dave's childhood heroes, the older boys who ruled the neighborhood in the 1940s and went to fight in Korea, now hang out under an Algrenian pall of imprecisely defined, anonymous doom—"at corner taverns, working on beer bellies," playing softball every once in a while "on teams that lacked both uniforms and names."^[35]

Dave's crew of friends navigates this difficult historical moment and this layered urban space, managing to wedge into it both everyday and ecstatic experience as they draw upon the mix of materials available to them. Dybek's characters and his prose are resolutely syncretic: older orders in contraction make room for new material gathered by his characters from the social landscape in which they move. The play of persistence and succession, the range of old and new material made available by postindustrial Chicago, opens the way for ecstatic experience, the search for which forms one of Dybek's principal literary projects. That syncretic search for ecstatic experience voices a larger pat-

tern within the postwar cultural history of the immigrant-ethnic neighborhood order. Dave and his friends, born during and after the war, form a leading edge of what James T. Fisher has called "a Catholic lost generation" that cobbled together its own cultural hybrid out of spare parts available to it.^[36] White-ethnic urban Catholics like Dave are formed in the contact between the constraining but reassuring immigrant-ethnic church and a free-wheeling, if not free-falling, encounter with the cultural opportunities made available by the postwar city: new contacts with black urbanisms (of the kind that produced, for instance, bebop, free jazz, and rock and roll) and Hispanic urbanisms (especially New World religious traditions), postwar orientalism in the form of beat-flavored Asian religiosity, a rich sense of living simultaneously in both the deeply structured Old World (via the old neighborhood) and a postmodern soup of weakly rooted identity making.

The protagonists move along paths well worn by working- and lowermiddle-class males of the Catholic "lost generation." Deejo Decampo gives up plans to become a great novelist and after a fling with beat poetry becomes a mediocre bluesman instead; Pepper Rosado gives up the drums and joins the Marines; Ziggy Zilinsky, tormented by quasi-religious apocalyptic visions of winking saints and Mayor Daley, and finally unhinged by Fire Commissioner Quinn's ill-advised decision to turn on the air-raid sirens when the White Sox won the pennant in 1959, gives up talking and sets out hitchhiking to Gethsemane. At the story's end, Dave takes shelter from the draft in the late 1960s at a community college, where a professor nicknamed "the Spitter" has led him to believe that there's "blight all through Dickens and Blake" and other great literature. The Spitter has a phony Oxford accent, "but the more excitedly he read and spit, the more I could detect the South Side of Chicago underneath the veneer, as if his th's had been worked over with a drill press. When he read us Shelley's 'To a Skylark,' which began 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit' [i.e., 'Hail ta dee, blight spirit'], I thought he was talking about blight again until I looked it up."^[37]

The appearance of blight in canonical Western literature—in the amalgam of visionary, romantic, and urban writing provided by Blake, Shelley, and Dickens—forms the climax of the story's literary argument. "Blight" is not a narrative of decline: it is, rather, a requiem for the narrative of decline because it is about developing a cultural tradition equipped to represent the postindustrial inner city. "Blight"'s account of emergent postindustrial urbanism becomes also the drama of the emergence of new stories, including literary writing, told by urban intellectuals—like Dave the narrator and Stuart Dybekwith distinctively postwar training. Dave and his friends are all in some way artists—musicians, writers, visionaries—who encounter ecstatic moments of heightened clarity when layers of urban order and meaning reveal themselves in otherwise mundane urban space. In those moments, they confront the possi-

bility of turning the decline into act one of a revised story. Finding the links between the old neighborhood and the community college classroom, a place where aspiring urban intellectuals with his background typically find "literature," Dave has equipped himself to do what Dybek does: to meld blithe and blight in tackling his generation's great urban subject, the fall of the old neighborhood and the rise of new urban possibilities.

"Blight," therefore, explicitly imagines the fusion of pre- and post-World War II Chicago's representative forms. One of its main postadolescent characters, Deejo Decampo, tries to write a Chicago novel entitled Blight. Deejo has completed only the first sentence—"The dawn rises like sick old men playing on the rooftops in their underwear"—but has stalled after this magnificent start in the Algrenian mode of expressive landscaping, and he never completes the book. Blight does not become the next great Chicago novel. Since Golden Arm's publication, the notion of a next great Chicago novel has fallen out of circulation, as have most of the books on the canonical list of great Chicago novels. Tellingly, after an extended flirtation with beat culture, Deejo records a Delta-style blues entitled "Hard-Hearted Woman," "whining through his nose" and "strumming his three chords" as did young white men all over America during the 1960s. The narrator wishes that Deejo had instead put the first line of his novel to the tune of "Hard-Hearted Woman":

The dawn rises
Uuuhhh,
Like sick old men,
Oh, Lord,
Playing on the rooftops in their underwear,
Yeah. . . . ^[38]

"Blight" therefore imagines the fusion of Chicago novel and Chicago blues into a syncretic form representing a neighborhood and a historical moment in the 1950s and 1960s when the old inner city gave way to the new, when both the ideology of blight and the genre of Chicago blues (which underlies rock and roll) were in their heydays, before the final stages of ethnic succession in which the narrator's family moved out of the neighborhood. That moment is most importantly one of fusion leading to new forms rather than decline and fall leading to ruins. Reversing Golden Arm's use of music to mark the impassable borders of its narrowing world, "Blight" proposes musical metaphors of fusion across the permeable boundaries of its urban world in flux: the perfection of rock and roll, the uncanny resemblances between Polish and Mexican jukebox music, a night scene in which Dave and his friends encounter a group of black doo-wop singers at the other end of a viaduct. (The viaduct scene, as opposed to the house party scene in Golden Arm it closely resembles, removes most of the interference between the groups so that they can see one another and make

a musical exchange: "though at first we tried outshouting them, we finally shut up and listened," Dave reports, "except for Pepper keeping the beat.")^[39] Dave, reversing Deejo's artistic development as he travels from the saxophone to literature in his effort to make art from time and place, traverses an emerging syncretic urbanism.

In its most extreme form, this pervasive syncretism reveals a magical realist edge. If Algren and the neighborhood realists might be whispering in one of Dybek's ears, and the Catholic lost generation's signature ecstatic influences from John Coltrane to Jack Kerouac might be whispering in the other, Dybek's true literary godparents might be the Latin American magical realists. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejio Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Isabel Allende, and others made syncretism their great subject in fashioning a literary tradition out of the encounter between New World and Old. The magical realism for which they are best known—a woman floating up into the sky while doing her laundry, a Caribbean dictator selling the sea to Americans who cart it off in labeled pieces, a grandmother who visits indiscriminately with the living and the dead^[40] —acquires its charge by combining, deadpan and seamlessly, the languages of nineteenth-century European realism and a variety of indigenous folk traditions. The Latin American magical realists, writing about the leading edge of American-style industrialization as it drove south in waves, provide a model of syncretic writing about making a culture out of the overlap of orders, and in that sense they provide inspiration for postindustrial magical realists like Dybek writing from the back edge of deindustrialization. Apparitional encounters with mute knife sharpeners and the great city-remaker Daley, like encounters with Spanish galleons in the jungle and streams of blood that flow with supernatural purposefulness through the streets of Macondo, occur precisely in the zone of overlap between orders.

Ringing Changes

To understand, finally, how Dybek engages with Algren in turning the language of decline into the language of syncretism, let us return for a moment to the virtuoso first movement of Algren's Man with the Golden Arm discussed in chapters 1 and 3. Sophie Majcinek sits in her wheelchair at the window, looking out on her Polish neighborhood in decline. Drifting in and out of sleep, Sophie remembers an idealized version of the neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s, when "everything was so well arranged" and God was immanent in the old neighborhood order, weighing "virtue and sin . . . like Majurcek the Grocer weighed sugar."^[41] Between that time and the present, something has gone wrong in a large and hard-to-figure way: part of it is that the neighborhood's "gettin' smokier," as Sophie puts it, as blacks encroach on the Polish preserve; part of it is that the old ways seem to be breaking up in the postwar moment.

Waking in her chair as church bells toll midnight over the neighborhood, Sophie hears "the last echo of St. Stephen's fading across this present midnight's dreaming roofs. And her whole life, from her careless girlhood until this crippled night, seemed caught within that fading chime. . . . September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away." The overlapping bells, remembered and present, bring her out of reverie and into a moment of apocalyptic insight: "'God has forgotten us all,' Sophie told herself quietly."^[42]

The church bells make music charged with the diffuse sense of dread associated with an autumnal historical moment. Sophie, like the novel and its author, feels in the air the imminent reconfiguration of a familiar social and cultural landscape into something new and strange. Algren, like his literary ally Budd Schulberg, whose 1955 novel Waterfront covers similar territory, was not a Catholic, nor was he interested in Catholicism as a religious tradition. Rather, Algren, Schulberg, and others drew from a menu of Catholic imagery—using the church as an icon for the white-ethnic urban village—to figure the experiential and institutional complexity of an urbanism that many observers in the 1950s increasingly saw as in decline. "God has forgotten us all" means, in this context, that the network of orders enabling and defining industrial urbanism has begun to break up: there goes the neighborhood.

Now let us turn to Dave, the draft-avoiding narrator of "Blight," who has been inspired by his college literature class to take another look at the old neighborhood his family has left behind. (His parents have moved to Berwyn, an inner—ring suburb favored by diasporic inner-city Poles, and Dave has moved away too, presumably to the professional-bohemian North Side.) Having gotten off the El—that ever-present reminder of Carrie's railroad city—and dropped into a tavern where the Mexican songs on the jukebox sound suspiciously like polkas, Dave has a vision that suggests the capacity of the narrative of syncretism to absorb the narrative of decline:

Then the jukebox stopped playing, and through the open door I could hear the bells from three different churches tolling the hour. They didn't agree on the precise moment. Their rings overlapped and echoed one another. . . . [S]omething about the overlapping of those bells made me remember how many times I'd had dreams . . . in which I was back in my neighborhood, but lost, everything at once familiar and strange, and I knew if I tried to run, my feet would be like lead, and if I stepped offa curb, I'd drop through space, and then in the dream I would come to a corner that would feel so timeless and peaceful, like the Carta Blanca with the bells fading and the sunlight streaking through, that for a moment it would feel as if I'd wandered into an Official Blithe Area.^[43]

I would not argue that Dybek is consciously revoicing Algren here—as opposed to Royko, who explicitly revoices Algren and Sandburg—but in this passage, as in the passage from Golden Arm, we encounter a flash of insight in

which the landscape of the old neighborhood becomes charged with possibility. The charge is apocalyptic in Algren's rendering, initially threatening but ultimately ecstatic in Dybek's. The two sets of overlapping church bells, Golden Arm's and "Blight"'s, ring one set of changes over which the two texts play very different melodic lines. Algren plays the definitive decline: the city done for with everyone in it, what he calls "a requiem for everyone trapped" in the old neighborhood.^[44] The overlapping bells in "Blight," on the other hand, signal the vertigo-inducing but ecstatic opportunities made available by the overlapping of old city and new. (Compare, similarly, the jukebox refueled with heterogeneous music in "Blight" to the jukebox in Golden Arm, which warns the Majcineks of impending disaster, and a jukebox "running down in a deserted bar" in City on the Make,^[45] a machine playing dirges as it winds down to silence.) The opportunities confronting Dave are explicitly literary—courtesy of Blake, Shelley, Dickens, and the Spitter—underscoring "Blight"'s drive to absorb the decline and its signifying landscape into a literature of engagement with the postindustrial city, from which Algren turned away after he had laid industrial urbanism to rest in scenes like Sophie's midnight reverie.

"Blight," then, plays inspired improvisations on the decline, turning it into something else entirely. While the menu of neighborhood imagery in classic declines like Golden Arm offers ways to figure what is lost in the postindustrial transformation, in "Blight" that imagery offers a model of what might be gained. Dave finds his way via the classroom and the old neighborhood—rather than via being beaned with a baseball bat, as Ziggy was—to the experience of inner-city urbanism as a series of miraculous events producing a set of meanings that flood the postindustrial landscape with cultural possibility. Winking saints, ghosts of the industrial era muttering in Polish, the mystical omnipresence of Richard J. Daley—all these are signs reminding us that literary raw materials run in rich veins through the fabric of postindustrial urbanism, which is ripe for development and redevelopment by enterprising young artists with syncretic tendencies. Like Royko, Dave finds his material and his narrating voice by confronting the transformation of the city, and its literature, into something that Algren was not prepared to recognize as his neighborhood.

Dybek, like Brooks and Royko, shapes the materials of postwar Chicago into a language that can be employed to say something other than (or, in Royko's case, something more than) "there goes the neighborhood." Golden Arm and City on the Make, however, develop the artistic possibilities of "there goes the neighborhood" on the grand scale. (This is another reason to pay closer critical attention to Algren: the language used by Americans to represent cities since World War II has developed more ways of saying "there goes the neighborhood" than of saying anything else, and Algren's version of decline explores deeply the literary properties of that language.) I do not wish to propose that Dybek's writing is somehow more open-minded or subtle than

Algren's; nothing could be less interesting or less germane to this argument. Rather, I want to suggest the confluence of imaginative repertoire and historical moment that produces the city of feeling. Complex as it can be, the city of feeling is a drastic simplification, allowing all the messy and open-ended complexity of a city of fact to reside within the constant boundaries of a text. What Algren and others pictured as a golden age followed by collapse into ruin is one long process, nowhere near complete and never to be completed, in which the Chicago that took shape between the Great Fire and World War II gradually disappears under new urban layers. The story of decline is itself a legacy of midcentury, and the work of Chicago writers like Brooks, Royko, and Dybek has similarly layered new and complementary chapters of narrative, landscapes, and character types over Algren's decline and the city it imagines. The textual Chicago Algren constructed in his writing has become in time both a persistent and a succeeded presence in the literary landscape, just as the Chicago he observed and lived in persists—interstitially, in resonantly recontextualized fragments—in the social landscape that has succeeded it.

Part 2 of this study similarly builds upon the story of decline to examine the mapping in literature of the postindustrial inner city as it emerged and matured after World War II. Part 2 also extends the map of the older white-ethnic neighborhood order into the zone of contact where white-ethnic enclave, redeveloped downtown, and black inner city meet; similarly, just as part I read Algren together with Brooks, part 2 explores in greater detail the postwar literature of black urbanism and its zone of contact with the literature of white-ethnic decline. Finally, part 2 begins to generalize this study's argument by extending it to a second city, leaving Milwaukee Avenue and Chicago behind and examining a set of texts that converge on Philadelphia's South Street. In reading a South Street canon against an account of the postindustrial transformation of Philadelphia, then, part 2 extends and fills in this chapter's schematic outline of the cities of feeling that imagine not just older neighborhood orders in decline but also the emergence in the decades after World War II of a new object of literary attention: a profoundly transformed inner city.