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.