South Side Story

Abstract

This bleak assessment of the far South Side uttered by Dr. Sommers, the protagonist of Robert Herrick's novel, would have been echoed by many of Chicago's civic leaders of the period. The passage of an amended annexation bill in 1889-over the objections of some elite, anti-urban Hyde Parkers-had brought an extensive swath of land into the city limits, multiplying Chicago's size more than fourfold. If the redrawing of city boundaries on a map was controversial, even more challenging tasks lay ahead: improving the physical landscape and constructing a larger civic identity on the ground. Some of the furthest outposts remained wastelands-in Herrick's words, bare, vacant, deserted. Real estate lots on the far South Side were little more than squares of land and marsh, cut up in regular patches for future house-builders and cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either side of an embankment.2 An economic depression had intervened, deferring the settlement of these subdivisions and allowing the cement sidewalks to crumble and weeds to grow. And at the center of this desolate landscape-indeed, its principal cause, in Herrick's view-were the ruins of the World's Columbian Exposition. After closing its gates in early 1894, the White City remained standing, its future uncertain. The debris of its neoclassical buildings provided Herrick with an ideal setting for the illicit courtship between Dr. Sommers and a married woman, Alves Preston, who eventually shack up in an abandoned fairground booth that resembled a time-stained Greek temple.4 It has become a familiar historiographical move to dramatize the aspirations and contradictions of fin-de-siecle American culture by revisiting the scene of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some of the most important