The Battle of Lincoln Park
9781540270283
Regular price $19.95 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%“A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago . . . an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development.”—Kirkus Reviews
There was a time when Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park was the forefront of a battle for a new kind of urban life. In the years after World War II, a movement began to reverse the middle-class flight to the suburbs. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers in the North Side neighborhood, rehabbers imagined a new kind of community—a renovated, modern one that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision.
But as the old buildings came down, cheap studios were combined to create ever more spacious, luxurious homes. Property values swiftly rose, and the people who were being evicted to make room for progress began to assert their own ideas about the future of Lincoln Park, with the help of the Young Lords Organization. Over the course of the 1960s, divisions within the community deepened. Letters and picket lines gave way to increasingly violent strikes and counterstrikes as each camp tried to settle the same existential questions that beguile so many cities today: Who is a neighborhood for? And who gets to decide?
This revised edition features striking archival photos, new maps, and a foreword by devin michelle bunten explaining the lasting impact and relevance of the book to Chicagoans, planners, urbanists, and all who are curious about the way cities change.
The Pit
9781455629060
Regular price $20.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Financial ambition, a tortured marriage, and an American city on the rise are brilliantly depicted in Frank Norris’ 1903 masterpiece. Curtis Jadwin is obsessed with speculating on the market, manipulating it so he can control the nation’s wheat supply. He neglects his wife, Laura, who seeks refuge in the arts, and in particular one artist, Sheldon Corthell. The Jadwin’s wealth buys them a mansion on Lincoln Park with an art gallery that strangers gawk at, but inside they struggle. And is Jadwin’s gambling sustainable, or is there a bear market in his future?
Curtis and Laura play out this American Dream scenario in the streets of Chicago, where they attend the opera at the Auditorium Building, visit the new art museum on the lake, and, from the comfort of their carriage, watch the trains and grain elevators. At the Board of Trade, in the pit, men yell and knock against each other, performing the theater of capitalism in front of an always crowded visitor’s gallery.
Few novels depict the struggles of marriage, the world of finance, or the rise of Chicago from the flatlands of the Midwest, as viscerally as this novel, originally published in 1903. Norris’s novel may immerse readers in a historic setting, but it’s punishing and profound themes are anything but dated.
This Belt Revivals edition features archival photographs and an introduction by Whet Moser.
Haunted Hotels and Ghostly Getaways of Illinois
9781467153157
Regular price $21.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Some Illinois travelers are so taken by their destination, they hunker down for eternity.
There’s something about old hotels and locales that tourists flock to. The places are experiences unto themselves, but they also thrum, sometimes quite literally, with the lingering presence of those who previously paid them a visit. At the Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton, traces of floral perfume from a woman who took her life more than a century ago greet visitors in room 220. Spirits abound at the DeSoto House Hotel in Galena, one bearing an unsettling likeness to Abraham Lincoln. At the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, children from the past still laugh after dark. From the polite spirit at the Inn at 835 Boutique Hotel in Springfield, who encourages guests to “turn the page,” to the specter of the jilted chambermaid at St. Charles’s Hotel Baker, author Maria Salvo Benson guides intrepid readers through hotels and getaways where previous guests never truly checked out.
Author Maria Salvo-Benson guides the intrepid through the most haunted hotels and getaways throughout the Prairie State.
