Devil in The White City - Better Late Than Never

I read Sophia blog and agreed her with views.

Well, Sophia, I do agree with you. I do not speak much in class because I love to hear the thoughts of others. However, I was extremely interested in seeing the next thing that Holmes would do and Larson's writing style did not distract my interests in his character. In fact, I think I got tired of the building jargon: building maintenance, building funds, building discussions, building materials, building conferences, etc. etc. It was enlightening to know that the author spent so much time researching the city and its architectural history but I wanted more of Holmes. I, too, am a CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case files type of woman and the clues, trails, evidence that I felt Holmes might have left behind excited me. I consistently wondered when the police would jumped on his trail and start to piece it all together. I was interested in the tools used to find him; people, documents, and articles of clothing that could place him at the scene of any of the crimes. After paying attention to my classmates feelings about Larson's poor literary skills and his unbelievable knowledge of how Holmes was feeling at the times of the murders, I noticed the literature was not the best that I've read. Then I used my own mind to ask myself would I have enjoyed a fictional book packed with so many facts as entertainment? In that sense, I too began to just read it for what it was. My brain just switched gears from entertainment to news flash mode and that way it no longer bothered me. In fact, it it was written with fluffy language, extraordinary metaphors, and victorian dialect I do not think it would have held my interest. Larson still gets accolades from me for taking on such a daunting task and putting it in print.

Brooks on Addams

Here is a poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks about Jane Addams. It was published in the posthumous collection In Montgomery: And Other Poems. This was the book Brooks was working on when she passed away in 2000. Chicago's Third World Press published it in 2003. I am typing this from a letterpressed broadside, rather than from the book, so it is quite probable that the line breaks are inaccurate.

(A side note regarding Jane Addams that I discovered this week: Her father and Emily Dickinson's father were both involved in politics at the same time. Addams's father served in the IL state senate from 1854-1870; Emily Dickinson's father served in the MA senate from 1842-43 and then in Congress 1853-1855.)

Jenn


JANE ADDAMS


I am Jane Addams.

I am saying to the giantless time-
to the young and yammering, to the old and corrected,
well, chiefly to the children coming home
with worried faces and questions about world survival-
"Go ahead and live your life.
You might be surprised.
The world might continue."

It was not easy for me, in the days of the giants.
Ans now they call me a giant.
Because my capitals were LABOUR, REFORM, WELFARE,
TENEMENT REGULATION, JUVENILE COURT (the first),
FACTORY INSPECTION, WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION,
WOMAN SUFFRAGE, PACIFISM, IMMIGRANT JUSTICE.
And because
Black, brown, and white and red and yellow
heavied my hand and heart.

I shall tell you a thing about giants
that you do not wish to know:
Giants look in the mirror and see
almost nothing at all,
But they leave their houses nevertheless.
They lurch out of doors
to reach you, the other stretchers and strainers.

The Jungle & Silent Spring

A question that I've continually returned to since reading The Jungle concerns genre: What does it mean for a novel -- a work of fiction -- to become the impetus for such significant social change? It seems strange and amazing that a fictional account of the conditions of the meat-packing district resulted in such sudden and sweeping reform. (And why, as there is no shortage of injustices to be exposed, haven't more novels had similar results?)

Fred Warren, co-editor of Appeal to Reason, a socialist journal that published articles and parts of books, commissioned Sinclair to write a novel about immigrants in Packingtown. The novel was serialized in Appeal to Reason in 1905, which had a circulation that year of 175, 000. Doubleday published The Jungle in 1906 and it achieved immediate success in the U.S., was published in seventeen languages within a few years, and received international acclaim. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were implemented within months after The Jungle was published. Congress and the Supreme Court passed other significant laws and made a number of rulings between 1906-1908 which related to unions and to child labor.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which was published in 1962, was an influential book in a similar way, as its resonance and relevance has continued to this day, and in terms of the radical changes it brought about. Silent Spring, though, is a non-fiction work. I wonder about how genre influenced the reception of both Silent Spring and of The Jungle, and about the reach and mobility of a novel in both 1906 and now. I also wonder how the results may have been different if Sinclair had written about Packingtown as a journalist and his piece had been published as the extensive cover story of a newspaper rather than as a work of "ficiton."

Chicago Under Glass

From time to time, I clip articles from newspapers or magazines, a story that interests me, but that I don't have time to read at the moment when I first encounter it, with the intention that I will return to it when I can give it the close attention I would like. While sorting through some papers recently, I came across one of these clippings, which I found relevant to Ghosts of Chicago.

Nearly two years ago, there was an article in the Chicago Reader (November 8, 2007) written by Michael Miner and titled "Window on a Lost World: The city as its first photojournalists saw it." Miner writes in celebration of the then just published book, Chicago Under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, edited by Mark Jacob and Richard Callahan.
The "glass" of the title refers to the glass negatives from which photographs of that time were made. The book features images from a time when photojournalism was just in its beginnings, and apparently it took photographers a while to catch on to the full significance of the genre. In 1915, the Eastland capsized a few blocks away from the Daily News offices, and in spite of the fact that photographers were immediately at the site, no photographs of the disaster were printed in the paper. However, in 1929, the paper ran a story with five photographs on the front page - "four head shots and a photo taken at the garage where Bugsy Moran's gang was rubbed out."

The atmosphere of the photographs is haunting and strange, and many of the images are bizarre. One photograph is of a man wrestling a bear. Another is of a heavyweight boxer dressed in a business suit shown holding three men who also wear business suits. The caption for the photograph that appears on the cover of the book states, "Blind children touch an elephant while visiting the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1917."


I checked the Chicago Public Library website and Chicago Under Glass is available at almost every neighborhood library in the city. In addition to the 260 photographs gathered in this collection, the Chicago History Museum, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, has digitally archived 55,000 photographs taken for the Chicago Daily News from 1902-1933.
The archive may be accessed at:

http://memory.loc.gov/

In the Reader article, five of the book's photographs are included, in addition to the image on the book's cover. My favorite of these is a photograph taken in 1924 of Norma Zilk, a student at Lake View High School. According to the caption, at one time Zilk "held the women's world records in the 80-yard indoor dash and the 220-yard outdoor dash." In the photograph, Zilk, wearing a Lake View t-shirt, flies through the air inside the Municipal Grant Park Stadium (later renamed Soldier Field). If you click on the above link and type in "Norma Zilk" in the Search All Collections box, the photograph will appear.

Jenn

Drawing the faces of the morning commute

I loved plodding through the muddy streets of turn of the century Chicago with Carl Sandburg. Just like walking around for a day with all but the closest of bosom buddies, Carl occasionally spewed some opinions with which I didn't agree, but I still appreciated his vigor, his enthusiasm, his love for a city so flawed. So I took him up on his suggestion, to "hang on a strap with me here" (p4) and board a Halsted Street Car, as I rode the 21st century blue line to campus. I couldn't spot any obvious cartoonists on the train with me, although one high school kid was doodling on the brown paper cover his mother had undoubtedly folded onto his new textbook. I imagined the "pigsticker" and the "overall factory girl" crawling down Halsted Steet on the way to the yards. I imagined that they lived in an apartment in Stevenson or Lincoln Hall. They might have walked the same ground we walk each day, wait on Halsted for the street car that never seems to come, hoping perhaps praying that Chicago transit doesn't make them late today. Flashing forward, I see a man in a tie anxiously check his watch. A woman in scrubs shifts impatiently in her seat. One man, in a restaurant uniform slumps over-- coming home from the night shift at 8:00 am.
"Find your pencils
a way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces." (Sandburg p. 4)

One woman in office clothes stares forward-- ipod in her ears-- the previous evening's concerns still lingering on her face. Contrary to the quiet malaise that hangs inside the car, the train hurtles forward, just as the street car once clanged down Halsted. Instead of standing in rooms full of raw carcasses, these passengers look forward to days spent answering phones, flipping burgers, cleaning bathrooms, administering flu shots and clicking mouses. They cling to coffee cups, cell phones, children's hands and newspapers. Another Chicago work week has begun.

Just like Sandburg witnessed so long ago,
"Faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams." (p. 4)

Devil in the White City Blog

Okay I’m going to struggle with this blog because I don’t have a ton to say about it either way.  It was enjoyable, but it didn’t blow me away.  I kind of thought it would blow me away, since over the summer one of my friend’s brothers told her she had to read it, and then she did and she told me it was awesome – the best book she’d read in a long time.  So maybe I had too high of expectations.  Anyway, I was pretty bored throughout.  I’m a grad student and I’m not supposed to be bored reading anything, of course, but maybe it’s because I’m not a history person.  Devil in the White City read a little too much like history class history to me, and I just couldn’t get into it.

So some of us liked the Burnham parts better and some of us liked the Holmes parts better.  A lot of us, it seemed, expected to like the Holmes parts best but ended up preferring Burnham.  I think I side with the latter.  For me, the Holmes parts could have been done better.  I come from this whole Psychology background (my undergrad major) so of course I’m fascinated by serial killers and sociopaths, but this seemed kind of lame and contrived.  Not what was going on, but the writing.  The Burnham parts were pretty interesting, but it could have been said in 100 pages, easy.  Not that I don’t understand, when you’re a history guy like Larsen you want to get it all out there, and you never feel like it’s thorough enough, but editors, hello?

I sound like I hate the book and I don’t.  I was glad I read it, but I don’t think I’ll recommend it to anyone else with the same fervor as my friend recommended it to me with.  Good for history buffs, bad for me.

Road Trip

My three buddies and I began our journey around 7:30PM as the bright moon was making its way up into the sky. The wind was strong on this particular night, but not too cold. Our first stop was at Robinson Burial Grounds, then the Grime Sisters, Resurrection Mary, and finally ending at Bachelor’s Grove. Nothing too exciting happened, but I will spice it up with some haunted history.

Our first stop was at Robinson Indian Burial Grounds on East River Road near Lawrence; it is right in the middle of Rosemont and Norridge. It is real easy to find, park, and walk over to, and if I were to rate the police activity in a Grand Theft Auto style there would be zero to one stars out of four – four being

the most police activity with a high chance of getting a ticket. The path leads right up to a large rock with the name Alexander Robinson inscribed into it, while buried underneath is all his family. Alexander Robinson acted as a mediator between the white men and Potawatomi Indians around early 19^th century. He was granted this land, where his burial now sits, as appreciation for all his work. His family continued to occupy this land up until May 26, 1955 when the land was mysteriously burned to the ground. Then on October 16, 1955, three young boys, ages thirteen, eleven, and fourteen, were found dead in Robinson Woods. Supposedly, they were molested and murdered by a man who owned a horse stable. The autopsy stated “asphyxiation by suffocation.” One boy was struck repeatedly and then strangled with a rope or necktie. They were all found with adhesive tape covering their eyes. The murder was not solved for forty years.

There have been many sightings and weird occurrences of phenomena in these woods. People have been known to hear the beating of Indian tom-toms and the chopping of wood late at night. There have also been strange lights coming out of the forest that motorists, neighbors, and local police have reported. Another strange occurrence is that of a phantom smell – the smell of flowers. In dead winter, people visiting the rock have reported smelling scents of lilacs and violets as if they were fresh in bloom. My friend Mike and his brother have experienced this smell when they visited a few winters ago. We stuck around for about fifteen minutes only to hear the loud creaking of the trees by the vicious winds. It was spooky to know the history but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Our next stop was down I-294S towards the Grime Sisters, another set of children dumped after they were murdered.

Source: http://www.ghostresearch.org/sites/robinson/

http:/www.prairieghosts.com/grimes.html

The Grime Sisters are located on German Church Road in Chicago. Being here at night is dangerous because of the cars speeding by. It is easy to park in one of the little communities with the huge houses and walk over to the bridge, but beware of cars at all times. I would give this two police stars because they would probably stop and say something if they saw you walking over to the bridge, more because of a safety issue. We walked over to the bridge where the girl’s bodies were dumped stood there for about ten minutes, took some pictures and left. Nothing exciting happened, except for the phantom hand grabbing my friend and pulling him down to the dark abyss; we haven’t seen him since. He was probably just messing with us.

The Grime Sister's murder is another incident of children being kidnapped and brutally murdered. They went missing December 28, 1956, which was not too long after the young boys who were found in Robinson Woods. Barbara was fifteen and her sister Patricia was thirteen. They went to go see the new Elvis Presley movie Love Me Tender and never made it home. The police and public believed the girls were runaways; they were able to get Elvis Presley to publicly call the girls home; a few shake of his hips did not work. The girl’s bodies were not found until January 22, 1957. A man spotted them on the road

while driving, thinking that they were “mannequins.” Their bodies were naked and completely frozen, and they had to be thawed before any autopsy could be done. They were determined dead because of “shock and exposure,” but their bodies were severly beaten. “According to reports, Patricia suffered from a broken nose, three large wounds on her stomach, and a severe beating. Barbara had been stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick, and had some large bruises on her head” (Eblin 2).

There are haunted sounds and sights that come from German Church Road, such as phantom cars and bodies. People have been known to report two bodies lying on the road; they call police, who then show up and find nothing. Another weird thing is that people will hear a car pulling up to the side of the road, then hear something sounding like someone is throwing something into the woods, then a door closes and a car drives off, all while there is nothing there to see – no car, no man, no bodies, nothing.

Sources:

http://www.prairieghosts.com/grimes.html http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/698969/chicagos_most_haunted_the_unsolved.html?cat=37

The next destination was Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Road where we tried to meet up with good ol’ Resurrection Mary, fat chance that was. It was about 8:30PM as we drove up to the front gate. It was real easy to find and pull up to; you could park right in front of the gate. I would give it two police stars because police would probably tell you to go home if you are just standing outside the gate and maybe yell at you depending on how they are feeling. I was hoping one would come by, because maybe he or she would have an interesting story to tell. We were disappointed when we got there, because the gate seemed to have been redone and there were no marks like the pictures, just one bent bar. The entrance had a sensational appearance, though; it was all white with a thick cross popping out in the middle and gold painted bars keeping out trespassers. We were hoping to find some pretty lady standing around with us or in the car while we were driving, but were not so lucky. I am going to skip the stories of Mary because we have gone over them in class so many times. It is the story of the ghost hitchhiker who disappears when you least expect it.

Our final destination was Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery. This was a huge flop because of the police. It scores four police stars. It is about fifteen minutes away from Resurrection Cemetery when there is no traffic and is located on the Midlothian Turnpike. We got there at nine but could not even make our way in because of police watching the entrance, so we went to grab something to eat at Portillos. We stayed there till about 10:00PM and then tried again. This time there were two police officers sitting in their car just hoping they would catch somebody going in so they could have something to do. We called it quits and headed home, but we will soon make our return there probably during the day. I am going to save any information on this place for another blog for when I do make it down there.

Tom Ryan