Chicago, Satan’s Sanctum

Title: Chicago: Satan’s Sanctum by L. O. Curon

Location: Internet Archive      Date: 1899

It seems Obi-Wan was wrong. There was a more retched hive of scum and villainy and its name was Chicago.

An utterly different sort of book is “Chicago, Satan’s Sanctum,” by L. O. Curon (Chicago: C. D. Phillips & Co.). It is a sensational description of the crime, immorality, police inefficiency and political corruption of Chicago. We are not in a position to say that the picture is exaggerated, though the author cites no corroboration for most of his statements save newspaper articles. Whether he writes throughout from personal investigation or largely from hearsay he does not say. The language he uses is brutally plain, and readers of sensitive nerves would better leave the book alone. What removes such a book, hastily thrown together and unrestrained in its superlatives, to the opposite pole from Jacob Riis’, is the fact that the author sees no bright side, recognizes no progress, proposes no definite and practical remedy. What he says, in effect, is “The city is going to the devil and the devil laughs at the people who don’t know it.” Two classes of people are likely to read the book, and neither class will derive much benefit from it: the morbidly curious will perhaps learn a few new sorts of wickedness to investigate, and the Christian citizen will look in vain for any suggestion “toward the reform of the evils described.

From: The Standard, Volume 47, 1900 (a Baptist Newsletter)

The following selection from the book is actually the very first sentence – and I mean that literally. The book opens with one sentence describing the history of Chicago and what it has come become. Amazing…

Chicago, with its world-wide fame as the most marvelous product of American enterprise among municipal creations in the nineteenth century, with its wonderful growth, from an Indian trading post in 1837 to a modern city of the second size in point of population in the year 1898, with the record of its stupendous strides in reaching its present commercial and financial position among the commanding trade centers in the world, with its strong civic pride, its numerous and admirable religious, educational and charitable institutions both public and private, its cultured development in literature, music, the arts and sciences, with its memorable disaster in the great fire of 1871, its speedy recoupment from that disaster, and its brilliant achievement in the organization and management of the magnificent “White City,” the wide range of the classified exhibits of which covered the entire and progressive contributions of mankind to all that goes to make up the civilization of the age from the earliest period of the commencement of that civilization, this Chicago, grand, philanthropic and patriotic, suffers, as for years it has suffered, from the most extensive and persistent advances in political power, along the lines of their respective crimes, of the criminal classes, until, from the wealthy bribe-giver to the lowest sneak thief and sexual pervert, these classes carry elections, corrupt the corruptible in the Common Council, sway justice in the forum of the lower courts, and govern the police force until it has become a municipal aid to the perpetration of crime.

The Social Problem at the Chicago Stockyards

Title: The Social Problem at the Chicago Stockyards by Charles J. Bushnell

Location: Google Books       Date: 1902

Back of the Yards

Take a look back at life “back of the Yards.” It wasn’t pretty. While the efficiency of the Chicago Stock Yard became an industrial age model, the human toll and living conditions of those whose sweat greased the wheels of progress became the most pressing social issue of the city.

THE STOCK YARD COMMUNITY AT CHICAGO.

The chief cause of the difficulty in the problem of modern city life is the lack of accurate public information about local conditions. With our cities growing much more rapidly than the country districts, great hordes of population, of diverse languages, customs, and habits, are being annually crowded into congested city wards, where, in the absence of any adequate knowledge of the special laws and the peculiar conditions of health and livelihood, life becomes a wild, sodden sickening, inhuman, and infinitely tragical struggle; not only a menace to those finer dreams of a noble, joyous, and beautiful national life, but a threat even to the very essentials of a common and decent civilization itself. To supply some of these needed elements of knowledge, therefore, in the case of a single typical industrial community of a great American city, and thus to illustrate a method of gathering such data in general, is the purpose of the present chapter. The aim will be to take up, after a preliminary survey of the general physical and racial conditions of the locality, a description of the present local status of each of the fundamental elements which go to make a complete democracy…

The Stock Yard district is very badly paved, where there is any paving. Most of it is of wood, in a very bad state of repair, so that riding over the district on a bicycle is a difficult and uncomfortable process. This wood paving, of course, absorbs considerable impurity from the drainage and from the air. In the Hyde Park district, on the other hand, except on Wabash avenue and streets immediately adjacent, the paving is largely of macadam or asphalt. (Some of the older east and west streets, such as parts of Fifty-first and Forty-seventh, are of wood.) But in this district almost all of the streets are paved, while in the Stock Yard district many of the streets are for miles in rainy weather scarcely better than mudholes.

A glance at the health department reports shows that the amount of sewering per mile of streets is also considerably less in the Stock Yard district than in Hyde Park. Of course, this is partly to be accounted for on the ground that there is more unoccupied land in the former district than in the latter.

The housing conditions of the two districts are so diverse in point of quality as to be at times almost incomparable. Anyone who rides observantly throughout the Stock Yard district, and then throughout the district east of it, cannot fail to be struck with the general appearance of squalor, dirt, and general dilapidation in the former, and of comparative neatness, cleanliness, order, and beauty in the latter. Many of the houses in the more thickly populated portions of the Stock Yard district are built in the rear of those fronting the streets, and the sanitary conditions are correspondingly bad.

Another element vital to the interests of health of the community is that of food. Aside from the mere question of quantity, or luxurious delicacy, of the food, the quality of the food of people in the Stock Yard district is neither as nutritious nor, on the whole, as well prepared as that in the other district. A mere glance into the lunch boxes of the school children is sufficient to satisfy any candid mind of this fact. It may very truthfully be said that the families of the district near the yards do not, as a rule, know how to buy or to prepare food in the most economical and nutritious way. Poor cakes, jellies, and unwholesome pastry will frequently form a large part of the luncheons of the school children, who seem to have almost a special craving cultivated for such things ; and a study of the budgets of some of the most typical families of the district reveals much the same condition of affairs.