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""Which neighborhood?" It's one of the first questions you're asked when you move to Chicago. And the answer you give - be it Bucktown, Bronzeville, or Bridgeport - can give your inquisitor a good idea of who you are, especially in a metropolis with so many different neighborhoods and suburbs to choose from." "Many of us know little of the neighborhoods beyond those where we work, play, and live. This is particularly true in Chicagoland, a region that spans over 4,400 square miles and is home to more than 9.5 million residents. Now, historian Ann Durkin Keating's compact guide, drawn largely from the bestselling Encyclopedia of Chicago, brings the history of Chicago neighborhoods to life."--BOOK JACKET.
This extensive guide shows how the history and culture of Illinois are embedded in the names of its towns, cities, and other geographical features. Edward Callary unearths the origins of names of nearly three thousand Illinois communities and the circumstances surrounding their naming and renaming. Organized alphabetically, the entries are concise, engaging, and full of fascinating detail revealing the rich ethnic history of the state, the impact of industrialization and the coming of the railroads, and insight into local politics and personalities. Many entries also provide information on local pronunciation, the name’s etymology, and the community’s location, all set in historical and cultural context. A general introduction locates Illinois place names in the context of general patterns of place naming in the United States. An extremely useful reference for scholars of American history, geography, language, and culture, Place Names of Illinois also offers intriguing browsing material for the inquisitive reader and the curious traveler.
An entertaining guidebook to the city’s many communities with maps, landmarks, history, and fun facts. With over two hundred neighborhoods divided into seventy-seven community areas, Chicago offers a dazzling and daunting challenge to ambitious tourists and lifelong citizens. This blend of history and travel guide introduces you to them. Anyone who’s never been to Chicago will be shocked to learn how big it really is. Did you know that Humboldt Park isn’t even in Humboldt Park? Confused about the exact boundaries of West Elsdon or curious about the origins of the famous Second City Theater? In a handbook that is both an entertaining adventure and a methodical survey, Mary Zangs tackles all seventy-seven communities, providing maps, points of interest, and local perspectives for the many places Chicagoans call home.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have established gathering spaces to find acceptance, form social networks, and unify to resist oppression. Framing the emergence of queer enclaves in reference to place, this volume explores the physical and symbolic spaces of LGBTQ Americans. Authors provide an overview of the concept of “place” and its role in informing identity formation and community building. The book also includes interactive project prompts, providing opportunities to practically apply topics and theories discussed in the chapters.
Offers the collective history of 230 neighborhoods and communities which formed the bustling network of greater Chicagoland--many connected to the city by the railroad. Profiles the people who built these neighborhoods, and the structures they left behind that still stand today.
What do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you’re tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties. In Chicago’s Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago—from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department’s twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle—but too small for the city to keep up with—city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood’s particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city—especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can—and cannot—accomplish when they work together.
They are the suburban jewels that crown one of the world's premier cities. Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff: together, they comprise the North Shore of Chicago, a social registry of eight communities that serve as a genteel enclave of affluence, culture, and high society. Historian Michael H. Ebner explains the origins and evolution of the North Shore as a distinctive region. At the same time, he tells the paradoxical story of how these suburbs, with their common heritage, mutual values, and shared aspirations, still preserve their distinctly separate identities. Embedded in this history are important lessons about the uneasy development of the American metropolis.
"Over the past several decades and increasingly since the beginning of the pandemic, second homeowners have left a distinctive mark across both rural and urban America. As wealthy elites reallocate capital into housing investments other than their primary residence, they extend the breadth of their influence to places as different as the backwoods of northern Maine and the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill. Across these varied geographies, the purchase of second homes has become a social problem, placing pressure on housing markets, igniting political tensions, and putting strain on local community dynamics. While this movement of capital may be in part motivated by financial returns, this alone cannot fully explain what motivates second homeowners, nor does it capture the depth of their influence. Privileging Place examines how place-identity-which is to say, a felt identification with a particular kind of place-leads many affluent people to shift a portion of their capital and their lives to a new place and to exert an influence on that place in a particular way. Drawing on interviews with over sixty second homeowners as well as community observations from two years of field research in Rangeley, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, Meaghan Stiman looks at the ways in which place-identity motivates the movements of a particular subset of second homeowners, namely, the upper-middle class. Belonging to the top 20% of American income earners, these second-home buyers are predominantly white and tend to concentrate their wealth in suburbs and other affluent, resource-rich areas. In Privileging Place, Stiman shows that, for the upper-middle class, second home ownership is a way to promote an identity for themselves through the place where they buy their second home (whether rural or urban). But because these projects are second homes, developed on the side while still holding onto the valued resources of their suburban primary residences, Stiman argues that such place-identity projects rely on further deepening inequalities in urban and rural places. To the second homeowners, these are not places to work, go to school, or contribute to community life, but are places to imagine a version of themselves as urban or rural people and to imprint their version of urban or rural life onto the community where they live part-time. By tracing the way upper-middle class values and practices unfold between secondary city and country homes and their suburban hometowns, this book offers a detailed look into the spatial concentration and diffusion of white, upper-middle class privileges in the United States"--
This social history and community study documents the events surrounding the attempt by community members, activists, and VISTA architects to resist the planned construction of a community college in the neighborhood of Uptown. The planner and architect are seldom envisioned as advocates for the urban poor. However, during the 1960s, New Left planners and architects began working with marginalized groups in cities to design alternatives to urban renewal projects. This was part of a national advocacy planning movement that was taking shape in urban areas like Chicago. Inspired by critics of the Rational-comprehensive model of planning, advocacy planners opposed the imposition of projects on neighborhoods often with no collaboration from residents. One example of this resistance was Hank Williams Village—a multi-purpose housing and commercial redevelopment project modeled after a southern town. The Village was an attempt to prevent the displacement of thousands of southern whites by the planned construction of a community college in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. While the plan for the Village failed to win support of the local urban renewal board, the work performed by the young VISTA architects became instrumental in their subsequent career trajectories and thus served as formative personal and professional experience.