Pride in the Jungle

Book excerpt: In 1905, Upton Sinclair published his muckraking classic, The Jungle, and shocked the nation with his account of the environmental and human costs of operating Chicago's sprawling Union Stock Yards. His description of the nearby neighborbood where workers lived, often in deplorable conditions, made the "Back of the Yards" one of the most famous - and infamous - urban enclaves in the country. Pride in the Jungle picks up the story of the Back of the Yards about a decade after Sinclair's memorable account. By that time many neighborhood families were on the verge of generational change as the original migrants from Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, and other parts of Europe surrendered authority over the family to their Americanized children. The neighborhood, too, was changing - from Sinclair's terrible urban slum to a stable, working-class community with a strong sense of pride. Focusing on the period between the world wars, Jablonsky describes the emergence of a distinctive sense of community as ethnicity, religion, family traditions, and an accommodation to the "American way of life" combined to create a "pride in the jungle". Jablonsky also explains how the Back of the Yards community was shaped by the residents' sense of place, by their unique experience of the cultural and the physical landscapes. He describes the grass-roots formation of the widely acclaimed Neighborhood Council as the culmination of "socio-spacial processes" unfolding in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Based on archival sources, published scholarship, and eighty-four oral histories, Jablonsky's lively account establishes why place and space mattered in the era of pedestrians and streetcars - and why they canstill matter in America's troubled, yet vibrant, urban centers.