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Chicago
Bronzeville was once America's most vibrant Black community--next to Harlem. Nightclubs, dance halls, rialtos, and jazz and blues joints lined the streets of Chicago's South Side. Not much is left. A few sound recordings, memories passed down from generation to generation, and--until now--only a handful of photographs.
Bronzeville Nights brings it back, with dozens of photos and mementos recently found in a cache gathered by Lonnie Simmons, a jazzman of renown who played these clubs and also roamed Bronzeville with a camera.
Simmons snapped Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horn and Billie Holiday. He photographed Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr. and Redd Foxx.
And he captured images of astonishing acrobats, howling entertainers, stunning dancers--and drag queens. His never-before published pictures tell an unknown story of lavish life during the segregated 1940s and 50s when African Americans frequented these vibrant clubs.
Bronzeville Nights is a treasure box. Souvenir photo folders from the Rhumboogie Club, postcards from the Palm Tavern and matchbook covers from the Grand Terrace. And it's the story of Lonnie Simmons himself, who ran away from his South Carolina home at age 16 so he could play saxophone for Fats Waller and Ella Fitzgerald before making Bronzeville his home.
Simmons' photos--seen for the first time--exude glamour, swagger and coolness. His images record a time and place that was destroyed more than half a century ago. A place that has never before been reconstructed in pictures. These photos revive this extraordinary social and cultural arena.
It's a world that Steven C. Dubin, author of six books including New York Times Notable Book Arresting Images, and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson reexamine, explore and explain in exhilarating text.
The enthralling story of the Great Chicago Fire and the power struggle over the city's reconstruction in the wake of the tragedy In October of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the "big one"--a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. There hadn't been a meaningful rain since July, and several big blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department's scant resources. On October 8, when Kate Leary's barn caught fire, so began a catastrophe that would forever change the soul of the city.
Leary was a diligent, hardworking Irish woman, no more responsible for the fire than anyone else in the city at that time. But the conflagration that spread from her property quickly overtook the neighborhood, and before too long the floating embers had spread to the far reaches of the city. Families took to the streets with everything they could carry. Grain towers threatened to blow. The Chicago River boiled. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, Chicago saw the biggest and most destructive disaster the United States had ever endured, and Leary would be its scapegoat.
Out of the ashes rose not just new skyscrapers, tenements, and homes, but also a new political order. The city's elite saw an opportunity to rebuild on their terms, cracking down on crime and licentiousness and fortifying a business-friendly environment. But the city's working class recognized a naked power grab that would challenge their traditions, hurt their chances of rebuilding, and move power out of elected officials' hands and into private interests. As quickly as the firefight ended, another battle for the future of the city began between the town's business elites and the poor and immigrant working class.
An enrapturing account of the fire's devastating path and an eye-opening look at its aftermath, The Burning of the World tells the story of one of the most infamous calamities in history and the powerful transformation that followed.
Leary was a diligent, hardworking Irish woman, no more responsible for the fire than anyone else in the city at that time. But the conflagration that spread from her property quickly overtook the neighborhood, and before too long the floating embers had spread to the far reaches of the city. Families took to the streets with everything they could carry. Grain towers threatened to blow. The Chicago River boiled. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, Chicago saw the biggest and most destructive disaster the United States had ever endured, and Leary would be its scapegoat.
Out of the ashes rose not just new skyscrapers, tenements, and homes, but also a new political order. The city's elite saw an opportunity to rebuild on their terms, cracking down on crime and licentiousness and fortifying a business-friendly environment. But the city's working class recognized a naked power grab that would challenge their traditions, hurt their chances of rebuilding, and move power out of elected officials' hands and into private interests. As quickly as the firefight ended, another battle for the future of the city began between the town's business elites and the poor and immigrant working class.
An enrapturing account of the fire's devastating path and an eye-opening look at its aftermath, The Burning of the World tells the story of one of the most infamous calamities in history and the powerful transformation that followed.
Chicago Avant-Garde tells the story of five women who took radical risks in their lives and in their art: artist Gertrude Abercrombie, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, choreographers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, and dealer-curator Katharine Kuh. Inspired and challenged by Chicago, they helped transform the city into a hub of avant-garde experimentation.
This catalog accompanies an exhibition opening at the Newberry Library on September 10, 2021. Designed by graphic artists Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer and letterpress printer Ben Blount, Chicago Avant-Garde includes more than 100 photographs, an engaging and deeply researched essay by Liesl Olson (Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry), and powerful new poems dedicated to each of the five avant-gardists by Chicago-based poet and educatorEve L. Ewing.
Long before corner bars stitched the social fabric of Chicago's neighborhoods together, raucous pioneers like Mark Beaubien were fermenting over the untapped potential of the unbroken prairie. Take a determined saunter from the clamor of Chicago's first breweries, through the hidden passages of thousands of speakeasies and then back into the current of the contemporary craft beer revival. Follow a path plastered with portraits of infamous saloonkeepers and profiles of historic bars. Author June Sawyers serves as an expert guide, stopping every so often to collect a vintage beer label, explain an original recipe or salute the heady history that sits atop the City of Big Shoulders.
Despite its rough-and-tumble image, Chicago has long been identified as a city where books take center stage. In fact, a volume by A. J. Liebling gave the Second City its nickname. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle arose from the midwestern capital's most infamous industry. The great Chicago Fire led to the founding of the Chicago Public Library. The city has fostered writers such as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago's literary magazines The Little Review and Poetry introduced the world to Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound. The city's robust commercial printing industry supported a flourishing culture of the book. With this beautifully produced collection, Chicago's rich literary tradition finally gets its due. Chicago by the Book profiles 101 landmark publications about Chicago from the past 170 years that have helped define the city and its image. Each title--carefully selected by the Caxton Club, a venerable Chicago bibliophilic organization--is the focus of an illustrated essay by a leading scholar, writer, or bibliophile. Arranged chronologically to show the history of both the city and its books, the essays can be read in order from Mrs. John H. Kinzie's 1844 Narrative of the Massacre of Chicago to Sara Paretsky's 2015 crime novel Brush Back. Or one can dip in and out, savoring reflections on the arts, sports, crime, race relations, urban planning, politics, and even Mrs. O'Leary's legendary cow. The selections do not shy from the underside of the city, recognizing that its grit and graft have as much a place in the written imagination as soaring odes and boosterism. As Neil Harris observes in his introduction, "Even when Chicagoans celebrate their hearth and home, they do so while acknowledging deep-seated flaws." At the same time, this collection heartily reminds us all of what makes Chicago, as Norman Mailer called it, the "great American city." With essays from, among others, Ira Berkow, Thomas Dyja, Ann Durkin Keating, Alex Kotlowitz, Toni Preckwinkle, Frank Rich, Don Share, Carl Smith, Regina Taylor, Garry Wills, and William Julius Wilson; and featuring works by Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Clarence Darrow, Erik Larson, David Mamet, Studs Terkel, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many more.
Belly up to the bar and take a swig of Chicago's beer history with this new look at the Windy City's best and most historic brews and breweries. Included are Chicago's most prominent and significant craft breweries, with intricate details on history, important personalities and events in the breweries' past, top beers and more.
Carl Sandburg was an ardent champion of Chicago, famously issuing the challenge: "Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and strong and cunning." For pianist Otis Spann, it was the "mother of the blues," and a beacon to "every good musician who ever left the South." But the union leader Eugene V. Debs had harsher words for the city, calling it "unfit for human habitation," and Rudyard Kipling claimed it was "inhabited by savages" and hoped never to see it again. Whether you look upon the city with admiration, disgust, or an incongruous combination of the two, Chicago has captured the imagination of generations of poets, novelists, journalists, and commentators who have visited or called it home. Chicago in Quotations offers a compendium of the most colorful impressions that citizens of--or visitors to--the Second City will appreciate.
By the end of America's Golden Age of Magic, Chicago had taken center stage in front of an American audience drawn to the craft by the likes of Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston. Cashing in on a craze that rivaled big-band mania, magic shops and clubs sprang up everywhere across the Windy City, packed in customers and put down roots. Over the last century, for example, Magic, Inc. has outfitted magicians from Harry Blackstone Sr. to Penn and Teller to David Copperfield. Magic was an integral part of Chicago's culture, from its earliest venture into live television to the card sharps and hucksters lurking in its amusement parks and pool halls. David Witter keeps track of the shell game of Chicago's fascinating magic history from its vaudeville circuit to its contemporary resurgence.
A fascinating history of Chicago's innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement. Author Liesl Olson traces Chicago's cultural development from the 1893 World's Fair through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of sweeping aesthetic transformations all over the world. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olson's enthralling study bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic "renaissance" moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville. Stories of the famous and iconoclastic are interwoven with accounts of lesser-known yet influential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. Olson argues for the importance of Chicago's editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens who helped nurture Chicago's unique culture of artistic experimentation. Cover art by Lincoln Schatz
From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie's comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city's appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes.
Illustrated with more than 140 photographs, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 tells the fascinating stories of the people, ideas, negotiations, decision-making, compromises, and strategies that changed the history of architecture and one of its showcase cities.
*signed copies available*