By Harold Henderson
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Chicago, child of politics. “These new western towns depended on government assistance for their very survival–no place more so than Chicago,” writes Donald Miller in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. “The federal government had removed the Indians from the area and given land to the state of Illinois to dig a canal. For a time the sale of government lots along the canal was the only business in town, while Chicago’s hopes for developing active commerce with the East were based on continuing harbor improvements undertaken and paid for by Washington….In 1830 state canal commissioners laid out two towns at the expected termini of the canal, Ottawa and Chicago….In this way, modern Chicago was born, the creation not of the forces of the private market, as some historians claim, but of state planners.”
Whether it’s the 70s or the 90s, there’s just no such thing as legitimate authority. From Leora Tanenbaum’s review of Laura Kaplan’s The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service in In These Times (April 15): “Although the group was supposedly run as a collective, Kaplan admits that a core group of several women who learned the abortion procedure held most of the power and made most of the decisions. This intrusion of hierarchy caused endless tension.”
Who went to school the longest? Percentage of neighborhood residents over 25 with four or more years of college: In Lincoln Park, 68. In West Garfield Park and South Lawndale, 3. Most educated suburb? Lake Forest, 66. Least educated? Lake Station, Indiana, 4 (Local Community Fact Book, Chicago Metropolitan Area 1990).
