What Was Here Before: Pullman, Chicago

The Potawatomi people ranged these Lake Michigan flatlands for centuries, following game through the prairie groves and fishing the rivers that drained into the lake. By the eighteen thirties the federal government had forced them from Illinois entirely, and the land was platted into the rectangular grids of the new American republic.

In eighteen eighty, railroad magnate George Pullman bought four thousand acres of empty prairie about twelve miles south of downtown Chicago and built an entire town from scratch to house the workers who built his famous sleeping cars. He designed the streets, the brick row houses, the church, the hotel, even the sewage system, and he owned every building. Rents were deducted directly from wages. By eighteen ninety-four the scheme had cracked. When Pullman slashed wages during a depression but refused to cut rents, his workers walked out. Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union joined them. The federal government sent troops. Thirty workers died. The strike was broken, but public opinion turned against Pullman's paternalist empire. He died in eighteen ninety-seven, hated enough that his family buried him in a lead-lined coffin encased in concrete, fearing his body might be desecrated. Pullman is now a National Historical Park.