tylercoates:(via pterodactyls)
World’s Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893.
(discovered via Brooklyn Museum on flickr)
April 1941. “South Side market, Chicago.” With security at the door. 35mm nitrate negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. -Shorpy
Photo link for full size.
Prairie Avenue - S.E. from 18th Street
Man standing on a fence in the Union Stock Yard & Transit Company, during the 1904 Stockyards Strike.
The ramp in the background, I believe, is the one that led up to the slaughter house in the stockyards. It was nicknamed the “Bridge of Sighs,” a reference to Venice’s famed Bridge of Sighs - the last view of Venice convicts saw before their imprisonment.
“Queen and guttersnipe of cities, cynosure and cesspool of the world: not if I had a hundred tongues, everyone shouting a different language in a different key, could I do justice to her splendid chaos. The most beautiful and the most squalid, girdled with a twofold zone of girdled with a twofold zone of parks and slums; where the keen air from the lake and prairie is ever in the nostrils and the stench of foul smoke is never out of the throat; the great port a thousand miles from the sea; the great mart which gathers up with one hand the corn and cattle of the West and deals out with the other the merchandise of the East; widely and generously planned with streets of twenty miles, where it is not safe to walk at night; where women ride straddlewise, and millionaires dine at mid-day on the Sabbath; the chosen seat of public spirit and municipal boodle, of cut-throat commerce and munificent patronage of art; the most American of American cities.,and yet the most mongrel; the second American city of the globe, the fifth German city, the third Swedish, the second Polish, the first and only veritable Babel of the age; all of which twenty-five years ago next Friday was a heap of smoking ashes. Where in all the world can words be found for this miracle of paradox and incongruity?”
GEORGE WARRINGTON STEEVENS, (1869-1900)
