Welcome to Pullman
This mural dedicated to railroad car magnate George Pullman is painted on the north retaining wall at the Metra commuter train tracks over 111th Street at Cottage Grove Avenue. The clock tower is across Cottage Grove to the right. I told Robin that in the movie of his life, George Pullman needs to be played by Victor Garber. This led to a debate about whether Victor Garber is dead. He isn't, but Robin thought he was.
In real life, George Pullman is being played by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Here's the quick story of George Pullman and why he made this spot on the far southeast side of Chicago significant enough to justify a national monument.
George Pullman was born in 1831 along the Erie Canal in upstate New York. His father was an engineer working on a project to widen the canal, and in the process he invented a system that could lift houses and move them out of the canal project's intended path. When George's father died in 1855, 24-year-old George took over the company. He moved 20 houses away from the canal in 1856. In 1857, he started thinking bigger.
He heard that the City of Chicago, then only 30-someodd years old and festering in a swamp, was trying to come up with some way to fix the problem they had with cholera and dysentery and typhoid and all those diseases brought on by the open sewage running through the streets. The problem was that, being a swamp, the city had a water table virtually at the surface, so they couldn't built an underground sewage system. Well, George Pullman said they could. The key wasn't to dig in the mud, though. It was to lift the city up. And, sure, Chicago already had a bunch of buildings sitting there in its fast-growing grid of streets, but Pullman had a trick for that. Just lift the buildings up five or six or eight feet and fill in the ground all around them. So the city hired Pullman to lift the whole thing into the air, giving them space for underground sewers above the water table.
Which ... yeah. That's the kind of thing Chicago does, historically. Don't like the elevation of the ground? Raise it. Don't like which direction a river flows? Reverse it. Just slice right through a Continental Divide. It's not like God will notice or anything.
The project made George Pullman a rich man, so in the 1860s, he spent some of his money to invent a "sleeping car." Essentially, he created a railroad car with beds in little cabins. Which doesn't sound like all that innovative a thing, but Pullman pulled out all the stops and made his cars fancy "hotels on wheels." He spent the 1860s and '70s buying out factories and patents, manufacturing his famous Pullman Cars in various locations. And he was doing pretty well, but Pullman was a big thinker.
And so, in 1880, he bought 4,000 acres of lakeside swamp then far southeast of Chicago and started building his very own company town. It was centered around the factory, where Pullman would build his cars. His administrative offices were in that clock tower building. And he built an entire town around the factory to house his workers. It was like a real city, only owned by George Pullman, and Pullman was the only employer. Everybody who worked for Pullman lived in Pullman's town, and they bought from Pullman's company store with money Pullman gave them to give right back to him.
And yeah, that always goes well. There's never any downside to the whole Company Town thing. Except that Pullman had all the dumb sorts of rules Company Town guys always have. (Which is why all those Tesla worshippers need to learn a little history before they hop aboard Elon Musk's spaceship to Mars.) There were strict behavioral codes that prohibited people from drinking or carousing, even on their own time, and they had to go to Pullman's church. They worked 16-hour days for little money that barely covered the company store prices. Ultimately, people got tired of it, and they started organizing. Pullman town turned into a time bomb.
Pullman lit the fuse in 1894, when demand started falling off for Pullman's cars. He started cutting wages at the same time he raised the rents, and people who were already living at the margin fell far below it. In June of 1894, they went on strike. Pullman tried to break it, and things turned violent. United States President Grover Cleveland, who loved big industry guys like Pullman, responded by sending in 12,000 U.S. Army troops (ignoring the objections of Illinois Governor John Altgeld), who wound up killing a bunch of people before they finally brought the strike to an end.
Unfortunately for Pullman, Governor Altgeld took President Cleveland's interference personally, and he set out on a mission to topple Cleveland from office. He managed to prevent Cleveland's re-nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, then pushed a national committee to deem Pullman's company town "un-American." This eventually led the Illinois Supreme Court to force Pullman to sell the town off, and before long the whole thing was annexed into Chicago. And that was the end of Pullman's Company Town.
Welcome to Pullman
This mural dedicated to railroad car magnate George Pullman is painted on the north retaining wall at the Metra commuter train tracks over 111th Street at Cottage Grove Avenue. The clock tower is across Cottage Grove to the right. I told Robin that in the movie of his life, George Pullman needs to be played by Victor Garber. This led to a debate about whether Victor Garber is dead. He isn't, but Robin thought he was.
In real life, George Pullman is being played by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Here's the quick story of George Pullman and why he made this spot on the far southeast side of Chicago significant enough to justify a national monument.
George Pullman was born in 1831 along the Erie Canal in upstate New York. His father was an engineer working on a project to widen the canal, and in the process he invented a system that could lift houses and move them out of the canal project's intended path. When George's father died in 1855, 24-year-old George took over the company. He moved 20 houses away from the canal in 1856. In 1857, he started thinking bigger.
He heard that the City of Chicago, then only 30-someodd years old and festering in a swamp, was trying to come up with some way to fix the problem they had with cholera and dysentery and typhoid and all those diseases brought on by the open sewage running through the streets. The problem was that, being a swamp, the city had a water table virtually at the surface, so they couldn't built an underground sewage system. Well, George Pullman said they could. The key wasn't to dig in the mud, though. It was to lift the city up. And, sure, Chicago already had a bunch of buildings sitting there in its fast-growing grid of streets, but Pullman had a trick for that. Just lift the buildings up five or six or eight feet and fill in the ground all around them. So the city hired Pullman to lift the whole thing into the air, giving them space for underground sewers above the water table.
Which ... yeah. That's the kind of thing Chicago does, historically. Don't like the elevation of the ground? Raise it. Don't like which direction a river flows? Reverse it. Just slice right through a Continental Divide. It's not like God will notice or anything.
The project made George Pullman a rich man, so in the 1860s, he spent some of his money to invent a "sleeping car." Essentially, he created a railroad car with beds in little cabins. Which doesn't sound like all that innovative a thing, but Pullman pulled out all the stops and made his cars fancy "hotels on wheels." He spent the 1860s and '70s buying out factories and patents, manufacturing his famous Pullman Cars in various locations. And he was doing pretty well, but Pullman was a big thinker.
And so, in 1880, he bought 4,000 acres of lakeside swamp then far southeast of Chicago and started building his very own company town. It was centered around the factory, where Pullman would build his cars. His administrative offices were in that clock tower building. And he built an entire town around the factory to house his workers. It was like a real city, only owned by George Pullman, and Pullman was the only employer. Everybody who worked for Pullman lived in Pullman's town, and they bought from Pullman's company store with money Pullman gave them to give right back to him.
And yeah, that always goes well. There's never any downside to the whole Company Town thing. Except that Pullman had all the dumb sorts of rules Company Town guys always have. (Which is why all those Tesla worshippers need to learn a little history before they hop aboard Elon Musk's spaceship to Mars.) There were strict behavioral codes that prohibited people from drinking or carousing, even on their own time, and they had to go to Pullman's church. They worked 16-hour days for little money that barely covered the company store prices. Ultimately, people got tired of it, and they started organizing. Pullman town turned into a time bomb.
Pullman lit the fuse in 1894, when demand started falling off for Pullman's cars. He started cutting wages at the same time he raised the rents, and people who were already living at the margin fell far below it. In June of 1894, they went on strike. Pullman tried to break it, and things turned violent. United States President Grover Cleveland, who loved big industry guys like Pullman, responded by sending in 12,000 U.S. Army troops (ignoring the objections of Illinois Governor John Altgeld), who wound up killing a bunch of people before they finally brought the strike to an end.
Unfortunately for Pullman, Governor Altgeld took President Cleveland's interference personally, and he set out on a mission to topple Cleveland from office. He managed to prevent Cleveland's re-nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, then pushed a national committee to deem Pullman's company town "un-American." This eventually led the Illinois Supreme Court to force Pullman to sell the town off, and before long the whole thing was annexed into Chicago. And that was the end of Pullman's Company Town.