Field Sites and Boundaries

Research took place in four community areas defined by the City of Chicago as: Riverdale, Pullman, South Deering and East Side; as well as across the state line in Hammond, Indiana. Hegewisch is another Chicago community area active in the Calumet Region.

Click on a community to explore the neighborhoods inside these officially bound communities.

Chicago's community area boundaries were established by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s, and have been used to define communities for official policy ever since.

However, the officially defined communities that we see represented on maps, like the community areas separated by white lines above, don't always match up with the neighborhoods and local communities with which residents identify in their everyday lives. Sometimes there are several communities within the officially defined boundaries, and sometimes residents define their communities across official boundaries. Census tracts and police beats don't always match up, either. For example, Police Beat 431 in South Deering includes two very distinct neighborhoods, and residents from only one of those neighborhoods attend the beat's CAPS meetings. Communities are fluid, changing over time as new buildings and infrastructure physically separate people, generations pass, social relations change and different residents move in and out.

Settlement and Ethnic Enclaves of the Region
While industry, trade and the construction of railroads and harbors dictated the landscape's transformation from contiguous wetlands, woodlands and prairies into an industrial hub of the world, the region's residents created communities and neighborhoods nestled within Calumet's industrial landscape.

The entrepreneurs who took advantage of the region's location for the construction of massive steel mills required a large laboring population. The labor source derived primarily from European immigrants who arrived in droves during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to make a living from this growing demand for industrial product. Mexicans and African Americans also arrived to work in the steel mills around the turn of the century. Different ethnic groups settled the region at different times and in waves, leading to ethnic enclaves within communities.

Some of the first immigrants to populate the region were Irish, English, Swedish, and German. They were followed by Eastern and Southern European residents, including Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian and Mexican residents. Immigrants continued coming to the area throughout the first half of the 1900s to fill labor demands of the growing industrial complexes. Famine, political unrest, and economic instability were additional reasons some residents immigrated to the Lake Calumet region.

In the United States, many residents migrated north to the urban, industrial city of Chicago from the rural, agricultural south. This includes African American residents who sought freedom in the North in the 1800s, during the Great Migration from 1914-1918 to fill labor needs created by World War I, as well as economic opportunities following World War II and civil liberties in the 1960s. Housing was built in Altgeld Gardens in the 1940s to house African American laborers. In the 1960s the African American populations in Pullman and South Deering also rose.

Race relations in some of the communities were uneasy in the 1950s and '60s, reflecting a tense point in American history. In 1953, the Chicago Housing Authority moved several African American families into the Trumball Park Homes in South Deering. Many white residents protested, and as several more black families moved in, riots ensued lasting several months. In 1966, rocks were thrown at Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on a walk in the East Side. Overt racial conflict has since calmed, but fear and racial tension is still an issue in several communities (Bensman and Lynch, 1988:33). However, residents of all ethnicities were united by their common interest in working and achieving a better quality of life for themselves and their families.

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