Chicago Condo Directory

The commentary on these photographs is substantial: it situates the events, persons, or institutions historically. The tone of the book is celebratory: Chicago’s Polish downtown was, after all, the “capital of American Polonia” and most tributes to capitals rarely mention their seedier sides. What table books of Washington, for example, include Anacostia or parts of Northeast? Indeed, there’s even a chapter on “Processions, Parades, Events and Celebrations,” documenting annual events like the Constitution Day Parade or Polish Day as well as once in a lifetime happenings like PNA President Casimir Zychli ski’s 1927 funeral nobody marks a funeral like a Pole . But if the reviewer had to identify one criticism of the book, it’s that downplaying of the seedier side. For many Americans, Slavic Chicago is identified with Upton Sinclair’s grim meatpacking plants described in The Jungle.. The socialist Sinclair may have overplayed the “downtrodden masses,” but Poles often go to the other extreme. Granted, Granacki shows the humble houses of average Poles pp. 2, 86 87 and even shows some of the small Polish businesses like the sausage factories, p. 85 , but the greyer side of everyday life lived by these bottom rung on society’s social ladder immigrants fades into the background. I have no idea if there were mega meat packers in this area of Chicago, but I do think we Polonians sometimes underplay the grimmer sides of immigrants’ struggles when documenting just how much they contributed to America. My other criticism of this book is that no pictures carry us into today’s Polish downtown. Granted, the neighborhood reigned as “capital of American Polonia” in “the first half of the twentieth century” p. 7 and the neighborhood’s changed since then. But some documentation of that change would benefit readers. Happily, the book ends with a map and suggested walking tour of the downtown, “On Foot in Old Polonia” pp. 123 25 . These minor reservations aside, the book is recommended not just for Chicago Polonia a not insignificant market since, except for Warsaw, no city in the world has more Poles but for all Polish Americans. For just as Washington, D.C., is the heritage of all Americans, so these few blocks in Chicago’s Polish downtown is the heritage of all Polonians.