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CCC Reference
Overview
Researching specific Chicago neighborhoods can be more difficult than researching community areas. This is due in part to the fact that the city of Chicago does not officially designate the names or boundaries of neighborhoods. As such, different sources, or even different people within the same source, might refer to a neighborhood or its boundaries differently. To further complicate research, neighborhoods oftentimes share their name with a community area even though they may be one of multiple neighborhoods within that community area. However, because Chicagoans oftentimes describe where they live by the neighborhood name rather than the community area name, it may be easier to find a first-hand account of growing up in the Pilsen neighborhood, for example, than it would to find an account of growing up in the Lower West Side which is the community area in which Pilsen is located.
Information for specific neighborhoods tends to come from a variety of resources. A good example are the Chicago Public Library neighborhood level community collections which exist for some, though not all, neighborhoods. These collections can vary in size, scope, and material (one might offer local club newsletters while another might contain oral histories), but typically provide the kind of neighborhood focus that researchers may find useful. Other helpful resources, when available, are the records of local organizations, community groups, or even legal records.
Collections exemplifying some of the various types of neighborhood specific resources are listed here, but this list is not comprehensive.
Archival Sources
- Explore Chicago by Neighborhood - from Rogers Park to Mount Greenwood, and beyond, Explore Chicago Collections
Here you will find links to resources within Explore Chicago Collections divided by neighborhoods. Please note that the list is not comprehensive and does not include materials for all Chicago neighborhoods. Additionally, some community areas are included in the list.
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Back of the Yards community collection, 1937-1983, Chicago Public Library
Collection summary: This collection consists of microfilm reels of the Back of the Yards Journal, running from January 7, 1937 to December 29, 1983 with some significant gaps, as well as one box of supplementary materials. Also included is a microfilm reel of scrapbooks kept by the Back of the Yards Council from between July 1939 and February 1967. Included is a copy of the 25th Annual Report of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, dated May 1964. -
Southport Neighbors Association Records, 1992-2003, University of Illinois at Chicago
Collection Summary: The Southport Neighbors Association (SNA) represents the residents and businesses in the Southport neighborhood of Chicago located in the heart of Lakeview. This collection contains minutes, newsletters, correspondence, and photographs documenting the activities of the Southport Neighbors Association. -
Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project papers, Chicago History Museum
Collection summary: In 2016 Breakthrough Urban Ministries, a community-based organization that provides social services on Chicago's West Side, and the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History collaborated on this oral history project. The oral history center worked with Breakthrough's Film Crew, a group of nine young people from East Garfield Park and other West Side communities, to conduct these interviews. Breakthrough and the East Garfield Park Youth Collaborative recruited most of the narrators. All narrators had strong connections to the West Side, mainly East Garfield Park and North Lawndale. A transcription company, interns, and a volunteer created the transcriptions comprising this collection, known as Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project. Archive includes project documents and 27 oral history transcripts from Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project. -
The Bethlehem Howell Neighborhood Center collection, 1894-1965, University of Illinois at Chicago
Collection summary: Bethlehem Center and Howell House were church-related neighborhood houses serving the Pilsen area on the Near West Side. They provided religious, social services, and personal welfare assistance to an immigrant community composed predominantly of Bohemians, Poles, and Czechs. The two centers cooperated throughout their history, merging in 1961 as the Neighborhood Service Organization. The Neighborhood Service Organization, popularly known as Casa Aztlan, continues to serve the Pilsen area. -
University Village Association records, Bulk, 1961-1978, University of Illinois at Chicago
Collection summary: The University Village Association (UVA) is a not-for-profit organization which aims to improve local stability in the University Village area. Located near the UIC campus, UVA assists local economic and residential development. These records include architecture maps, a Hi8 tape recording, newspaper clippings, photographs, redevelopment reports, and utilities maps.
Brubaker, C. William, Bromann Playground, Andersonville, 1981, University of Illinois at Chicago,
https://explore.chicagocollections.org/image/uic/59/5d8nk68/
Books and Other Published Sources
WorldCat allows you to search the holdings of libraries around the world. Check to see if these titles are at a library near you! If not, see if a local public library or a university with which you are affiliated allows you to do interlibrary loan. WorldCat may not include images or summaries for all titles.
Chicanas of 18th Street: Narratives of a movement from Latino Chicago by ISBN: 9780252036187Publication Date: 2011-09-21Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform. Highlighting the women's motivations, initiatives, and experiences in politics during the 1960s and 1970s, these rich personal accounts reveal the complexity of the Chicano movement, conflicts within the movement, and the importance of teatro and cultural expressions to the movement. Also detailed are vital interactions between members of the Chicano movement with leftist and nationalist community members and the influence of other activist groups such as African Americans and Marxists.
Boystown: sex and community in Chicago by ISBN: 9780226413259Publication Date: 2017-01-20From neighborhoods as large as Chelsea or the Castro, to locales limited to a single club, like The Shamrock in Madison or Sidewinders in Albuquerque, gay areas are becoming normal. Straight people flood in. Gay people flee out. Scholars call this transformation assimilation, and some argue that we--gay and straight alike--are becoming "post-gay." Jason Orne argues that rather than post-gay, America is becoming "post-queer," losing the radical lessons of sex. In Boystown, Orne takes readers on a detailed, lively journey through Chicago's Boystown, which serves as a model for gayborhoods around the country. The neighborhood, he argues, has become an entertainment district--a gay Disneyland--where people get lost in the magic of the night and where straight white women can "go on safari." In their original form, though, gayborhoods like this one don't celebrate differences; they create them. By fostering a space outside the mainstream, gay spaces allow people to develop an alternative culture--a queer culture that celebrates sex. Orne spent three years doing fieldwork in Boystown, searching for ways to ask new questions about the connective power of sex and about what it means to be not just gay, but queer. The result is the striking Boystown, illustrated throughout with street photography by Dylan Stuckey. In the dark backrooms of raunchy clubs where bachelorettes wouldn't dare tread, people are hooking up and forging "naked intimacy." Orne is your tour guide to the real Boystown, then, where sex functions as a vital center and an antidote to assimilation.
The Muse in Bronzeville: African American creative expression in Chicago, 1932-1950 by ISBN: 9780813550435Publication Date: 2011-09-02The Muse in Bronzeville, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with reproductions of paintings of the same period, examines Black Chicago's "Renaissance" through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage make a powerful case for moving Chicago's Bronzeville, long overshadowed by New York's Harlem, from a peripheral to a central position within African American and American studies.- Pride in the Jungle: community and everyday life in Back of the Yards Chicago by ISBN: 0801843359Publication Date: 1992-12-01In 1905, Upton Sinclair published his muckraking classic, The Jungle, and shocked the nation with his account of the environmental and human costs of operating Chicago's sprawling Union Stock Yards. His description of the nearby neighborbood where workers lived, often in deplorable conditions, made the "Back of the Yards" one of the most famous - and infamous - urban enclaves in the country." "Pride in the Jungle picks up the story of the Back of the Yards about a decade after Sinclair's memorable account. By that time many neighborhood families were on the verge of generational change as the original migrants from Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, and other parts of Europe surrendered authority over the family to their Americanized children. The neighborhood, too, was changing - from Sinclair's terrible urban slum to a stable, working-class community with a strong sense of pride. Focusing on the period between the world wars, Jablonsky describes the emergence of a distinctive sense of community as ethnicity, religion, family traditions, and an accommodation to the "American way of life" combined to create a "pride in the jungle."" "Jablonsky also explains how the Back of the Yards community was shaped by the residents' sense of place, by their unique experience of the cultural and the physical landscapes. He describes the grass-roots formation of the widely acclaimed Neighborhood Council as the culmination of "socio-spacial processes" unfolding in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Based on archival sources, published scholarship, and eighty-four oral histories, Jablonsky's lively account establishes why place and space mattered in the era of pedestrians and streetcars - and why they can still matter in America's troubled, yet vibrant, urban centers.
Us Versus Them: race, crime, and gentrification in Chicago neighborhoods by ISBN: 9780190066574Publication Date: 2020-02-27Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing visions of neighborhood changenecessarily divide activists into racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, Doeringexamines how activists and community leaders clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove tomake local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field, Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of neighborhood change.
Online Sources
- Wikipedia: List of Neighborhoods in ChicagoThe Wikipedia entry for Chicago neighborhoods can be a useful tool in that it includes a side by side list of Chicago neighborhoods and the community areas in which they are located. Either the neighborhood list or the community area list can be arranged alphabetically which can be helpful if the user wants to view all the neighborhoods in a particular community area together, for example.
- Encyclopedia of ChicagoThe Encyclopedia of Chicago is a reference resource focusing on Chicago and its surrounding areas created through collaboration between the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University.
- Explore Chicago CollectionsExplore Chicago Collections is a resource created by Chicago Collections that allows the user to search the collections of member institutions throughout the city.