WBEZ | Pullman

Economic development coming to Southeast Side

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:32:00 -0500

A neglected former industrial site on the Southeast Side of Chicago is poised to get some needed economic development.

U.S. Bank is donating land near 111^th Street and the Bishop Ford Highway for construction of Pullman Park, a mixed-used project. Housing, big-box stores, a park and recreational facility are being planned. It’s supposed to bring 1,700 jobs. Wal-Mart is scheduled to be the first tenant by next year.

“The main goal here is economic development,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday at U.S. Bank.

Emanuel said this development would help eliminate the 9^th Ward’s food-desert status. “This ward does not have any fresh fruits or vegetable grocery stores. It’s okay to drive outside the ward – you don’t need a passport to do that. The fact is that’s about to change.”

Pullman Park is billed as an anchor for the Pullman and Roseland communities.

“The biggest thing that can happen out of this development is bringing fresh produce to the 9th Ward. The fact that we do not have a grocery store we can go to in the community is criminal,” said Ald. Anthony Beale.

Union loses close vote at Comcast facility in Chicago

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:01:00 -0500

A union has narrowly lost a closely watched election among some Comcast workers in Chicago. They voted 92-79 against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 21.

Two days of balloting, which ended Wednesday, left 189 workers at Comcast’s facility in the Pullman area without collective bargaining. Those employees include installation technicians, maintenance technicians, warehouse workers and payment agents.

“Our employees exercised their legal right to vote and decided not to unionize,” Comcast said in a statement. “We respect their decision.”

This is IBEW’s third election defeat at the Pullman facility since 2003.

Local 21 organizer Dave Webster said Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, ran an effective anti-union campaign. “They scared [the workers] about union dues and they made them think they wouldn’t be part of the big happy family anymore,” Webster said after the balloting.

The vote, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, had significance beyond the Pullman workers.

“Comcast is a global employer and the telecommunications industry is growing,” said Robert Bruno, who directs the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois. “If the IBEW is able to establish a beachhead, it could raise standards at the company. If that rippled through the industry, it would be the same dramatic impact that unions had in the car and steel industries and other manufacturing.”

Nationwide, unions represent an estimated 2 percent of the Philadelphia-based company’s workforce. That’s apart from the media conglomerate NBCUniversal, in which Comcast acquired a majority stake this January.

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd (VI)

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:00:00 -0500

Right toward the end of our interview, Tom asked me if I ever met Studs Terkel. I did, I said, one time, just a few months before he died. “He was a great man,” he said. “We really miss having him around.” I agreed, sure, but said I thought a few of his questions might baffle contemporary readers.

For example, Studs asked a lot of his interviewees, what do you think would happen if Jesus came back to earth?

I think I asked somebody that, not too long ago.

Tom starts thinking. We were wrapping up our talk, preparing to move on with our respective days, but now he’s getting into it again. Perhaps it’s the setting, the church in Pullman, or maybe, like Studs, Tom just wanted to know the answer.

You know, what comes to mind is, would people believe that it’s him? About 90 percent of the people, they’d probably call the police. Hey you better come lock this guy up. I would find Jesus quite fascinating to meet. I’m not afraid to talk to hardly anybody, so I would give this guy with long hair and sandals an audience at least, and if he began to preach to me the way that Jesus preached I’d say, That’s a pretty odd fellow [laughs] with an interesting delivery, speaking in parables. OK, let’s see where’s he going and where’s he coming from. Kind of a cool guy. Hey Jesus, you know, stick around, I’m sure we got a lot of things to talk about. You’re into social issues, so am I, let me introduce you to some of my immigrant friends over in south Chicago that really need some help. You want to do some volunteer work, Jesus? [laughs]. I’ll give you an environmental tour. Maybe you got some ideas for cleaning up some of these sites around here. I think that would be amazing.

I tend to move away from thinking of him as God. I think of him as a fellow who came here on Earth like all of us came to be and lived his 33 years, or something like that, and worked for change and worked for the poor and worked for the downtrodden.

I have this argument with a good friend, a Lutheran, all the time. I say Ken, You go to church once or twice a week, you subscribe to all these Lutheran things and you consider yourself a Christian. How can you feel that way toward people who are poor? Oh, they don’t belong over here. Well where do they belong? Everybody belongs somewhere.

I hear some cockamamie ideas from other people who consider themselves Christians. I know people who are nonreligious, Atheist or Agnostics, that are more Christian than you are. They subscribe to things that Jesus taught and believed in. So I just find it fascinating how most of Christianity, like our newspapers and other things that we’ve discussed here today, have been co-opted and high-jacked for other means.

Yeah if you see him around, tell him to come down here. [Laughs.]

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd (V)

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:00:00 -0500

I worked briefly as a steel worker, but I consider myself more of an honorary member. My dad spent almost 45 years at Wisconsin Steel and he made me promise that I would never go to work in the steel mills. So I embarked in business—the business of politics and government jobs. I worked as an organizer and opened what we call the Friends of Labor back in the days when the mills were still working and there were a number of strikes back then late ‘70s early ‘80s. I was living in the suburbs at the time and working on a strike assistance committee, and I happened to own a building in downtown Harvey with a partner that was the president of a steel worker local that I had helped support and organize, so we became a strike headquarters.

Tom’s phone keeps ringing, and by this point he’s just decided to turn it off. He’s a busy man, but excited to talk about the labor history in Chicago.

Tom Shepherd—Pullman 6 2

You can hardly find anybody in this area that works in steel. There’s hardly any steel manufacturing being done in the city of Chicago, all the big mills are closed. Finkl Steel is going to be moving out here. They’re taking over what formally was Versa-Steel. US Steel still has a plant in Gary, Mittal Steel has a plant in East Chicago. It’s owned by an Indian person who I understand lives in England or Holland, I’m not sure, so it’s foreign owned. Those are the last remaining vestiges of steel. Ironically the Sherwin- Williams plant, which is just to the south of us here, employs about 120 union workers under the steel workers umbrella because they used to be atomic chemical workers.

So there’s small local of steel workers that produce paint, but there aren’t too many union employees here in the neighborhood. The six most active people who came together to fight this Wal-Mart thing and form the nucleus of what we call the Concerned Citizens of the Ninth Ward, more radically known as the Pullman 6 [laughs] are myself and Sherry Williams who is a postal worker and belongs to the postal workers union, Arlene Eckles who is a flight attendant, Jeff Helgeson who is a professor of labor history, and Ellen Garza who formally was a staff member for SEIU or AFSCME*. So there are some former labor union people here who strongly believe in the labor union concept.

Together we visited business people, we surveyed them. There are a lot of small businesses. A lot of Korean-owned businesses, Palestinian-owned businesses, a hodgepodge of black mom-and-pops, and those people were some how persuaded to back this Wal-Mart plan. It’s not a real strong group—they don’t have regular meetings, they lost their city funding. I’ve talked to them and they say, We know this is going to be very damaging. I say, Well, why did you how did you attach your name to it? And they say, The alderman kind of . . . you know. . . . They’re insinuating that there was some pressure applied somehow, somewhere.

Very early on in this whole campaign for development here in Pullman Park, there was no mention of a Wal-Mart. A lot of us were welcoming any kind of development. Ryerson Steel left a year ago in December, closed over there. The last of the 150 steel worker jobs left the area when Ryerson closed, and the land was just laying there dormant all this time. So, a shopping mall, whatever. We’ll have construction jobs and then our kids that grow up in this neighborhood would hopefully be able to do what I did and so many others did, grow up getting summer jobs or Christmastime jobs. We were we kind of bought in on this development, until it was dropped on us in April, just before the May City Council meeting, that it was going to be a Wal-Mart. And it was Wal-Mart or nothing.

I don’t think that one company should dominate the entire retail industry. I don’t think that it’s good to not have competition. I don’t like the fact that probably 85% of their stuff is imported from China. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I wouldn’t buy a box of chewing gum from Wal-Mart. I was in Florida with my sister and her husband visiting them in February and when they went in their to do their shopping, I took a walk through an adjacent orange grove. I found that very pleasant.

*The Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd (IV)

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:22:00 -0500

Tom Shepherd, local historian and go-getter, has been fighting Wal-Mart’s intended move into his historic Pullman neighborhood. To Shepherd, the runs counter to the area’s connection to the early days of the American labor movement, but the big box store has a in common with Pullman’s idea of a company town.

This neighborhood of course was built by George Pullman. He came out here with a grand vision in 1882. Most of the homes around here were remarkably built up within a year or two. At that time it was quite an achievement, and was heralded throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, as a real accomplishment that an industrialist was building a model town for his employees.

(photo by Kristi Logan)

His vision was to build a place that was appealing visually and had some of the grandest amenities for lowly factory workers during his time. But that experiment hardly has ever worked in history, to own the company that people make their wages from and to own the store in the neighborhood. Market Hall was right around here and he had an arcade building just a block from here, which unfortunately no longer stands, but it was like a forerunner to modern day indoor shopping malls.

It was really something, but it just didn’t work to have your boss having so much control over you. In the 1890s we went through, ah I think it was considered a depression at the time or a severe recession. The orders for railroad cars dropped and people had to be laid off or fired. Mr. Pullman didn’t lower the rents on people and didn’t lower food prices, so therefore folks just didn’t have anywhere else to go for jobs. Finally things turned and he began to put people back to work, but a lot of them still weren’t able to keep up because he lowered wages when we took people back. That’s what spurred the strike of 1894.

That was the first major national strike. The railway strike occurred in 1894, and there were other individual strikes around the country but this was the beginning of the modern labor movement, where we had broad geographical collective bargaining. That’s why this community is so significant. A week from Saturday we’re hosting a Phillip Randolph Society Institute local chapter here. A number of years ago I began to chair a group that would host annual Labor Day discussions and last year it was really enormous. We had a couple thousand people and the endorsement and participation of the Chicago Federation of Labor and the state AFL-CIO. It was quite an extravaganza. During the heyday of unions, of course there were tens of thousands of steel workers that lived in the Southeast area of the city. I belong to the retired steel workers chapter on the East Side and we still have a good strong group with an activist bent. We jump on the bus if we have to and go down to Springfield, or go down to city hall when need be.

Not to mention that today we have a lot of tours coming through here. People from all over—Japan, China, Germany, England, they know more about labor history in this country than people do in this country. We host tours through the Illinois Labor History Society. So this is a neighborhood that’s proud of its history.

Comparisons have been drawn between Pullman and Wal-Mart. When we had the Wal-Mart employee here, they talked about how sometimes they’re compensated or rewarded with some type of shopping coupons to shop at Wal-Mart. I’m sure Wal-Mart would be delighted if their employees all did all of their shopping at Wal-Mart. They are encouraged to do that. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them are forced to do that, in a sense.

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd (III)

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:24:00 -0500

I’ve been asking Tom Shepherd, down in Pullman, how the new Wal-Mart will affect things in the area.

(photo by lanskymob/Flickr)

Howard, who lives right around the corner from here, has a bike store in Dalton that he’s throwing in the towel on. He put it up for sale about three weeks ago and now he’s gonna close it down. He has been fighting the Wal-Mart—he knows he lost the major battle of selling bicycles but he was still able to get along with service, because Wal-Mart doesn’t offer anything in the way of servicing bikes, but he isn’t able to keep up what it costs to keep a store going. Licenses, taxes, employees. So he’s given up. Just take that and multiply it by the shoe stores, by the hardware stores, the sporting goods, the T-shirt shops up in Roseland, there’s about a mile of little, I guess you would call them mom-and-pop, but you know, individual businesses including jewelry stores and telephone stores, electronics. They’re all gonna be knocked out when the big store comes.

Now it’s not only one big store that they’re proposing over here on the east end of Pullman, but now maybe they’re going to put a mid-size or a smaller store a half a mile or a mile and a half away on the other side of the neighborhood. And that’ll be it.

I talked to our hardware store, the one hardware store that’s hanging on in this neighborhood. He operated at a loss in 2009. I said, Well, how is it this year? He said, I’m doing a little bit better, I’m just operating on such small margins I’m lucky to keep these people working. And he points out three, four employees in the store. I talk to him about the Wal-Mart and he said, That will be it.

It’s so ironic it’s pathetic. The site where this is being proposed was formally part of the Pullman Manufacturing Company, the Palace Car Company, the, it was a Steel Workers Union Local 1834 and it had an honorary name after Eugene Debs. How ironic is it going to be that we have a strongly anti-union—union-busting, horrible track record as far as employee issues. . . . It’s particularly galling that they intend to open over here and that some of the people in this neighborhood are hoodwinked into that Wal-Mart culture.

Of course they have done an amazing, enormous PR campaign. I know people over here that probably gained a few pounds in the past six months because of all the dinners and lunches and breakfasts and balloons and knickknacks and stuff they’ve been given by the cooperation. They’ve been courted by them, and have gotten on this bandwagon and believed that if we don’t get Wal-Mart then we’re not going to have anything. We’ve got to do this: it’s now or never. All the clichés, and all the hoopla and lies, fraudulent ads in the paper saying Pullman wants Wal-Mart, Pullman needs Wal-Mart, people from here have to go all the way to Country Club Hills for fresh produce. We talked to people around here. Most of the people in this community don’t know where Country Club Hills is. For them to take a full-page ad in the Chicago Sun-Times that Pullman people have to go to Country Club Hills to get fresh foods is bald-faced lie.

And you know they get away with it, and the Sun-Times have endorsed them of course, and so has the Trib, because they spend so much money and they can steer opinion. That’s what we’re up against here.

But the issue about the labor, this traditionally has been a strong union area. I know that unions are much less strong today and the numbers have dwindled, less than 15% or something of people across the country are union members, and today there are very few jobs and very few union jobs. Mayor Daley was on the early morning news, and he was talking about the jobs that this was gonna bring: It’s gonna bring jobs, it’s gonna bring jobs, we need development. Well, it used to be we would believe, what’s the saying about a rising tide raising all ships? Here we want to lower the standard. People working at Wal-Mart can’t afford to raise a family, to pay a mortgage or rent, they have to be two-income households without a doubt, or hold two jobs per person to be able to achieve that today.

I’ve seen a study from Loyola University and another one from University of Chicago, I think, that recently came out. One deals with the Wal-Mart that’s on the West Side and how many jobs have were gained as opposed to lost, and it’s pretty much a wash when you count the businesses that have had to close because of Wal-Mart, or people that have left those jobs and came to Wal-Mart.

So you have two studies out there that prove there’s not a real gain in jobs. We formed a little group here in Pullman to try to combat this and try to enlighten people. We also attempted to get an audience with the developers and the local bank here, which is now US Bank, one of the five major banks that are taking over everything in the country, but which was originally the Pullman Bank. We talked to our old bank friends about the concerns that we have but they wouldn’t meet with us.

So in this very room we had a community meeting to enlighten people, and we had an employee of Wal-Mart talking about the horrible conditions working for the Wal-Mart company, and the poor benefits, the poor rate of pay, some of the horrific stories of how they treated employees. And then as a contrast, a Jewel employee talking about her pension and what the union has done for her over 23 years or something like that. We had people in this room who said, Wow, we just didn’t know. We showed a film that interviewed people across the country who had experiences with Wal-Mart, you know being locked inside a store, or being fired for even breathing a word that begins with U, signifying union. People talking about how one person died because Wal-Mart told her she would be fired if she took a sick day to go to the doctor, and she died of something, I think a massive brain hemorrhage or something. Folks were aghast, and somebody really needs to tell that story. The newspapers aren’t doing such a good job at it.

But that’s the thing. Folks are hearing one side. It’s like going up against any major cooperation. We see BP doing it right now because they have egg all over their face for the disaster down in the Gulf, and what are they doing? They’re embarking on a big PR campaign.

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd (II)

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:21:00 -0500

Tom grew up on the South Side. Although he spent a few years living in the suburbs, he came back to the South Side after retiring . . . and now, he says, he’s back in action.

A friend of mine who I visit in Florida every year, he grew up over here and moved to the north side as soon as he could get out of the household. He helped to open my eyes to another world on the other side of Madison Street. He used to bring the Reader out. He’d say, Tom, I’m gonna bring the Reader—you know what it was like. It used to be, Oh man, I gotta haul this Reader down, it’s gonna be another few pounds. And now it’s like, I’ll put it in my back pocket. I brought my friend in Florida the Reader and he was—I thought he was gonna break down in tears when I brought it out. It’s just like every other publication, eradicated practically. All those writers they had, and those full feature articles that you don’t find anymore.

I can’t stand picking up the newspaper and seeing something that’s presented as a story that you know was just hand-delivered as a fluff piece from a corporation. And then people pick that up and read it and say well it was written.

I’ve always been a crazy newshound my whole life. I’m not ashamed to say I read Al Jazeera because we’re not getting the story here. The Guardian used to be pretty—all of them have been co-opted and during eight years of Bush-Cheney, through threats and intimidation, financial manipulations, whatever it took, they had co-opted the entire industry, destroyed editorial independence. It’s a sad thing, but if you pick up a paper from the Middle East, or from some independent source, you’ll see pictures or photographs of people in the streets of Iraq or Iran or Palestine, wherever, folks are sharing a newspaper. It’s just incredible. You’ll see eight people huddled around it, or a television with an Al Jezeera newscast, people all standing around ‘cause they don’t all have big 6- inch screens down in their family rooms. This is the news. And over here, it’s like people don’t want to hear the news, I’d rather watch American Idol, I’d rather hear who won the Stanley Cup. And the BP thing—that ain’t me, that’s over there.

Here I’m looking at this little publication, the bulletin of my friend Hurley Green the third, the editor/publisher. He drops these off for me and it’s like OK, something else for me to do. I got to get these papers out. I got a paper route like when I was a kid. He covers local issues and he’ll always ask, Oh what’s going on in Pullman? I’ll put it in the paper. I’m eternally grateful to him. So I’m a newsy.

We’re beginning to see the death of so many things that I grew up with and held dear and cherished, and now it’s to say goodbye to every mom and pop business, practically, is gonna be devastating not just to my memory, but I think it will be devastating to our culture, devastating to people. I don’t know how many how many interviews I’ve read written by entrepreneurs, former entrepreneurs, business people who have been put out of business in towns all across America that now have become greeters or security guards. They’re fumbling around for any kind of a job because they might have been happy operating a sporting goods, fishing/tackle store for all their lives and suddenly that is gone and they can’t go to factories for work anymore. So now what are they doing?

Revision Street: Tom Shepherd, late 60s

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0500

The store was going to be the beginning of five stores around the city that they want to open—now we hear they want to open dozens. Big stores, small stores, medium size stores. I’m a Vice President of the East Side Chamber of Commerce, and president of a small business council here in Pullman. We’ve been talking to business people and I think it really needs to get to the chambers of commerce who have been enlisted to endorse this Wal-Mart thing. This is a target to put every hardware store out of business, every shoe store out of business, every little food store and Wal-Mart-ize or whatever you want to call it, the entire city. You know, who has a need for anything else? When I traveled to small town America, I went to ask somebody, Where’s the post office in your town? She asked, What is it you need? I said I want to buy some stamps and send a little card. Oh you can go to Wal-Mart. I said, For a postage stamp? I don’t think so. I’m looking for the post office. I wanted to get an oil change in a town, Oh Wal-Mart changes oil. I’m like, well what a minute, that’s all you can offer here is Wal-Mart? It’s like that everywhere and now they want to do that to Chicago.

Forgive me for a sailing off into that… I’m living in Pullman. This is my second tour in the neighborhood. I was born just a couple miles from here and lived in a couple spots in neighboring Roseland, and then I moved to this neighborhood in 1971, and lived here until 1976. I moved to the suburbs for 23 years and I moved back here in 1999, so now I’ve been here an additional 11 years…

Tom Shepherd has brought me to the Greenstone Church in Pullman, but he’s so fired up about the recent City Council vote to allow a new Wal-Mart store in his neighborhood he started talking the moment I set up the microphone. I’m checking levels, mentally preparing my questions, and he’s off already about what this will do to his neighborhood.

(photo by Kimberly Janisch)

I was born in Burnside, one neighborhood removed from here, a little Hungarian enclave. I grew up during the time of racial transformation on the South Side of Chicago. We stayed in the neighborhood until crime became quite unbearable, until the school deteriorated, and then we came to Roseland, which is a neighborhood just the other side of the tracks there. I spent my formative teenage years there. I went to Fenger High School, which is my alma mater and is world renowned for the boy that was beaten to death with the baseball bats, which might have been one of the issues that contributed to torpedoing the Olympics in Chicago.

My folks were still living over in Roseland when I got married and moved over here. I was just starting out and Pullman is a cheap place to live. It still is very affordable here. I think the rent I was paying when I got married in 1971 was 90 dollars—the tax on that row house was 90 dollars a year. So I lived here until my eldest daughter became school-aged and we had to make a decision. The Pullman Elementary School has had a bad reputation over the years and we didn’t want her there.

It is a unique neighborhood, people here do know their neighbors. We’re all attached, so you tend to know who you share a porch with, because your neighbor might shovel your walk and the next time you’ll shovel their walk. As long as I got the lawn mower out, I might as well cut the next three houses. There’s a lot of that going on. We share common walls so we keep each other warm, literally and figuratively, in the winter time, so there is a different feel around here definitely. You go down the street here—it used to be like this in the other neighborhoods in Chicago that I grew up in back before air conditioning and TVs and remote controls and computers and everything—and people were sitting out on their porches, so I could go down the street and I might know 95% of the neighbors on my block. Around here it’s still kind of like that. We have a neighborhood watch, and we have a strong civic organization that just celebrated its 50-year anniversary.

I had a tavern just two blocks from here during that period and I sold the business. I was gonna pull up stakes from the city and go out and do some rural living, my wife and I. We spent three years in Peotone until I couldn’t take it anymore [laughs]. I was a city boy at heart.

My dad passed on early due to complications, possibly from the mill. He had to take early retirement because he had emphysema but he also smoked. He had cirrhosis of the liver because he was a hard-drinking ethnic steelworker type of guy that went to the bar every day like so many workers did. My wife died in a car accident and my kids had grown up and moved on. I decided, Well I gotta make a move. Where do I want to go? And I decided to come back here to my old neighborhood. Something about city elections draws me back. [Laughs.] They’re so interesting and exciting …

So this has always been a fairly progressive strong couple precincts and I remained precinct captain here over all those years. Even when I was an elected official out in the suburbs for a spell, I still had an interest in city politics. A fellow church member—of my church in Hammond—owned a three-flat building. He said, Why don’t you think about coming back to Pullman? I said you know, Al, I have given it some thought. My daughter keeps telling me I belong out on a golf course in the suburbs, but I came back over here because it’s centrally located. I’m back in action.

Revision Street: Historic Pullman

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0500

(photo by AEM)

Built in the 1880s by railroad magnate George Pullman, Historic Pullman was a company town designed by architect Solon Spencer Bemen. All workers’ needs were met in the immediate vicinity: grocery stores, heating, indoor plumbing—Pullman had designed the town so that his renowned Pullman Porters (and the rest of his employees) would never have to go anywhere else. When the Panic of 1893 turned into an economic depression, however, Pullman production slowed and workers were laid off—but rents and prices in Pullman were not lowered. Further wage cuts lead to the Pullman Strike in 1894, a battle between the railways and labor unions that eventually involved some quarter of a million workers across 27 states. An all-out boycott—workers refused to load Pullman cars onto trains, or operate them—effectively halted travel west of Chicago. The conflict only ended when President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops in to end the strike, an arguable infringement of his constitutional authority. A national commission later found Pullman’s paternalistic town to be partially responsible for the national incident, and decreed it “un-American.”

In recent days, the Chicago district has fallen on difficult economic times, but Mayor Richard M. Daley expects a new Wal-Mart store in the neighborhood will bring tax revenue and jobs to the area.

A real life snowglobe: Winter comes to the Pullman neigborhood

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:00:00 -0600

Hotel Florence, 111th just east of Cottage Grove (photo by Lee Bey)

A blanket of snow has fallen on the city. S0 take a drive--better yet, a ride on the Metra Electric commuter rail--to the city's historic Pullman neighborhood on the far South Side.‚ Few places in Chicago are as picturesque after a snowfall.

111th Street Metra Electric platform looking north.
Pullman Clocktower on the left (Photo by Lee Bey)

(Photo by Lee Bey)

The neighborhood was originally a planned industrial town--America's first--built in the late 1880s by railroad car magnate George M. Pullman.‚ The former factory was nearly lost in a spectacular extra alarm fire more than a decade ago,‚ but has been almost rebuilt, down to the functioning clock tower (even if the time isn't quite correct). The town pretty much stands looking‚ the way it did in the 1890s, with its sturdy brick home and rowhouses in remarkably good condition.

This USA Today story gives a pretty good primer on the area.‚ Better still,‚ my pal Geoffrey Baer at WTTW takes a walk through Pullman beginning at the 15:40 mark of his Hidden Chicago 2 documentary. And the neighborhood makes an appearance in the 1990's Harrison Ford film "The Fugitive."‚ Ford's Richard Kimble makes a call from a Pullman row house at 112th and St Lawrence, and the coppers pull up in front of historic Greenstone Church looking for him. No snow, but you get the idea..