Street Types of Chicago

In 1892, the Chicago photographer Sigmund Krausz published a book of portraits of people he had posed and photographed in his studio titled Street Types of Chicago. Accompanied by “literary sketches by well-known authors,” the photographs, as explained in the author’s introduction to the expanded volume published four years later, Street Types of Great American Cities, are character studies which he expected the reader to “meet with the recognition and hearty appreciation of such as have daily and yearly noted these types in the crowded streets . . .” Krausz describes his difficulties in collecting these characters, the “weeks and months” he haunted the thoroughfares and “dingy alleys” and his “many ludicrous and unpleasant experiences,” such as being taken as a medical student on the hunt for “subjects for the dissecting-room” and “barely avoiding arrest through a misunderstanding by a female Italian type . . .” Once in the studio, his subjects, “lacking the educational qualification necessary to grasp [his] ideas” and because of their “awkward and stubborn behavior in front of the camera,” often failed to provide him with a suitable image. Only after many such failures was he able to have sufficient material for his collection.

Some of Krausz’s images asked for the sympathy of his readers. “Buya da Papah, Signor?” depicts the plight of a Chicago newsgirl. The description, in this case, was provided by Krausz himself:

An Italian Newsgirl
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

Who has not been accosted, especially evenings and in the down-town districts, by one of these forsaken-looking miniature specimens of toiling humanity?

“Buya da papah, signor?” is their plaintive cry, and it seems to tell a sad story of privation, hunger and neglected childhood driven out in the night by unfeeling and barbaric parents, or, worse perhaps, by a cruel padrone, to earn a few paltry cents for their protectors.

As one sees them, of a winter evening, shiver on the streetcorners, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, their stunted little bodies poorly protected by an old, ragged shawl, against the rain and sleet, crying out with their thin, childish voices, or mutely upholding with their stiff little hands an evening paper, one might feel, indeed, that this is a cruel world, into which every minute a new sufferer is born.

What a contrast between the male and female street Arab! How self-confident, how mischievous the one; how dejected, how forlorn -looking the other!

One might feel compassion and concern towards both of them but while the one, in a sense, hardly deserves it, being self-reliant and by nature hardened against the adversities of life, the other calls forth the deepest pity, the utmost resentment against social conditions that allow a tender being, a future mother of citizens, to be pressed into service to help earn a livelihood for depraved and conscienceless progenitors.

Will this problem ever be solved ?

Continuing Krausz’s theme, the writer Wolf von Shierbrand, who later would write such historical examinations as Germany: the Welding of a World Power and Austria-Hungary: the Polyglot Empire, would write of the “Accordion Player”:

Accordion Player
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

Here we have one of those types of street life which the thoughtless throng passes by unheedingly, and yet one which furnishes food for thought, serious thought. All the way from sunny, vine-clad Italy she came, from a country where the very air, like an Aeolian harp, vibrates with music; whose every foot of soil reeks with history; whose people have a greater past than any other living nation. But alas! it is also a country which for centuries has been down-trodden, overrun by lusty barbarians, and overridden by the steed of the conqueror. A poverty-stricken country, whose rich natural resources lie fallow, Italy, the sleeping beauty, just awakened from her dream of a thousand years, and still rubbing her eyes wondringly [sic] at the enormous strides forward which all her neighbors have made.

And from that home, beautiful but starving, this swarthy stranger woman has come to these hospitable shores. A strolling musician, vagabondism is in her blood. The hard life she has ever led since she was weaned has left its indelible stamp on her. Straggling, unkempt hair, low forehead, prominent cheek bones, and eyes that glimmer like half-extinct charcoal, she would do as a model for the witch of Endor. But though repulsive in looks, and though she uses her accordion as an instrument of torture on an indulgent public, producing nothing but shrill, discordant sounds, the woman crops out in one spot at least. What Goethe calls the “eternally womanly” shows itself in the child – the bright-eyed, roguish little imp, the “bambino carissimo” of this hag. Like an Indian squaw she carries her pappoose [sic], performing her labor all day long with this burden on her back, twanging her accordion, begging and wheedling, the mother love is there, nevertheless. That is the one green spot in her life, the oasis in the desert of her heart. And let us hope that the little devil-may-care fellow on her sturdy back one day may grow up to be an independent, stalwart American boy.

Employee of the Gas Company
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

Typically, the Italian immigrants preferred street labor to work in the factories, where in any case they weren’t wanted. They worked with pick and shovel, digging drainage ditches, making street repairs. The drainage of the site of the World Columbian Exposition required hundreds of workers. The writer Sam T. Clover, who in 1884 had published Leaves from a Diary: a Tramp Around the World, would describe Krausz’s portrait titled “In the Employ of the Gas Company” as a man, “many of us [know] to our sorrow.” Clover writes with mock concern that “one cannot withhold a feeling of pity for the poor devil who works so faithfully and unremittingly when the gang-boss is in his proximity. Wait until the foreman is at the farther end of the block, however, and your sentiments will experience a change. . . . Not that he stops work at all; bless you, he is too cute for that! Just watch his pick rise and fall, and you will comprehend my meaning. Why, a blind man could detect by its sound just how far away that gang-boss was from the digger.” Still, somehow, despite his “artistic loafing,” the man “sweats profusely” and drinks deeply and often from the water in a wooden bucket, using a tin dipper. But, Clover tells us, “it is at noon, when his growler-can is filled from the nearest saloon, that he appears in all his glory. Watch him take a swig! No bottle with a white label was ever emptied with keener zest that that beer-can. Talk about nectar for the gods? He would none of it! Give him beer – all he can guzzle – and he is supremely happy.”

Street Sweeper
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

There are echoes of Clover’s description in that of the street sweeper as described by C.B. Whitford, best known for his books on dog training. Whitford would point out that it was election time when the sweeper was the happiest. “Then he is a man of importance,” Whitford wrote, “whose franchise is eagerly sought by the politicians. All of his friends are given work at this time, and their labor is made correspondingly lighter. Then he has time to pause frequently in his work and lift to his lips the persuasive fluid which is furnished in abundance by the political managers who claim his allegiance.”

Scissors Sharpener
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

The scissors-grinder is treated more kindly, this time by Krausz himself. “The scissors-grinder is a man who is always welcome to the cook,” Krausz writes, “who, if she happens to be a daughter of Erin, will for the moment forget her innate prejudice against the “Eyetalian” and intrust her dull knives to his care. Whether he carries his apparatus on his back or pushes it before him on wheels, his mind reverting to his sunny home or to his native maccaroni [sic] pots, his brown hand does not tire of swinging the bell with which he reminds our housewives of a dull carving-knife or a rusty pair of scissors.”

Banana Peddler
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

Krausz also describes the fruit peddler: “A degenerated descendant of the ancient people of Rome or Sparta, the swarthy banana pedlar [sic] pushes his cart contentedly through the thoroughfares of the city. No thoughts of the ancient glory of his nation disturbs his mind when he cries out his ‘Ba-na-nos! Ba-na-nos!!’ He is not sentimental. He is bent on making his profit, and the commercial instinct is far more developed in him than that warlike spirit which predominated in his ancestors. The banana cart is the war-chariot behind which he fights his battle of life. The few paltry dimes which form the profits of a day are to him perhaps as much as the spoils of a victorious battle were for one of his progenitors.”

Rag Pickers
Street Types of Chicago (1892)
by Sigmund Krausz.
Public Domain.

Finally, LeRoy Armstrong, known for his book An Indiana Man, published two years before, is inspired to a mock homage by the image of the “Rag Pickers”:

Born in streets that “echoed to the tread of either Brutus,” under the wall-shadows that have fallen on a Caesar's triumphal march, beneath a sun that could not find a foe for Romans – born so, but in a later day when alien blood has sunk a race of warriors – this last residuum in Time's great goblet that once brimmed over with the best of earth, these ancient crones have wandered from the Old world to glean a living from the refuse of the New. The dames of ancient Rome – the garbage barrels of an American city! There is the satire of the centuries. The stylus that painfully engrossed the learning of that day has swept across the page of Time with swiftly growing speed, till lightning presses end the cycle of improvement. And these old crones, dark fishing in the dawn, dig up the crumpled leaves: “Decline and Fall!” Shall any matron, proud of present empire, live in lines to be digged out of dust-bins in that brighter age when our descendants, sunk to slaves, shall crouch and shiver in the noisome ways? Is there a city somewhere hid in Earth and Time through whose dim alleys Columbia's final son shall grope inferior for food? Why not? Did the Tigris promise less? Do our streams promise more? Where stood the fate that crushed the kings of earth? What fate for us lies crouching in the twilight – centuries away?

A look at the occupations of the inhabitants of Indiana Street found in the records of the census of 1900 shows there were laborers and carpenters, iron workers, pressmen for printing companies, a wagon tire maker, peddlers and “mosaickers.” There were laundresses, barbers, a worker in a coffee factory, street vendors, confectioners, cabinetmakers. There was the scissors sharpener, which Krausz portrayed, along with the fruit peddler, and there were also shoemakers, dressmakers, bartenders, plasterers, ceramic makers and stone masons. One would make his living as an interpreter, another as a sausage packer, a young woman as a cheese maker in a creamery. There was also a sculptor on the street, as well as a musician. And, no doubt, there were some, popularly referred to as “rag-pickers,” who scavenged in the trash of others for usable or salable items, which helped them make ends meet. Most of the work available to the immigrants was menial. In garment shops known as “slop-shops,” which were spread throughout the Near North Side, workers, mostly women and girls, toiled long hours for little pay in their rags and, as expressed in a Chicago Times exposé of the time, their “meanest apologies for shoes.”

Mother Frances X. Cabrini
Public Domain.

The house at number 99 was one of the larger tenements on the street. According to the 1900 census, it housed six families, twenty people, in the house proper and in the apartment behind made from an outbuilding. The names on this block, as well as on the blocks both east and west and around the corners on the cross streets of both Franklin and Orleans, were frequently the names of San Vincenzo and Castellone and of other towns of the Volturno Valley – places such as Colli a Volturno, Scapoli, Cerro al Volturno, and Pietrabbondante. Names from Pizzone were there, also, though many of the Pizzonesi had settled on the Near West Side on Ewing Street, which lay to the south and west of the Near North Side, this enclave of those from Pizzone barely two miles from their neighbors from San Vincenzo on Indiana Street, nearly duplicating the distance separating their two villages in Italy. Eventually, Ewing Street would be renamed Cabrini Street for Mother Frances Cabrini of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, who for her work with and devotion to the Italian immigrants of Chicago was recognized after her death by the Catholic Church as a saint, the first citizen of the United States to be so honored.

Stained Glass, the Church of the Assumption.
http://assumption-chgo.org

Mother Cabrini worked through the Church of the Assumption, the first Catholic Church in Chicago founded for Italian immigrants. She would eventually found the church’s school, and it is said that when she died on December 22, 1917, she was working on Christmas gifts for the children there. The Church of the Assumption was begun on what was then East Illinois Street, just one block south of Indiana. Begun in 1881 and dedicated during the time of celebration of Ferragosto on the day of the Feast of the Assumption, August 16, 1886, the church was staffed by fathers from the Order of Friar Servants of Mary – or the Servites – who had been sent from Italy to minister to the immigrants in their own language. The stained glass, the altar in the apse beneath a mosaic of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” the ornate ceiling were all created through generous donations by a few prominent Italian families and the work of Italian artisans. The window behind the altar is a representation of the Assumption of the Virgin and is modeled on El Greco’s painting of the same subject, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

 The Church of the Assumption.
http://assumption-chgo.org

Cristina would have taken her children to this church. She would have confessed to her priest here and lit candles as votives. In the pews, on her knees, she would have prayed to the Virgin for her husband and her children. From Indiana Street she could see the church’s bell tower rising over the rooftops of the tenements across the street. On Sunday mornings the bells would announce Mass, and Cristina would have gathered up the children and walked around the corner at Orleans to Illinois Street. With the sun behind them, the high honey-colored walls at the front of the church are shaded during morning services. The three doors to the sanctuary open onto the sidewalk of Illinois Street. Once inside, Cristina would have thought of the Church of San Nicola in Pizzone, where she had gone all her life until coming here. There was much that was familiar, much that seemed like her home. In the spring of 1892, perhaps Cristina kneeled here, the light blue from the colored glass of the altar window catching the morning sun. As she prayed to the window’s ascending Virgin, perhaps she thought of the child she was now carrying, her fourth, the first who would be born in America.

Emiddio would see the church’s bell tower as a landmark, one he would be able to see as he approached his neighborhood. On days he was not on the streets, he would watch the sun traverse the sky over it. At night it was the moon in all its phases. Some evenings he sat on the tenement steps. He would listen to the clatter of the cable cars on Franklin Street and watch the sky above the tower. Many years later he would write of starry skies and the night air charged with moonlight. Perhaps, his thoughts were here, the images those learned as a boy.

Writing in the preface to Krausz’s book, displaying a humanity alien to Krausz and in opposition to the portrayals which follow, the Luxembourg-born rabbi Emil G. Hirsch ended gently and elegantly with these words: “The men who meet us in this book are not of the order of those who control the destinies of a city by the vastness of the enterprises they direct, but all of them in their modest sphere contribute their mite to the active rush which ebbs and flows along our busy thoroughfares. Many of the figures which in this collection extend to us their welcome greeting are old acquaintances of ours, nay, friends whose occasional absence from their wonted haunts and places incite concern for their well-being. None of them but brings us something, be it the hard-pressed letter-carrier or the sooty coalman; be it the musician or the pedlar [sic]; they belong to us. . . . [W]ithin the shell was the animal, behind the book the man. . . . Behind the piles of iron and steel and granite and mortar are the men. These much more than the edifices which they erect are characteristic of a city. And these humble street types are without doubt to be numbered among the men and women who have made and are making our Great Cities; they are the promise of still greater achievements to be garnered in the near future.”

* * *

[Author’s note: In my previous post, “Newsboy,” I identified the address where my family first lived in Chicago, 99 E. Indiana Street, as being at the corner of Indiana and Rush Streets. This is incorrect. Chicago’s streets were renumbered in 1909, and I misinterpreted the table which lists the new numbers. This address would actually have been a few blocks to the west, on Indiana Street between Franklin and Orleans Streets. I have corrected the previous post. – WCM]