The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream

Many reviewers in the 3-star range have made comments that are similar to my overall opinion, so I shall be short on those points. What will not be in short shrift are disclaimers and extremely personal opinions.

I usually don't do this, but I'm going to break down each star of my rating (just like the Chicago flag, except the book gets 3 instead of 4 on the flag, har har). The book gets a star just for its excellent title. I also award a star for the approach that Thomas Dyja took in painting and weaving together semi-biographical portraits of Chicago's cultural icons in the mid-twentieth century. The third star is for the incredible amount of research and detail I have rarely seen in other places.

The book doesn't get it's fourth star because it never seems to pull all of the disjointed vignettes together or truly support the original thesis. For example, how did Mies van der Rohe's artitecture implemented at IIT influence the rest of the country? Do we really get a picture of Chicago as the centerpiece of the nation in the 1950's? I suspect the book would have been better if some of the portraits were truncated and more ties created between different sections without being bashed over the head.

Also, the book doesn't explain that some of these cultural shifts were built on the Chicago before, filled with corruption, energy, grit, and patchworks of immigrants. Glossing over these and other historical/cultural pillars weakened Dyja's attempt at making a case about the mid-century triumph of Chicago.

Now, onto the disclaimers. First, I love Chicago, so I getting new information about the city/area is right up my alley. Second, I currently work at Shimer College (a tenant of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)), which is situated near 34th and State. That's the previous address of the Mecca Apartments, to which the book pays a good bit of attention. It's unusual to find so much detail behind the personalities, culture shifts, racial and economic tensions, and politics behind the building of your workplace and I am glad that I now know it. Shimer College is one of the few colleges whose entire curriculum is structured around the Great Books curriculum (and I'm in a Great Books Book Club, which well predates employment at Shimer). Thus, the sections about Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler were quite interesting to me; while I certainly knew something about both men, I liked getting an alternate viewpoint. Specifically, though, the author has very negative opinions about all these items, which had some validity, but never seemed to draw out the greatness of any of these items. How can we say that Mies' buildings and the Great Books phenomena were influential when the picture painted in this book is largely negative? At least, that is the impression I took away.

I do think this book does a good job of delving into the structural racism that Chicago built against the Great Migration. Even 60+ years later, policies surrounding redlining, restrictive covenants, Federal Housing Authority and Chicago Housing Authority districting and policies, slum lords who charged exhorbitant rents for properties they did not maintain, violent outbreaks by whites that typically weren't punished, lack of public transportation comparative to white sections of the city, etc. have created a segregated city that provides few opportunities to those in most of the South Side. These structures have lead to the economic and cultural decline of the city.

Lastly, I recommend listening to the audio book version as much of the specific things that I really enjoyed may be easier to stomach with that delivery system.

I really enjoyed this book—learned so much. It is a magnificent achievement, although its focus on corruption, racism, violence, and selfishness made me feel pretty depressed by the time I finished.