This book provides readers with an insightful case study of patterns of human habitation in metropolitan Chicago. Although Lewinnek fixed its chronological parameters between 1860 and 1930, she nonetheless ventures in the direction of contemporary history.
Lewinnek’s initial sentence stakes the terrain: “Chicago’s first product was real estate.” She subsequently elaborates upon the real-estate marketplace, finance, geography, and construction. But this is hardly a book about joints and arches or dollars and cents. What makes the book interesting is Lewinnek’s clarification of it as “an analysis of ideas as well as actions.” It could have proved a dismal social-scientific treatise filled with theories and statistics. Instead, it introduces “novels and poetry as well was bank records and real estate maps.” Nelson Algren, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Blake Fuller, Louise Montgomery, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright step onto the stage. Readers will search in vain for Jane Addams—no entry in the index—who...