POSTCARDS FROM CHICAGO’S PAST
New book showcases city’s history via vintage artifacts
For Neal Samors — who has authored, coauthored or published 26 books about Chicago over the past two decades — “Chicago history really comes to life through these postcards” showcased in his latest work, “Changing Chicago: A Portrait in Postcards and Photos.”
The genesis of the project, which includes the images pictured here and many more, was several years ago. Samors published “Chicago From the Sky,” featuring aerial photos Lawrence Okrent had shot in connection with his career as an urban planner and zoning expert. When Okrent told Samors of his massive collection of more than 1,000 vintage Chicago postcards — dating back to the 1880s — the idea for a book was born.
The key thing for Samors and his co- authors Okrent and Steven Dahlman was “we didn’t want to do a ‘ then and now’ book, because there are too many of those out there,” said Samors. They did care- fully juxtapose postcards with contemporary or vintage photographs of the same scenes, “but not replicated from the exact same angle. We felt it’s more interesting to mix things up,” added Samors.
Many of Okrent’s postcards in the book are quite rare — and never previously seen in any publication. Those include postcards from the Chicago World’s Fair in the 1930s, “The Ghetto” postcard of Maxwell Street vendors, a rare photo of Navy Pier with a sailboat in the foreground, “Noon Hour on State Street” and an amusing scene of cattle being herded toward the Chicago Stockyards, under the L tracks on the South Side.
One of Samors’ favorite images in the book is “the one of Grant Park with the old bandshell — seen next to a shot of the new one, designed by Frank Gehry. That is just one of many ways we show in the book how much Chicago has changed over the past century and a half.”