Pullman District seeks park status
Chicago neighborhood integral to black workers movement
CHICAGO — A neighborhood that played key roles in the development of the African-american labor movement, the railroad industry and urban planning is the focus of efforts to create Illinois’ second national park site.
Legislation pending in Congress would start the process of placing the Pullman District under National Park Service (NPS) control, ensuring that its historic structures and museums remain intact and attracting more visitors and economic development, advocates of the plan say. The Abraham Lincoln National Historic Site in Springfield is the state’s only NPS destination.
“Pullman is historically and architecturally significant,” says Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-ill., sponsor of a bill that would authorize an NPS study. Making it part of the national park system “would go a long way toward putting us on the map . . . and create jobs” where they are badly needed, he says.
Lynn Mcclure of the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association says the study would determine the suitability and feasibility of making Pullman a national park site. Having such a site in Chicago would be “incredible,” she says. “It is the only big city in the country that just has zero national park presence.”
The Pullman District is an industrial and residential complex built in the 1880s hired to work in the factory and as porters allowed many to move into the middle class, and porters helped spark the historic migration of blacks from the South to Northern cities by spreading the word about jobs in the North, says Lionel Kimble, who teaches history at Chicago State University. The porters’ “impact on history can’t be seen in a negative light,” he says.
Jeff Soule, outreach director for the American Planning Association, says Pullman was “the first industrial city designed with the inhabitants’ welfare in mind” and included nice, if modest, homes for workers and proximity to the goods and services they needed. Planners “are trying to re-create the community that Pullman already is,” he says.
A Pullman national park site could be modeled after Massachusetts’ Lowell National Historical Park, which highlights the early textile industry, says Patrick Brannon, president of the Pullman Civic Organization and a resident. “It could have a lot of tourist draw,” he says, although some residents worry about being inundated by visitors.
Michael Shymanski, a Pullman resident and president of the Historic Pullman Foundation, says the district was the birthplace of many “significant ideas in the experiment of America. It’s an international icon.”