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@@cats5351 and what points did he show that were not Pullman ??? Pullman goes from 95th on the north to 115th on the south cottage grove on the west to the expressway on the east
@@cats5351 1 you shouldnt be a baby and delete your comment and 2nd you should really research what you think you know .. Pullman Neighborhood is NOT the just the Historic distinct the historic district is PART of the Pullman Neighborhood - Pullman can include North Pullman, Pullman , South Pullman, and West Pullman and part of the lake Calumet just a thought start studying Cartography i have been studies Chicago maps for 20 plus years for different rail projects and can tell you Pullman is not just that little Historical section its really at least 5 times the historical sections footprint
Grew up in central Illinois and I remember two quality wool blankets mom would put on our bed in the dead of winter with the Pullman logo. I asked what that was and she said "They're from the Pullman train." They would have been worth some significant money today. But I remember how heavy and warm they were.
Yes these blankets are made of the best hair, My mom would let me take a bite sometimes until I formed a bezoar which was removed but I still have it and am waiting for the right day to eat it.
As a native southsider I disagree on some points. Pullman was universally disliked for good reason. He did not build Pullman for the good of the workers. He built the area for a way to control a readily available workforce within a close distance to their work. He kinda modeled it after the coal mine towns. You are also leaving out a few things. Pullman had thugs hired to intimidate the strikers and the violence was inevitable. The company also had spies who would report on each other. Pullman owned just about everything, stores, bars, etc. and workers were often in debt to all of them. By the sixties, Pullman was a joke to southsiders. The fact that he would lower wages and not rents tells you something. There was a hotel built on 115th called the Florence. By the sixties it had been reduced to a shady place with 2 bars that would serve anyone over 16 and a haven for ladies who made their living horizontally. Pullman supplied many jobs and income for this area and others. But please don't portray him as an altruistic saint, he was neither.
@@brosefmcman8264 If this evil person was a saint, I'm glad I am not in your church. I grew up a couple miles north of Pullman and went to high school with a lot of the grandkids and children of people who worked at Pullman. Never once did I hear a kind word for Pullman from anyone. Never. What I love or do not love means nothing. What means something is the fact of what he did and how he treated his workers. Those things are a matter of record. You have a right to your opinion, but I'll stick with the historical facts. What do I love? I love honesty, fair treatment of workers, fair wages, safe working places. Pretty radical ideas right? Pullman thought so.
I grew up in Chicago not far from West Pullman , The Pullman sleeping car shop was a stones throw away from My back door , We studied the History of. the Man and his family and company In Highschool ‼️
Hey, Executive Director of the Historic Pullman Foundation here. Thanks for the great video! Please come visit us and all of our partners in Pullman, we have tours, exhibits and at special events, historic pullman cars visit!
When I was visiting Chicago, I specifically planned a trip to Pullman’s neighborhood and it was totally worth it. It’s an amazingly preserved historical area, with every corner filled with the scent of its remarkable past. Thank you Ryan for this video, it revived great memories of that trip for me, and maybe will guide some of your viewers to visit this hidden gem of Chicago.
I visited the Pullman District several times while living in the Chicago area. So glad the residents there worked so hard to maintain this beautiful and historically significant area. I save these videos for my grandchildren (who still live in Chicago) so they can learn the history of this great city. Thanks for presenting history for all to enjoy.
Being a lifelong Californian, I am very appreciative of sites that share the rest of our country's history before it is lost in time. Thank you for your time in sharing this.
The Pullman plant on east 103rd St. now belongs to the City of Chicago Dept.of Transportation and Streets and Sanitation. The cranes and such are still intact. I used to pull out of this yard many times before I retired from CDOT. The neighborhood around 47th St. and the Illinois Central Electric Line is called Oakenwald with Oakwood being a few blocks north of that by the way.
As a one time resident of Pullman (I lived across the street from Market Hall), I really appreciated this video. Instead of using so many generic pictures of various neighborhoods, perhaps more photos of the actual streets and neighborhood (especially in the spring when the trees are leafy), would have been nice. Still, many thanks for you efforts.
I am a Chicago native and grew up and lived in Roseland near the Pullman area and graduated from George Henry Corliss HS. located not far from Pullman.
A little of what I already knew, and way more the parts I was missing. What a thorough documentation of the give and take struggles of America's immigrants, our working class, and the historically wealthy elites. Lots to learn here, while history repeats itself today.
My dad and my grandparents were from Pullman. Haven't been there for years. Tomorrow he will be gone 3 years and I want to go spread his ashes there at the park where he spent a lot of time. Nice video. I didn't realize the awesome history!
I looked into buying a home there , there was a time` you could find homes ,including the row houses for a good price! They have a lot of unique charm.
Thanks. I was wondering if it was still rental or had become privately owned. With the residents owning there are benefits in access to capital for making it nicer.
"Low wages, high rent" - perfectly describes the 21st c housing crisis! At least he had vision and quality standards. Today's employers don't care if they pay enough for you to afford your rent. So sad that companies cared more about housing standards in 1884 than they do today. Thank you for this very informative and well produced piece.
Barack Obama: "Everybody's got to learn to code..." So, that's the politicians for you. Oh, and those tech employers who do hire people like you to code? Then they hire people from overseas and make you train them before they fire you and go off to their vacation homes on Martha's Vineyard that are right next door to, you guessed it, Barack Obama...
They really didn't back then either. The funniest thing about cities, wages, and the housing crisis is how everyone is selective in what to blame. Can't blame the almost 2 fold expansion in the available workforce created by government inaction and policy since the 1950s, can't blame the stupidity of congregating in one small area to work. Nope gotta blame landlord's, your neighbors, the city, your company etc. Ask yourself why it's so important to live in a metro area then ask yourself why then shouldn't you pay for the "convenience"
If you are a gamer, the city of Colombia in Bioshock: Infinite (a great game btw) is heavily based on the architecture of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Finkton has a lot of influence from Pullman.
My father worked for the Pullman Standard company in it's plant/development center in Michigan City, Indiana. This was after they had begun to focus on frieght cars as the travel by rail system had been replaced by flight and automobile. He said they had programs for any employee who had a good idea of how to improve their rail cars they would be financially rewarded. He said this was something the company had done since they began. My father designed an important improvement to the way rail cars are coupled together that is still in use today and he was given a $500 bonus back in 1958, so he was able to purchase two acres of land that is currently worth roughly 2million dollars as it is in Beverly Shores where any undeveloped land cannot be built on due to it becomimg national shoreline and it's a popular area for very wealthy people from all over the country to build these huge homes in a beautiful secluded area 35 minutes by car from downtown Chicago. He was paid royalties for years and years, until the company closed it's doors. He had left the company by that time to become a police officer.
i have studied Pullman and his investments extensively and he was no saint .like so many wealthy people he did do some good but far from a saint. in reference to the Pullman cars, he did not make any cars, he purchased used cars and remodeled them a few were special order that had larger windows Wich meant the siding and side frame were different was done at the factory not his shop..
When I was in high school in the early 70's, for a couple years, I worked in the Pullman building at 111th and Cottage Grove, doing general maintenance. I wound the tower clock few times. The were a couple restaurants on 111th we used to go to, one in the old Florence hotel. Some of my fondest memories. I went through there a few years ago, and it was still kind of nice. The office building and clock tower burned down in 1998 or 1999. Because it was a national historic landmark, they rebuilt it. Those buildings there today are only about 20 years old.
Interesting? Go back and ask about the Florence Hotel in the later years. 115th. Now that would be interesting. Pullman built the Florence. It was grand in its day but deteriorated into a haven for prostitutes and drug addicts.
@@dbeaus The United States has deteriorated into a haven for prostitutes and drug addicts. Now they call those people homeless. In San Francisco, if you are arrested for prostitution, they give you a $ 100 fine, essentially the same as a parking ticket. Pullman was a good man. He built the hotel for outsiders, salesmen, and visitors to the plant, and was the only place you could get alcohol in Pullman. He wanted his workers to be able to avoid the scourages that had befallen the 1850s City of Chicago, rampant alcoholism, and veneral diseases from the downtown houses of ill repute. He wanted to give his workers a clean break, a good clean life, isolated from the corrupting influences so prevalent in a bustling frontier town.
Pullman is an interesting area of Chicago. They have achieved some things as far as preservation, though a tour of the museum shows that things have declined since the heyday of the planned community. A walking tour with a pamphlet/map of major buildings and typical residences is a nice way to spend an hour or so, though I recommend you don't do it on a January afternoon as I've done the last two times I visited!
My mother in law grew up there in the 60s. We went during one of their open tours where home owners open up their homes and you can walk through them. The house she grew up in wasn't apart of the tour, but the home owner saw us standing outside admiring, and she was nice enough to let us into her home when my mother in law said she grew up there. She got to see everything amd had so mamy memories to share. A little 3 bedroom home shared with 7 kids. Most of the homes that were on tour were beautifully remodeled. My mother in laws home for the most part was the same. Really cool experience!
You should do a video about Leclaire, IL, which was N.O. Nelson’s utopian company town for the N.O. Nelson Manufacturing Company which made plumbing fixtures. Please note that the “c” in Leclaire is lowercase. N.O. Nelson was a benevolent industrialist. Leclaire was founded in 1890 and was annexed into Edwardsville, IL in 1934 where it remains a distinct neighborhood today. Leclaire actually succeeded in providing a pleasant working and living environment and remains a nice neighborhood to this day. Leclaire featured beautiful architecture, modest single-family homes some of which were owner occupied and some of which were rented, a park with a pond and a bandstand, schoolhouse, baseball field, lush landscaping, and fresh grown produce from home gardens and a nearby farm. The N.O. Nelson Manufacturing Company had its headquarters office in nearby St. Louis, its main factory in Leclaire, and other facilities throughout the country. Nelson offered profit sharing to his employees, which he felt struck a middle ground between capitalism and socialism. The Edwardsville N.O. Nelson factory was sold to Wagner Electric in 1948 and was used by them until 1957. The facility remained vacant until it was purchased by the Southern Illinois University Foundation in 1964. In 1972, the Foundation sold the property to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). SIUE referred to the facility as the Wagner Complex and used it to temporarily house university functions while the permanent SIUE campus was being constructed. SIUE was founded in 1957 and was originally housed in temporary facilities such as the Wagner Complex, the former Shurtleff College in Alton, IL, a former high school in East St. Louis, IL, and the former Broadview Hotel in East St. Louis. The current SIUE campus opened in 1965. The SIUE Art Department was the last SIUE department to use the Wagner Complex and didn’t leave until the SIUE Art and Design Building East was opened on campus in 1993. SIUE allowed the Wagner complex to become decrepit as they never intended to use it on a permanent basis despite remaining there until 1993. The Wagner Complex was deeded to Lewis and Clark Community College (L&C), which is based in Godfrey, IL, in 1999. L&C planned to use the complex as their new N.O. Nelson Campus. Renovation of the N.O. Nelson Campus buildings began in 2002. The campus was beautifully renovated and continues to operate as the L&C N.O. Nelson Campus today. The N.O. Nelson Manufacturing Company went out of business in 1958 and was bought out by Primus Inc., which is now Winsupply. I have some photos showing the current state of Leclaire that I could share with you for any future video on the topic.
Yes, there are benevolent one's, but unfortunately they are the exception. There was a large manufacturer in Pennsylvania, maybe 6-8 years ago. 1200 workers or so. I am sorry, I don't remember the name. 6 weeks before xmas, the entire plant went up in flames. The owner was one of those self made guys, he started with nothing. I saw the video of his speech to the employees. They were looking at a bleak Xmas without income. Well, he told them that not only would they be paid thru the holidays, but until the plant could begin to hire people back. I regret that I cannot remember the name, he deserves that much. I will see if I can find it, and I will post the details. If anyone reads this and knows the details, I would e appreciative.
I’m glad this video is so popular with hundreds of thousands of views. I lived in Chicago in the late 90s and really enjoyed several trips to explore historic Pullman.
My cousin was a close friend of the Historic Pullman Foundation’s director and in the mid 70s was therefore allowed to live in the Hotel Florence, a former Pullman company hotel for visitors and dignitaries that had visited the complex back in the 1880s and on. The Hotel Florence was not open to the public when my cousin lived there and only a weekend brunch restaurant was open for the public at the time. I was fortunate to be able to stay with my cousin in his suite when I visited him several times, taking the Illinois Central train from Chicago. I marveled that the lavish interior which featured beautifully stamped metal ceilings and dark wood floors and fixtures. The hotel was being historically renovated to its original look. I haven’t been there since 1978 and wonder if restoration continued and was finished. The entire neighborhood was beautiful as well.
If one could make Pullman its home and take pride in all its work there through all the difficulties, it could be one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the Midwest.
At 7:50 there is a photo of my Grandfather's pharmacy! I recognize it from a picture in a family album taken at a similar angle with my grandfather standing in front as a young apprentice pharmacist in the early'20's.
I had a chance to visit historic Pullman back in 2013, enjoyed the surviving historic buildings and hope to visit again in the future when I return to Chicago! Great video, I loved the background on the area and certainly will drive me back there!
Thanks, so fascinating about the history of Pullman ! Unbelievably , there are Pullman train carriages still in operation in the U.K. - all beautifully restored and operated for luxury train/gourmet food experiences in the U.K. !
This is the first time I’ve heard of this neighborhood. It is a fascinating story and I’m glad to know the neighborhood pulled together to save this historic place.
I was born and raised in south side Pullman, I grew up spent most of my day shootin some B-Ball when a few a holes were apparently up to no good for sometime now they’ve been making trouble in the Pullman neighborhood eventually I got into a fight where my mom got scared so eventually I had to move in with my uncle & aunt in a town called “ Undisclosed for privacy reasons”!
Wow, just a beautiful presentation!!! Thasnk you for this!! America has so much hidden history, it's a shame to try to destroy it by destroying such communities! Thank you+!!!
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Company towns never died, in fact Amazon and Facebook are building those again under a different name. And no, not even the workers who lived in those places during their heyday liked it... especially if they're Pullman employees...
Company housing still exists in the south, trust me you do not want your job tied to your home because any ideological differences you have with owners will not end in your favor.Personal experience talking here.
"Rents remained unchanged"... What about rents went down. Taxes? Cost of Maintenance material? Utilities? The only variable in an Industrial atmosphere is Labour.
This video is an insightful and fascinating overview of the Pullman company in Chicago. It's a great lesson in business, labor relations, urban development, and politics all rolled into one.
13:47 and the same photo earlier is of Pullman, Washington. It was named to attract interest from the Pullman company but never got any. Otherwise it has no connection to the Pullman company.
Mr. Ryan, I wanted to tell you I am from the little town where the Bantam, Jeep, and the massive Pullman Standard plant was in the valley with it had two sister industries. Allegheny Axle, and there was a big steel plant right up the road, about a third or a little more of the plant is still there. The Steel plant even made the SS used in the building of the US's gateway to the west. I heard Pullman Standard and I usually watch but I dropped everything to do it now on a Saturday night, crazy right. My Grandfather was the Foreman of the Tool rooms for the 2 plants, did so for at least 30+ years.
In the late '80s I would pick up steel from the redone Pullman shop learned a little about Pullman and have driven through the housing lived the scenery and it's history most of the old steel mills had their company towns as well
A similar thing happened in my hometown. The home of barbed wire. Elwood stole the idea from another and created an empire. He built slums for employees and kept them in poverty. His family tree died out with the last Elwood being developmententally disabled. His mansion is a museum now
My Great Grandfather worked at Pullman for a time as a carpenter, he passed in 1968 when I was eight, his daughter my Grandmother used to tell me he had worked for President Lincoln's son, as Robert Todd Lincoln at one point was the CEO of the company. He's buried not too far from Pullman in the Calumet Park area
Not the only company to build housing -- Post Cereals did the same thing in Battle Creek, Michigan. My grandparents lived in 'Post Edition' when my grandfather worked at Post.
Fun Fact: The rise and fall of the Pullman utopia is what inspired Illusion Softworks, the developers of the Mafia video game, to call their city "Lost Heaven".
@@djcpr2009 In the Definitive Edition, they even state that "Lost Heaven was founded by a corporate industrialist trying to create a paradise on earth."
The passenger car you show at the end was previously owned and operated by the British Pullman Company. Except for using the same general concept the British Pullman had NO connection with USA companies you discussed. It was probably constructed at the PCC's shops in Brighton, NOT at Pullman Illinois. While in the USA Pullman cars were noted for their overnight services while the British cars were mostly fancy parlor/lounge cars. The UK is obviously much smaller and the trains were usually able to reach their destinations in a single day without the need for extensive overnight services. I am sure there were exceptions to the far reaches of Wales/Scotland but nothing like the much greater distances in the USA. Mind you I would love to pull into Pullman Illinois in the beauty you show but it wouldn"t be historically accurate.
Sounds like Thomas Edison, he did not treat his employees well. Tesla who invented alternating current treated his employees much better than Edison did.
6:01 - In the UK, in a similar fashion to Pullman, a town was developed for factory workers. Bournville is a village on the southwest side of Birmingham, England, founded by the Quaker Cadbury family for employees at its Cadbury's factory. Cadbury's is well known for chocolate products - including a dark chocolate bar branded Bournville. ('Cadbury's' is to the UK what Hershey's is to the U.S.) Bournville is known as one of the most desirable areas to live in the UK; research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2003 found that it was "one of the nicest places to live in Britain".
I don't know of ANY structure that is more than TEN years old, that has Not "SEEN BETTER TIMES". Once any structure is ten years old the shine is gone, and staff and public don't (rarely anyway) look at until it is dilapidated.
My Father's Polish family immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th Century and initially settled in Pittsburgh before quickly resettling on Chicago's south side. From what I understand, this was the general area where they lived. Now I wonder if my great grandfather worked for Pullman? By the Depression era, my grandfather relocated to nearby Gary, IN to work at US Steel's Gary Works plant where my father and his siblings grew up.
I worked in Pullmanf five years ago. Very rough area in modern times, almost like driving through a ghost town. The old historic churches were beautiful though
You did not mention the old Pullman Tech campus at 250 East 111th Street, that was obtained by the Augustinians in 1951 and opened back up as Mendel Catholic Preparatory School. The school was reorganized as a Coed Catholic School, St. Martin De Porres, in 1988, but was only able to continue until 1997, when the CPS bought the property back and opened Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, a selective enrollment four-year magnet high school and middle school. My first teaching and coaching job in the early 80's was at Mendel. I loved the grounds and wished it could have been even better used for an environmental science course, as the huge property had a large pond out front.
Hundreds of major companies got their start in Chicago, none of them are a NIGHTMARE to Chicago, including Pullman, the only nightmare associated with this great city is the current mayor!
The Mayor and city government are just part of a long line of Democrats that have run the city into the ground, mainly with their "tax and spend" redistribution of wealth. Which has helped no one, not the people "benefiting" or the people paying. The poor are staying poor instead of being incentivized to go to where there are prospects of finding better jobs, while the rich are leaving. It is not just the rich though, the middle class business owners are packing up and heading to greener pastures, taking the jobs with them.
It seems that Pullman started off with good intentions & gradually showed his true colors when his labor force protested by rearing back his "Ugly True Demeanor"
George Pullman and his father had been humble, hard-working carpenters, not aristocrats. They were from New York and worked near the Erie Canal. The father would take plain or ragged boats and refurbish them with fine wood and accouterments and resell them to the wealthy for pleasure cruising on the canal. He invented a large wooden screw that when turned could raise buildings. When the government decided to widen the canal and connect it to New York City, he won a contract to move the homes near the canal by raising them and relocating them. George the son came to Chicago to help raise the buildings in Chicago using his father's invention. The city streets were a cesspool of filth and the city awarded George a contract to raise the building and install sanitation systems to carry away the filth. George then started a side gig of refurbishing passenger cars with fine wood in the same manner his father had refurbished the boats on the Erie Canal. He sold some to some wealthy railroad owners and the word spread to other wealthy railroad owners. His big break came when he outfitted the railcar that carried Lincoln's body from Washington DC back to Springfield Illinois through northeastern states and this publicity generated many orders for similar railcars. George was not a high finance guy with a wealthy background. When some wealthy New York financiers saw the growing popularity of his cars, they partnered with him, financed the company's growth and made it into a very profitable company, mostly leasing the cars. George did not own Pullman the village, it was a partnership with the wealthy New Yorkers. George would have lowered the rents but the greedy New York partners refused and outvoted him at the board meeting. Your hatred of George Pullman is misplaced. The rent at Pullman Village was out of his control. Ask Andrew Carnegie, a shareholder! George was altruistic and the labor troubles were very stressful to him, eventually taking his life through a heart attack.
I am very happy the neighborhood has survived and been so well preserved. The history of the company is so odd, in ways amazing and in other ways tragic. I will say it is not a good thing when the employer owns your housing and local retail. The video does not mention if workers were paid in money or company scrip. Company scrip was the common practice for company stores of the time. Scrip could not be converted to US currency.
They were paid in US cash and more than the average worker, the union was more annoyed that people were laid off than the difference between wages and rents. It was more of an excuse, after all the workers were free to live elsewhere and travel a little of extra time to work like most people did at the time. The narrative was easier to sell to the rest of the unions and other people.
@@653j521do you not comprehend the meaning of “almost”? And as for me knowing “nothing” about American History, that’s really hilarious since that was my major. Have a great day trolling 😊
I agree...Pullman was nothing like Westinghouse and the concept of a town owed factory can also be associated with Roebling NJ. Also refer to Wagner House in NY outside Cooperstown. Wagner ideas were taken by Pullman.
Those last photos are of British Pullman cars. A British Pullman company had been set up- the first Pullman cars were imported from the USA but the later ones were made in England and ultimately the company was bought by the nationalised organisation that ran all Britain's state-owned transport in the 1950s and graually the services ended but these old 1930s, 40s and 50s cars are used in various luxury trains.
Henry Ford did the company town thing as well. He paid very well for the era, but he was a control freak in the lives of his workers. In South America, where he established a rubber plantation to supply his auto factories, he dictated diet, exercise and hygiene of the native employees to the point that they rebelled.
Worthy of mention is that President Lincoln's son Robert was running the Pullman Co. during much of this time and was responsible for many of the company's progressive actions.
@@piper888 Abraham Lincoln had 4 sons: Robert, Edward, William, and Thomas. Only Robert lived to adulthood as his other siblings died early in childhood or in the case of Thomas up until 18, just 6 years after Abraham's death...
Robert Todd Lincoln was hired because he was among the influential having been the son of a great President. George Pullman had built a beautiful railcar to carry Abraham Lincoln on a procession from Washington DC through the Northwest to the Midwest and eventually Springfield, IL. All the heads of business turned out to pay homage to Lincoln as it went hear their towns. This publicity was the springboard for the success of Pullman railcars. After Pullman died the executive board felt that having Robert Todd Lincoln head the company would reestablish the brand, recognizing where its success began.
