Coast to Coast and Back to Chicago

Coast to Coast and Back to Chicago
Author: Mike Shepherd
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2018-12-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1532065582

Coast to Coast and Back to Chicago begins with the protagonist Mick Scott hitchhiking out of the Windy City to escape a cold winter and a failed relationship with a cold-hearted woman. His trip takes him across the Deep South and up the east coast to Boston. He continues on through the west to San Francisco with stops in Austin, El Paso, Santa Fe, and Salt Lake City. He then returns to Chicago where he resolves his relationship with the woman he left while meeting the famous columnist Mike Royko, who helps him in his attempt to publish a book about his hitchhiking adventures.

The Third Coast

The Third Coast
Author: Thomas L. Dyja
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0143125095

Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.

The Coast of Chicago

The Coast of Chicago
Author: Stuart Dybek
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2004-04-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466806370

The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

Chicago's Gold Coast

Chicago's Gold Coast
Author: Wilbert Jones
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0738591777

What was once described as an undesirable swampland has been transformed into one of the most beautiful and wealthiest neighborhoods in America. Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, developed in the late 1800s, was first called the Astor Street District. It was named after one of the first multimillionaires in the United States, John Jacob Astor--even though Astor never lived in Chicago. In 1885, Astor Street District's first mansion was built. Potter Palmer, a dry goods merchant and owner of the Palmer House Hotel, built his palatial, castle-like residence on the corner of Lake Shore Drive and Banks Street; inside the Palmer mansion were 42 lavishly furnished rooms, which required 26 servants to maintain. Many wealthy Chicagoans followed Palmer's lead and built mansions in the neighborhood. Several homes took up an entire city block and, as time progressed, the name Gold Coast was adopted. On January 30, 1978, the entire Gold Coast district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Join authors Wilbert Jones, Maureen V. O'Brien, and Kathleen Willis Morton, longtime residents of the Gold Coast, on an engrossing journey through the neighborhood's history. Includes archival images along with the more contemporary images of photographer Bob Dowey.

City of the Century

City of the Century
Author: Donald L. Miller
Publisher: Rosetta Books
Total Pages: 1084
Release: 2014-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0795339852

“A wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s early history” and the inspiration behind PBS’s American Experience (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last. The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life. “With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times “Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman “An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City

Great American City

Great American City
Author: Robert J. Sampson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2024-04-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226834018

Great American City demonstrates the powerfully enduring impact of place. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City presents the fruits of over a decade’s research to support an argument that we all feel and experience every day: life is decisively shaped by your neighborhood. Engaging with the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, Sampson, in this new edition, reflects on local and national changes that have transpired since his book’s initial publication, including a surge in gun violence and novel forms of segregation despite an increase in diversity. New research, much of it a continuation of the influential discoveries in Great American City, has followed, and here, Sampson reflects on its meaning and future directions. Sampson invites readers to see the status of the research initiative that serves as the foundation of the first edition—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)—and outlines the various ways other scholars have continued his work. Both accessible and incisively thorough, Great American City is a must-read for anyone interested in cutting-edge urban sociology and the study of crime.

Gold Coast Madam

Gold Coast Madam
Author: Rose Laws
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Brothels
ISBN: 9781893121775

Chicago, 1988. I was 52 years old, 5'4" tall, and 130 pounds, with red hair and a 36DDD bust, enjoying dramatic Lake Michigan and skyline views from my 21st-floor apartment in the landmark Lake Point Towers building. I had never felt more alive. I was Chicago's reigning madam, providing $400 an hour call girls to Chicago's business owners, traders, lawyers, judges, politicians, mobsters, pro athletes, and Hollywood stars at addresses all over Chicago's downtown and Gold Coast. Vice was on their way up--the doorman had tipped me off. I started thinking back on my life, where I came from, and how I ever got to where I was now. I began life the youngest of nine on a primitive farm in the backwoods of Tennessee. Seeking to make my own way in the world I would meet and marry a man from Cicero, Illinois. Soon I was pregnant eight times in eight years, malnourished, and beaten--once nearly to death. That’s when I left. When I recovered and returned for my five kids, I discovered they'd been put in a brutal orphanage. It took me years to get them back. God knows why I got into this business. It was to save my kids. But I chose to stay. I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and I’d still do it today if I could... From my earliest days as a hanky-panky entrepreneur in the 1960s--renting rooms by the hour at the Addison Motel--others took notice. Playboy, Penthouse, the Sybaris. My adventures took me to all over the Western Suburbs, to Atlanta, Savannah, and the Oak Brook Polo Fields, and eventually to the nightclubs, bars, yachts, and penthouses of Chicago’s Gold Coast. I’d work in this business until 2002 when the FBI busted me and I served 17 months in federal prison. Now I’m retired, living in Florida, and spending my days like many seniors here, walking, playing with my grandchildren, going to church. Let me take you back to my days of juggling three sugar daddies, living and breathing sex, providing the city’s elite with beautiful women, having loads of cash and tons of fun, and experiencing the joys and heartaches of a life on the edge, lived to its fullest.

Chicago in Maps

Chicago in Maps
Author: Robert A. Holland
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

Chicago in Maps is a luxuriously illustrated cartographic history of Chicago, known for centuries as the gateway city to the West. The powerful and evocative documents reproduced here offer an unprecedented avenue to the city's past-a fascinating collective portrait of the evolution of one of America's great towns. Among the seventy-four maps featured, many are seminal exemplars of this timeless art form: the "Kinzie Map," which accompanied the Narrative of the Massacre of 1812; the Rand McNally "View of the World's Columbian Exposition" of 1893; Daniel Burnham's influential "Chicago Plan" of 1909, which epitomized the ambitions of the City Beautiful Movement; W. T. Stead's "Map of Sin"; and Bruce-Roberts' 1931 "Gangland Map"-a tongue-in-cheek "expos�" of a city populated by such powerful underworld figures as Al Capone, "Baby Face" Nelson, "Machine Gun" Kelly, and others, indicating various gang territories and warehouses. Filled with fascinating historical anecdotes and detailed scholarship, Chicago in Maps is a work that will be highly prized by map lovers and history buffs alike. It is a sumptuous feast of glorious full-color reproductions of maps by the some of the world's most extraordinary cartographers.