Through Art And Industry, Chicago Shaped America

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

America became a superpower after World War II and on New York's global rise and the sprawl of Los Angeles seemed to evoke much of it. A new book by Thomas Dyja argues that Chicago really defined America to the world. The freedom music of blues, gospel and jazz; a civil rights movement that began with the Emmett Till case and the founding of Ebony, modern glass and steel buildings that dared the sky.

Wry, improvisational sketch comedy at Second City, from Nichols and May to Steve Carell and Tina Fey. The atom was split in Chicago just a few blocks from where Saul Bellow wrote and where Muhammad Ali trained. And the modern American political machine of Richard J. Daly somehow found the ballots that helped put John F. Kennedy into the White House.

Thomas Dyja writes that the most profound aspects of American modernity grew up off of the flat prairie land next to Lake Michigan. His new book, "The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream." Thomas Dyja joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

THOMAS DYJA: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: You say the real struggle for America's future took place in post-war Chicago. Set that up for us, if you could.

DYJA: Well, there's a big conflict between the building of postwar corporate America, where after the war and after the WPA and the Depression, there's a big movement towards big structures, big institutions. And there's also a movement on the other side in Chicago, which is very much people-oriented, that comes out of the other side of the WPA, that draws out of kind of vernacular culture. And those two things really meet in different ways in Chicago; corporately, business-wise but also artistically, I think.

SIMON: And I want to draw you out about Mies van der Rohe. What difference did he make to the way cities look beginning with the Chicago in which he settled?

DYJA: Well, Mies comes to Chicago in the late '30s and sort of chased out by Hitler. The Fuhrer was not a great fan of his work, so I think he didn't have much of a choice but to leave. So he came to Chicago to run the new architecture department at the Armour Institute, which was a technical school on the near South Side, and also take the job of redesigning their campus, building a new campus for them.

And what Mies does is he takes the modern architecture of people like Le Corbusier - there are other architects working in this kind of simple vernacular - but he really brings it to America, especially to Chicago, which is producing, you know, is going into the war and the postwar years, a huge amount of steel.

It's a major center of American manufacturing and steel production. And he takes that simple steel and glass structure and really exemplifies America with it. He creates a kind of architecture that is luxurious and thought-provoking and really expresses what America can be in the second half of the 20th century.

SIMON: You write in this book at some length of Gwendolyn Brooks.

DYJA: Yes.

SIMON: The great poet. She succeeded Carl Sandburg, as a matter of fact, as Poet Laureate of Illinois. She wrote of Bronzeville, a neighborhood on the South Side at time when Richard White said, quote, "There is an open and raw beauty about the city that seems to either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life." Bronzeville was bustling. How did she capture that?

DYJA: She's a really interesting case because she also overlaps with Mies in a very particular way. She, as a young woman, worked in this huge apartment building on, I want to say, 31st Street, 34th Street, called The Mecca, which became famous. There were blues songs written about it. And at The Mecca, Gwendolyn Brooks really got her sense of what this new Chicago was going to be like, the new black Chicago in Bronzeville.

And at the same time, this is also part of where the Armour Institute, IIT campus is going to be. Mies ends up in 1955 building his great masterpiece crown hall on the site of The Mecca. So you have this overlap of these two great minds of Chicago talking about the same place in very, very different ways; Brooks from the bottom up and Mies very much from the top down, both masterpieces.

Brooks was tapped into Chicago in a very special way in that she spoke so much about the domestic aspects of life. One of my favorite photos of her is her walking down 63rd Street with her kids in tow, groceries in her arms, no one notices who she is. She's a great poet of the domestic, and I think that's very true to the Chicago spirit.

SIMON: It pains me as a Chicagoan to note that it's impossible to talk to you about a book that drips with a clear (unintelligible) love for Chicago and not mention the tragic, the sad, the outrageous toll of violence every day in the streets. Even though it must be recognized we'll probably talking about 20 or 30 streets in a town with tens of thousands of them, but it's a violence that eats at the heart of a great city.

DYJA: Well, the most important point about those few streets in the middle of the city is that they belong to all of Chicago. And one of the impulses that one sees there is this discussion of Chicago and black Chicago. And in researching and reading all that I've read, in interviews, there's often the discussion of two different cities. And I think when Chicago finally wraps its hands around all of itself and doesn't speak of it in these two different terms, I think they're going to be a lot closer to solving some of these problems.

SIMON: Thomas Dyja. His new book, "The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream." Thanks so much.

DYJA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.