The Center of It All
Chicago's Loop in the Jazz Age
No bright-light district in the city of Chicago
shined brighter or commanded the attention of more Chicagoans than the
Loop, the city's long-standing retail and entertainment center.
Part of the Loop's mass appeal was the wide variety of amusements
that could be enjoyed there at all hours of the day and night. But
there was much more to it than the simple availability of cheap
thrills and exciting entertainment. Much of the area's popularity,
particularly with middle-class Chicagoans, stemmed from the complex
geographical arrangement of the Loop's amusements, which influenced
how freely Chicagoans of diverse social and economic backgrounds
commingled as they went about their nighttime revelries.
Establishments located in the very heart of the Loop, where land
prices and rents were highest, catered primarily to women during the
day and white, middle-class couples in the evening. Here, along State,
Randolph, and Clark Streets, were situated the city's leading
department stores, its largest movie palaces and vaudeville houses,
and many of its better night clubs and restaurants.
Surrounding the core of the Loop, on less expensive land situated
along streets with above-average pedestrian activity, were numerous
discount and specialty retailers, small movie theaters, and
high-volume cafeterias. Because of the lower prices charged at such
establishments, they attracted a more heterogeneous clientele,
including lower-paid Loop office workers, working women, and, in some
limited cases, African-Americans. Discount department stores along
State Street between Adams and Congress, for instance, were, compared
to their counterparts up the street, far less concerned about the
wealth and social status of their customer base. They made their
profits by selling in volume rather than in catering to Chicagoans
willing to pay higher prices for stylish goods and personalized
service.
The outer fringes of the Loop were home to the area's least
expensive and most widely criticized amusement activities, including
burlesque houses, dime museums, taxi-dance halls, penny arcades, cigar
stores, and chop suey joints. Centered along Madison Street west of
Canal and State Street south of Van Buren, these so-called "skid
rows" primarily attracted male audiences, many of whom lived in
nearby budget hotels and worked in the surrounding rail yards. Other
regulars included curious teenage boys and university men. Most
Chicago women kept clear of the city's skid rows, fearing unwanted
propositions, possible sexual assault, and a bad reputation. Even the
dance halls discouraged female customers, instead preferring to hire
women to dance with their male patrons. The shape and character of
Chicago's skid rows changed frequently as establishments challenged
contemporary standards of morality, became the targets of anti-liquor
or anti-prostitution crusaders, and received orders to shut down by
the police, often only to be replaced by a similar business a few
weeks later.
An intricate web of invisible but widely acknowledged social
boundaries criss-crossed the Loop during the early twentieth century
and influenced the ways in which individuals experienced its public
spaces and amusement activities. One's class, race, and gender all
determined where one could and could not go in safety and comfort.
Women, for example, felt far more welcome in the Loop's department
stores than did men, but wealthier women received better service than
poorer women at high-end firms like Marshall Field and Company and
black women were encouraged to shop in the bargain basements rather
than on the main floors. Loop restaurants and cafeterias were also
carefully segregated by class, race, and gender. Some restaurants
excluded women and blacks altogether, and the prices on the menu
helped regulate whether the clientele was predominantly white- or
blue-collar.
The Loop of the Jazz
Age incorporated many distinct and highly specialized retail and
entertainment mini-districts. It was this degree of intense
specialization, found nowhere else in the city, that for many years
made the Loop so appealing to Chicagoans and visitors.
Among the more noteworthy mini-districts were:
1. State Street
Lined with department stores, State Street was the city's premier
retail corridor. The stores, which were important centers of female
social and economic activity during the early twentieth century,
became tonier the farther north one went.
2. The Rialto District
Many of the city's largest movie palaces and trendier night clubs
were centered along Randolph Street between State and Clark. Chicago's
Tin Pan Alley also called the area home. During the day, most
movie-goers were female, but at night the Rialto became very
heterosocial as couples flocked to the shows.
3. Michigan Avenue
During the Jazz Age, Chicago's largest concentration of grand
hotels was along Michigan Avenue between Jackson and 12th Street.
4. Newspaper Row
Madison Street between Dearborn and Clark was notorious for its
concentration of newspaper offices, reporters, and wanna-be
journalists. During the early part of the twentieth century, Newspaper
Row was one of the Loop's most male-dominated areas.
5. South State Street
Some of the Midwest's most famous burlesque houses and many
taxi-dance halls were located along the State Street skid row.
6. West Madison Street
Madison Street was the "main stem" of the near west
side's skid row and home to dozens of small dance halls and cheap
movie theaters.
7. Tower Town
Poets, jazz-lovers, intellectuals, political radicals, gay men
and women, and other marginalized members of society helped make the
near north side's collection of night clubs and cabarets trendy and
famous.
8. Center of Government
One of the Loop's male bastions throughout the twentieth century,
the businesses around City Hall at Clark and Randolph Street often
catered exclusively to male customers.
9. Restaurant Row
During the Jazz Age, many of the finest restaurants in town were
located near the intersection of Clark and Madison Streets. It was a
reputation earned in part because of the number of male businessmen
and conventioneers that ate there. Women, unless accompanied by their
boyfriend or spouse, typically dined only at the cafeterias of the
Rialto or the State Street department stores.
10. Center of Finance
LaSalle Street was and remains Chicago's center of banking and
finance, and is still a significantly male-dominated part of the Loop.
The rationale behind such invisible social
boundaries also fueled the development of Chicago's skid rows. Skid
rows were nothing more than highly specialized amusement districts
that, in contrast to other Loop entertainment areas, catered almost
exclusively to men. The removal of promiscuous, male-oriented,
primarily working-class, and often interracial amusements to the
Loop's periphery and the creation of a specialized zone of
heterosocial, middle-class, white-only amusements in the heart of the
Loop was one of the most significant developments in the history of
Chicago popular culture. Only with the total or partial exclusion of
confirmed bachelors, the poor, and blacks from areas most commonly
frequented by middle-class Chicagoans did they have confidence to
embark on the project of redefining marital and sexual relations.
Their collective efforts, which State Street merchants and
Randolph Street impresarios facilitated in the hopes of economic gain,
transformed how individual Chicagoans related to commercialized forms
of leisure and recreation. Fading away were the days when parents
arranged the marriage of their children and unhappy husbands turned to
prostitutes or burlesque shows. All that had become "old-fashioned"
in the minds of young, "modern" couples. By the end of the
Jazz Age, however, commerical leisure activities had become an
indispensible part of the middle-class search for eligible marriage
and sex partners. Such couples grew accustomed to meeting one another,
"falling in love," and sustaining their marriages through
their mutual enjoyment of male-female leisure activities. And it was
the movie palaces, night clubs, and department stores of the newly
reorganized Loop that helped them achieve that goal.
West Madison Street
"Walking west over the
Madison Street bridge and immediately beyond the gray facade of the
Northwestern station, a sudden change in the character of the street
crowd attracts your attention. Women are not found any more and
instead you see nothing but men. Gnarled old men with yellow teeth,
shabby young men with dirty wrinkled clothes, middle-aged men with
doughy complexions, laborers, lumber-jacks, Mexicans and drunks. You
are, in short, in 'the port of homeless men'-- the great west side
'floptown' of Chicago.
"On Madison street again, known in the language of the
tramps as 'the main stem,' you pass cheap lodging houses, employment
agencies, second-hand clothing stores, dusty Japanese coffee rooms,
dingy restaurants, barber colleges, 'oyster bays' and missions, until
you come to the 'Workingman's Palace,' a lodging house of 25 and 35
cent beds conducted by the Salvation Army."
John Drury, "Byways of the
City: Floptown," Chicago Daily News, 28 July 1926.
Authored 1 Aug 98
Copyright
1998 by Scott A. Newman