Pullman Monument supporters hope Labor Day opening of historic clock tower and factory grounds brings recognition and investment

On a Monday afternoon in August, the 111th Street Metra station in Pullman was mostly quiet, save for faint clanging as the occasional train chugged by.

Train seemed the appropriate way to arrive at the Pullman National Monument, just a few minutes’ walk from the station. Looking east off the platform and past several lines of rail, the red brick Pullman clock tower stood tall.

“This is Chicago’s DNA,” said Joseph C. Szabo , the president of the Historic Pullman Foundation. In Pullman, he said, the history of industrial railway innovation meets at a crossroads with the history of the labor struggle, the civil rights movement, immigration and urban planning.

“It’s a Chicago story, but it’s nationally significant because of the impact that it had on the rest of the country,” said Teri Gage , superintendent of the Pullman National Monument. “Truly, nobody in the country was unaffected by what was happening here in Pullman.”

Pullman’s history is still relevant today, Gage added. “We’re talking about immigration, social justice and the labor rights. We’re still trying to figure out, what’s a living wage? We’re still talking about that today.”

This year, Labor Day weekend will mark the grand opening of the Pullman National Monument Visitor Center in the clock tower and the surrounding factory grounds — an undertaking marked by its fair share of ups and downs.

The road to the national monument — Chicago’s first — was driven by more than half a century of grassroots neighborhood effort.

Important too has been government cooperation as well as philanthropic investment, said Mike Shymanski, a board member of the Historic Pullman Foundation who has been involved in preservation efforts since he moved to the neighborhood in the late 1960s.

In 1998, an arsonist set fire to the clock tower building, which was rescued from demolition after residents orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to save it, Shymanski said.

In the six years since President Barack Obama declared the Pullman Historic District a national monument, the National Park Service has contended with toxic soil, funding challenges and bureaucracy.

Residents and community organizations hope the opening of the visitor center and new exhibits will bring heightened national recognition of Pullman’s history, as well as economic investment and development to the Far South Side.

“For me, it’s really emotional,” said Harriette Burks-Watson, a longtime Pullman resident. “To finally see this dream come to pass — honestly, I couldn’t have imagined it as beautiful as it has turned out.”

Burks-Watson had stopped to chat after an outdoor Sunday service at the historic Greenstone United Methodist Church. During the 1894 Pullman factory strike, the church’s pastor preached in support of the workers, said Greenstone’s current pastor, Luther Mason.

“People have been working like dogs here for 50 years,” said Roderick Lewis, who was standing outside the church with his partner, Arlene Echols, Burks-Watson, his neighbor, and Mason. “Some of them are still here to see it, some are not.”

This weekend will be a neighborhood-wide Labor Day celebration. Visitors can take part in free tours of the visitor center and the historic Hotel Florence. The Illinois Labor History Society will host walking tours of the neighborhood. On Monday, the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum will open for its Urban Renaissance event, a commemoration of the Great Migration complete with live music and art space. Amtrak will carry historic Pullman palace cars — the luxurious rail cars Pullman’s company produced and sold to railroad companies across the country — into town for the event; visitors can tour them at the 111th Street/Pullman Metra station.

Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, an alum of Corliss High School who grew up in neighboring Roseland and used to ride his bike around Pullman as a kid, hopes the monument will highlight the neighborhood’s history for those closer to home, too. He never learned about the history of the neighborhood in school, he said.

“That’s what we have to change,” Beale said on a drive around Pullman. “A lot of the kids in the community have no idea the history that’s right in our own backyard, because they’re not teaching it.”

‘Background of discontent’

In 1880, George Pullman began construction of his eponymous company town, located at the time outside Chicago city limits. It was in Pullman that workers — skilled craftspeople and mechanics, many of whom were immigrants — constructed Pullman’s palace cars. The town featured row houses — with indoor plumbing — for workers, a library, school, grocery store and more, all company-owned.

At the time, Pullman was praised for his innovation and planning but criticized for his paternalism. In 1894, factory workers walked off the job in a massive strike that led to the national recognition of Labor Day.Decades later, the Pullman porters, who worked on the palace cars, formed the first Black labor union with major standing.

“Pullman may appear all glitter and glow, all gladness and glory to the casual visitor, but there is the deep, dark background of discontent which it would be idle to deny,” the Tribune reported in 1888, in a quote now emblazoned on the walls of the new visitor center.

In 1893, an economic depression led George Pullman to decrease factory workers’ wages. But he didn’t lower their rent.

“They felt like this robber baron was passing the cost of the recession on to them,” said Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. In May 1894, the workers went on strike.

The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, came in to represent the factory workers and called for a nationwide boycott of Pullman railcars. That summer, more than 18,000 Pullman workers who walked off the job were joined by over 200,000 railway workers nationwide. Almost all the railroads out of Chicago — the rail hub of North America — were shut down.

“The real historical significance of (the strike),” Winant said, “is this very early effort at industrial unionism” — an organizing method in which all workers in an industry are represented by the same union, rather than by disparate craft unions.

But Winant said the strike fell short in this attempt, because a year earlier, the American Railway Union had voted to bar Black workers — like the Pullman Porters — from joining.

In July, the strike was forcibly crushed by U.S. Army troops. Debs, along with other leaders in the railway union, was imprisoned.

Years later, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman company to sell its nonindustrial property. Many of the workers bought their own homes.

But in the short term, workers didn’t see meaningful improvement in their wages or quality of life. And, Winant added, the American Railway Union was essentially finished off along with the strike.

‘Grandfathers of the civil rights movement’

In 2016, former Pullman porter Benjamin Gaines, who worked on the railroads from 1945 to 1954, spoke about the job from his Evanston home.

“The porters, believe it or not, we had a celebrity status,” Gaines told the Tribune. “We were upper-class because it was a prestigious job.”

For some porters — who worked on the palace cars starting in the very early years of the Pullman company — the job was their first after the end of slavery. There was a certain excitement, not to mention pride, that came from working on the palace cars.

As Black men with freedom of movement at a time when that freedom was heavily restricted for many other Black Americans, porters clandestinely carried Black newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, on the palace cars to distribute along their routes.

Still, the porters’ working conditions were, in many ways, untenable. They were tip workers. Porters hardly slept, and when they did, it was sometimes sitting up, in smoking cars, said David A. Peterson, Jr., who grew up on the same block as the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, where he is now the executive director.

And passengers often didn’t call the porters by their names. They called them George, after George Pullman. “It was just a very fancy way of calling you a boy,” Peterson said.

When that happened to him, Gaines told the Tribune, he would reply, “‘My name is Benjamin Franklin Gaines. There’s no George anywhere.’”

Having been excluded from the American Railway Union, the porters formed their own union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925, about three decades after the factory workers’ strike. A dozen years later, they would become the first Black union to receive a collective bargaining agreement with a major U.S. corporation — the Pullman company.

The Brotherhood was led by A. Philip Randolph, who was not himself a porter, but who had made a name for himself as a journalist and a figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1941, Randolph threatened a march on Washington, D.C., successfully pressuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt into desegregating the war industries.

“They were the grandfathers of the civil rights movement,” Peterson said.

“A lot of the things that the porters were fighting for are still issues that we as African Africans are still fighting for today,” Peterson said.

“Labor Day,” he added, “for me running this museum, represents a call to action.”

Small-town community

Pullman is a tight-knit community, more like the small town it once was than a typical big-city neighborhood. Standing in the shade outside Greenstone Church, Burks-Watson, Echols and Lewis waved at almost every neighbor they saw walking a dog or pulling out of a driveway, calling out to each of them by name.

When Echols moved to Pullman in the late 1990s, the history of the neighborhood was a big draw for her; she and Lewis live in a historic rowhouse built as part of the original planned community. But it’s her neighbors — and she considers anyone who lives in Pullman a neighbor — who make the place so special, she said.

“We all realize that we all are connected because of this neighborhood, and there’s something about this neighborhood that we can’t get anywhere else,” she said. “And it behooves all of us to work together to make this place a better place.”

Echols said she was proud that because of the monument, more people would come to see how lovely and important of a place Pullman is.

“Not just because of the history,” Echols said. “Oh my gosh, you’ll read about the history in many other places. But that sense of small-town community is not found in many places. Honestly, I suspect not even in small towns anymore. I don’t know,” she laughed.

“But it’s here.”