Chicago is about to get a new national park — its first ever.
The White House announced Tuesday that it will designate a section of Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood on the South Side as a national monument. President Barack Obama, whose community organizing work began in the neighborhood, isexpected to personally announce the news in Chicago on Feb. 19, DNAinfo Chicago reports.
Elected officials and historic groups alike had been pushing for years for National Parks status for the 300-acre district, which dates back to the 1880s.
Constructed for engineer and industrialist George Pullman, the district was a planned model industrial town, one of the first of its kind, marking a significant shift from the rundown living conditions more typical of working-class neighborhoods. Company workers were required to live in company-owned residences, with the first moving into the district in 1881. Visitors from around the world attending the World’s Columbian Exposition traveled in special trains to view the lauded district in 1893.
In 1894, the district was ground zero for one of the most famous labor conflicts of the era. Factory workers with the Pullman Place Car Company walked out over declining post-depression wages, then a boycott from the American Railway Union spread effects of the walkout nationwide, prompting President Grover Cleveland to intervene with federal troops and resulting in violence. It marked the first time a federal injunction was ever used to end a strike.
In 1925, the district became home to the nation’s first ever all-African-American workers’ union, the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, organized by Asa Philip Randolph.
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