The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future
In The Pig and the Skyscraper Chicago: A History of Our Future, Italian author and journalist Marco d'Eramo turns his gimlet eye on the Windy City's 170-year social geography. The first of d'Eramo's books to be translated into English (by Graeme Thomson), this gritty cultural criticism falls in line with City of Quartz by Mike Davis (who provides a foreword) as it pries open the history of the stockyards, Gold Coast skyscrapers, slaughterhouses, Miracle Mile mansions, the Cabrini-Green housing project, the Sears Tower, the Mafiosi and the inner-city gangs, the Mayors Daley, the police force, the unions, the Black Power movement and so on. Beginning with the railroads, which wiped out "entire herds of buffalo," made the city "black with coal dust" and called for the importation of hundreds of Chinese laborers, d'Eramo astutely traces Chicago's craggy sociopolitical continuum. Photos.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.