The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream Pdf Summary
A cultural history of Chicago at midcentury, with its incredible mix of architects, politicians, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and actors who helped shape modern America
Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books.
Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel’s oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago School of Television, and the improvisational Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment.
Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos—both constructive and destructive—of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War Two. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away “blight” with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost—monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago’s role as America’s meeting place.
In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.
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The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream Review
5.0 out of 5 stars BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Third Coast’: Detail-Rich Account of How Much of the Post WWII American Dream — and Nightmare — Was Created
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 5, 2014
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The American way of life in the postwar world was a product of Chicago. From the steel in its new Miesian skyscrapers to its stacks of golden crispy McDonald’s French Fries. The city was navigating the transformation of the cultural ideal of the common man into a national mass market strategy. — Thomas Dyja, “The Third Coast”, Page 336
That statement by Thomas Dyja in his enthralling book “The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream” (The Penguin Press, 544 pages, maps, glossy photo inserts, notes, index, $29.95) sounds a little overdrawn, but native Chicagoan Dyja provides more than enough information to make his point — in an exceedingly entertaining book.
I was attracted to the book — as I am to all books about Chicago — in part because it was where I moved in the summer of 1961 after graduating with a B.A. in English from Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, about 50 miles west of the Loop, and began my first real job. It wasn’t in journalism — that came in January 1966 when I joined the staff of a daily newspaper in nearby Hammond, IN — but I was the small town boy in the mecca of the Midwest and it was marvelous — paradise, even.
My one-bedroom apartment on Grant Place in Lincoln Park cost me all of $75 a month — very affordable on my $5,200 a year salary — and it was a short walk to a place I fell in love with on first sight, Old Town at Wells Street and North Avenue, home of the Old Town School of Folk Music, Second City and many other attractions. The first two institutions are covered in the cultural section of “The Third Coast.”
Dyja describes — to pick just one example — how rock ‘n’ roll was born in the Chess Record studios with Chuck Berry recording “Maybellene.” According to Dyja’s account (page 293) Leonard Chess changed the name of Berry’s song from “Ida Red” to “Maybellene” , pointing to a bottle of Maybelline mascara that a secretary had left on the studio’s piano.
“It has to have three syllables”, Leonard yelled (he liked to yell, usually laced with a rich variety of profanities) , and with this pronouncement, rock ‘n’ roll was born in 1955. (The song title’s spelling was changed to avoid a copyright infringement suit from the cosmetics maker).
The book abounds with details like this — something that appeals to my inner trivia geek .
Dyja notes that Leonard and Phil Chess were white men who made their money from black artists; but he adds that they — contrary to some other accounts –treated Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other blacks the same way they treated white artists. The brothers Chess were in it for the money, but so were the artists, including Berry, who earned a living as a carpenter in his father’s contracting business (Page 290-291) and vowed never to pick up a hammer after he traveled to Chicago from St. Louis.
If you’re a fan of “Saturday Night Live” or “The Colbert Report” you’ll learn — if you don’t already know it — the connection with those two shows with Chicago’s groundbreaking Second City improv theater, which grew out of earlier efforts like the Compass Theatre. Dyja describes the birth of Chicago improv — which led to other theatrical efforts that made the city such an important theater center — in considerable detail. Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Shelley Berman, Barbara Harris and the parents of Ben Stiller — Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara — all got their start in Chicago.
Television innovations that we take for granted were born in the city by the lake: The first host of NBC’s “Today” show was Dave Garroway, a fixture in the Chicago School of Television on NBC-owned WNBQ before he moved to the Big Apple, broadcasting from the Merchandise Mart, along with Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison of “Kukla Fran and Ollie” and Louis “Studs” Terkel’s “Stud’s Place.” The latter show was an inspiration for the TV sitcom “Cheers” — just as Dyja says the station’s “Vic and Sade” was a “kind of great uncle” to Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion.”
I pride myself on my knowledge of Chicago (hometown of both my mother and father) but I was surprised at some of the details that Tom Dyja unearthed and placed on display in this book, which is enhanced because of its listing of sources and a wonderful bibliography. By the way, here’s a link to my 2012 review of a book about Chicago in 1919, “City of Scoundrels”: […]
New York City-based NBC used Chicago — at the end of the coaxial cable — as a source of low cost programming, Dyja explains, noting that before jet air travel supplanted trains nearly every coast-to-coast trip included a Chicago stop. This flow of people made made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory.
At the same time that the atom was being split at the University of Chicago — which gets a great deal of coverage in “The Third Coast” — the city provided a new home for the Bauhaus of Dessau, Germany, which was detested by the new Nazi regime. Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and others found a welcoming home in the city that created the steel-framed skyscraper and was the home of Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, John Root and many more.
Moholy-Nagy, a multi-talented Hungarian artist, found a patron in Container Corporation of America owner Walter Paepcke, who later bought the old mining town of Aspen, Colorado and started the Aspen Institute. Moholy’s Institute of Design thrived and was later folded into the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), whose South Side campus featured buildings designed by Mies.
This expansion of IIT affected the city’s African-American community, at that time concentrated in Bronzeville, where the disastrous experiment of high-rise public housing like the Robert Taylor Homes led to many of the problems affecting present-day Chicago.
Racial divisions were particularly highlighted with riots when blacks moved into formerly white, predominantly ethnic neighborhoods, Dyja points out. The maps at the front of the book are particularly useful to those unfamiliar with Chicago’s geography — and helped this former Northsider comprehend what was going on in White Sox territory.
The election of Richard J. Daley as mayor in 1955 — he was supported by legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson — let to more construction that changed the skyline of the Loop. It was also the time of white migration to the suburbs and violent protests by whites against African-Americans arriving in their formerly all-white enclaves.
Dyja covers the city’s rich literary scene extremely well, with his accounts of novelist Nelson Algren (“The Man With the Golden Arm,” “Walk on the Wild Site”) and his French mistress Simone de Beauvoir; Gwendolyn Brooks and many others. His account of how Hugh Hefner changed the face of magazine publishing is one of the best I’ve seen.
“The Third Coast” is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand Chicago — and, by extension the creation of post WWII urban America. On top of that, it’s supremely readable. An unbeatable combination. Update: For my Friday, Dec. 20 on-air review of “The Third Coast” with Craig Hammond of WHIS in Bluefield, WV: […]/radioactivewhis and listen to the Dec. 20, 2013 broadcast replay.
5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book about the Culture of Mid-20th C. Chicago.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 4, 2021
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The life of Chicago when it was the Second City, and the home of innovation in music, television, art, architecture, marketing and advertising, is the subject of this book.
It explores the city from roughly the Great Depression to the 1960s, when Chicago emerged as a distinctive city of education, politics, and culture. The men and women who made the Univ. of Chicago, Great Books, the Atom Bomb, Hugh Hefner, Playboy, Mies Van Der Rohe, Ray Kroc, McDonalds, Chuck Berry, Chess Records, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and the Museum of Modern Art these are some of the chapters of this book.
The intersection of racial problems, bigotry, crime, and the influence of unions, educators, politicians, and the Catholic Church is exposed as Chicago attempted to progressively answer the needs of society, Blacks and white ethnics who felt threatened by the expansion of Black Americans after WWI. Both the church and political leaders tried to build public housing to warehouse Blacks who were kept out of white neighborhoods. But as the church leaned in on the side of social justice, it alienated those Poles, Italians, Ukranians and others who looked to their local parish as the protector of the community.
The decline of unions and industries, the expansion of the suburbs, the falling off of the Democratic machine, the loss of department stores, the ravages of urban blight and urban renewal, the wiping out of neighborhoods to make way for highways and the emptying out of Catholic life in the city proper ended a kind of consensus of positive thinking that once characterized the Windy City. Chicago’s creatives decamped to New York or Los Angeles, and the decline of the city continues to this day.
In a way this book is a kind of winsome elegy to a lost city that had balls, energy and charisma, and enough moxie and chutzpah to create, build, manufacture, sell and think of itself as the true embodiment of America.
But it will surely inflame and infuriate that Chicagoan who never dies: the stalwart defender of the city who carries civic pride in his blood and will look upon this book as a grievous insult.
About Thomas Dyja Author Of The Third Coast pdf Book
I’ve written three novels and two works of non-fiction before THE THIRD COAST PDF BOOK. I’ve also worked as an editor, book packager, and many years as a bookseller in Chicago, New York, and Boston. I currently live in Manhattan with my wife and daughter, who’s in high school; my son is away at college
The Third Coast pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- ASIN : 1594204322
- Publisher : Penguin Press; First Edition (April 18, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 544 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781594204326
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594204326
- Item Weight : 1.9 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,279,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,633 in Sociology of Urban Areas
- #25,094 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 182 ratings
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