The operative word in the title of this stunning book of photographs is ‘era’. The emphasis is on the milieu of Chicago in gangland days. As such, there is something for everyone in this 200-page coffee table quality book. Of course, there are the requisite bloody cadavers, gun toting hoodlums and getaway cars, with the courtroom shots, the funerals, and beer busts. But the top-notch photographs taken with the big old press cameras of the period reproduce details that bring the 1920s and ’30s to life—everything from the pens on a desk, cigar bands, facial expressions in a crowd. We take for granted this kind of depth of field with today’s high-quality digital cameras; but it is remarkable that the average news photographer was able to get these crisp pictures 80 years ago.
The selection of photographs from the Chicago History Museum’s collection will entrance more than the crime fan. Fashionistas will delight in the many ‘costumes’ of women of the era, from barely clad club dancers and bathing beauties to the bejeweled and fox-furred travelers passing through Union Station. Cloche hats, bobbed hair, rolled silk stockings one expects on ‘the new woman,’ but it is startling to see hats and costume jewelry adorning the denizens of the factory assembly line. A tough Chicago policewoman poses with her pistol in a full-length sealskin coat. Men’s fashions seem more varied than today with a profusion of bowties, vests, cuffed pants and male jewelry from pocket watch fobs and chains, gem-headed tie pins, to a whole spectrum of wristwatches. The gangland men seem to have had their ‘colors’ too, much as today’s bad-boy wannabes. One faction attired in light suits with straw boaters, another with light fedoras with dark hatbands and double breasted overcoats, still others twinned-out with velvet lapels. The plainclothes cops and U.S. marshals, un-stereotypically, are the guys in the black hats.
Sports fans will note the Dempsey-Tunney fight, and Capone at Sox Park. The gun lobby-set will be floored by the range of weapons portrayed, in great detail, including the clichéd machine gun concealed in a violin case. Architecture nuts will enjoy the one-on shots of hotels (the Allerton, new in 1924, dwarfing everything around it on Michigan Avenue), stores, theatres, long-gone landmarks, and rows of bungalows. Advertising junkies will feed on a plethora of billboards and posters. There’s even radio studio shots, and African-American jazz on the South Side, and the big bands of the era all over town.
These great photographs were selected and reproduced by a cadre of Chicago History Museum staff, with insightful commentary by local historian/curator Russik, who most recently was lead curator for Mapping Chicago. If the economy and gas prices are keeping you close to home for vacation this summer, journey to another era through this book. You might want to purchase a spare to hold-over for a holiday gift to shorten someone’s Chicago winter.
© Copyright 2008 by Marie J. Kuda