My tenth-grade art teacher, a nice lady named Ms. Hennessy, did not like white space. “Fill the whole page,” she would say when she looked at our drawings and paintings. “All the way to the edges. Don’t leave anything blank.” Ms. Hennessy would like the Roseland-Pullman Mural Project, which was painted this summer on the railroad viaduct at South 113th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. It carries an explosion of bright colors across every available inch of concrete, covering four large walls at each corner of the viaduct and both sides of the 113-foot passageway that stretches underneath the train tracks. In all the mural covers 7,200 square feet, making it the largest community mural in Chicago–no small trick in a city that has more than 100 such murals.
“It lacks intimacy,” says Pounds. “And 113th Street gets most of the foot traffic.”
Pullman’s carefully designed community was more than a social experiment–it was also a profit center, intended to provide an ongoing 6 percent return on investment. So Pullman wouldn’t sell the houses he built to his employees. They were forced to rent, and though rents were high, wages at the Pullman factories were low. The problem got worse when wages were slashed after the financial panic of 1893. In May of 1894, the workers of Pullman went on strike. Six weeks later the fledgling American Railway Union took up their cause, calling for a nationwide boycott of any railroad line that carried Pullman cars. That led to one of the most bitter strikes in American labor history, which was finally broken when the government issued a restraint-of-trade injunction against the American Railway Union and its president, Eugene Debs. At the time of the strike, the Pullman community was still inhabited by its first settlers, the Swedes and northern Europeans who had the woodworking skills necessary to build the elaborate wood-frame cars that were the Pullman company’s trademark in the 19th century. In 1907 Pullman began manufacturing steel cars, which required welders and metalworkers. “The people attracted to Pullman for those jobs were not the same as came the first time. There were a lot more Italians and Greeks,” says Paul Petraitis, a Pullman resident who was among the more than 100 people who helped design, paint, and raise money for the Roseland-Pullman mural project. He was also an archivist at the Chicago Historical Society for 16 years. Some Hispanics have recently moved into Pullman, he adds, but there have never been more than a handful of black residents.
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“For us, it’s a question of feeling isolated. I felt really oppressed by the segregation of Chicago, the way neighborhoods don’t relate.”
But many were enthusiastic, and the project was endorsed by the Pullman Civic Organization and the Martin Luther King Community Organization, a Roseland neighborhood group. Financial support was arranged with the help of the Chicago Public Art Group, an umbrella organization that has played a key role in promoting murals and other outdoor artwork throughout the city during the past two decades.
Julie Hayes, an artist from Pullman who served on the design committee, wasn’t sure at first that the ideal of group creativity could be translated into an effective, aesthetically pleasing design. “To be honest,” she says, “I didn’t think it was going to work. Maybe it’s because I’m an artist. In the very beginning, I didn’t know how we were going to pack in all of what we wanted–even though it was a huge space. We just had so many things that everybody wanted to put in.”
