Object Lesson: Architecture at Pullman National Monument as Both an Agent of Division and Collective Identity

Abstract

Few American places have been so conspicuously shaped by the politics of class and race over the long twentieth century as Pullman, Illinois, making it an important location for studying the role of placebased heritage practice in today’s fight for social justice and equality. This model company town, built in 1883 by luxurytrain producer George Pullman as the ultimate test of corporate paternalism, gained high praise at first, but became the poster child for company overreach when an 1894 strike highlighted worker frustration with Pullman’s control over both wages and rents (Figure 1). The company was ordered to divest itself from the town by 1907, but Pullman retained a distinctive identity on the south side of Chicago throughout the twentieth century, largely because of its recognizable architecture. When President Barack Obama created Pullman National Monument in 2015, he called for intersecting stories of race, class, labor, and place that would use the site’s history to “tell rich, layered stories of American opportunity and discrimination, industrial engineering, corporate power and factory workers, new immigrants to this country and formerly enslaved people and their descendants, strikes and collective bargaining.”1 Obama’s directive, however, set up a challenge for National Park Service (NPS) staff because the active heritage community in Pullman was deeply divided— spatially and racially— in ways that undermined the president’s holistic vision. In Pullman’s residential area south of the factory site and clock tower, the famous Florence Hotel and Greenstone Church punctuate about twentyfive blocks of red brick row houses. Starting in the 1960s, several community groups of middleclass, mostly White, residents developed a popular narrative about Pullman’s significance as the nation’s first professionally designed model town. Led by the Historic Pullman Foundation and the Pullman Civic Organization, these groups successfully listed the Pullman Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places and gained state and local designations in the 1970s. They have been active in historic preservation ever since. On the northern side of Pullman, however, a different history and preservation story prevailed. The National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, founded in 1995 and housed in one of SARAh fAyEN ScARLET T AND LAURA WALIK AINEN ROULEAU