The Other Boomers: Chicago Youth and the Politics of Poverty in the Long 1960s

In March 1963, Chicago’s Hull House, under intense economic and political pressure, sold its iconic Near West Side social settlement property and reconstituted itself as the Hull House Association. Jane Addams and her partner Ellen Gates Starr had established Hull House in 1889, and it soon provided a model for similar efforts to ameliorate poverty across the United States. However, the settlement’s future came into question after World War II, when city officials began to focus their attention on “blighted areas” like the Near West Side. Urban renewal meant that Hull House and other residents would be displaced. This dissertation is about what happened when Hull House embraced its displacement, with an emphasis on the agency of young people who were eligible for social services. The newly formed Hull House Association established two new neighborhood centers, in Uptown and Lakeview, and affiliated with two existing centers, in Woodlawn and at the LeClaire Courts public housing project. These four communities were distinct. Who lived in each, the way they functioned and were perceived, was the result of long and complicated processes of development. Into the 1960s, those differential processes of development included young people who had distinct relations with social services and a prevailing youth culture of resistance. This dissertation consists of four community studies, in thick description, that contextualize youth agency as the result of long processes of community development, resulting in localized social and political specificity. Beyond thick description, these community studies are grounded in what feminist geographer Doreen Massey calls a progressive sense of place, an understanding of place as process. This allows us to see how young people navigated the complex specificity of each community, and its power-geometry, including the role of machine politics and social provisions in determining their future mobility, their ability to escape poverty.