Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
Urban issues
Here you will find articles about land use, zoning, the City Beautiful movement, subdivision design, parks, and transportation, illustrated mostly by cases in Chicago and Springfield and published mainly in Planning, the Chicago Reader, Chicago Enterprise, and Illinois Times.
I can't remember when I became interested in how cities work. I suppose it dates to the slow death of my home town's downtown (which for eleven years also happened to be my neighborhood) in the 1970s. The perceptive reader will recognize in me the loving son who became a bore about fitness and nutrition after watching a beloved parent die of a heart attack.
In any event, urban issues were to become a professional preoccupation. The first opinion piece published in Illinois Times under my own name was about the promiscuous clearing of downtown commercial buildings for parking lots. My first piece for Illinois Issues magazine, in 1978, was about urban planning, specifically developer exactions being imposed by the Chicago suburb of Naperville. (The piece is of little interest today and is not included in this archives.) Developers of the day raged about how this clumsy manipulation of market forces by government would throttle growth; I take pleasure in pointing out here that in the years since, Naperville grew from 42,000 residents to 148,000.
An occasional contributor to the early Illinois Times was Ruth Eckdish Knack. She moved to Chicago and took a job as an editor at Planning, the monthly published by the American Planning Association, the professional organization for urban planners. Ruth (now a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners) kindly tossed assignments my way, and I began to acquire an education in urbanism and planning, article by article, my tuition in effect being paid by the APA. I suppose I should have declared that on my 1040s.
Funny how a freelancer, by stint of publishing a well-researched piece in which he or she interviews experts about a topic about which he is otherwise ignorant, gets a reputation as a authority by virtue of his work appearing in a journal considered authoritative. I got used to it, but I never didn't laugh when I saw a piece of mine on this topic on a university reading list.
Interested readers also should know that I devoted two chapters in my history of mid-Illinois—"A Classic Mixing Zone" and "Town Mania"—to population demographics and migration and urbanization as they affected that part of the state; see Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves.
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Would Ruin Chicago Ave. Character
Ruining the "park" in Oak Park
Wednesday Journal November 27, 1911
This Space Available
Public spaces in Chicago and cities around the world
Reader January 29, 1993
Cities don’t make floods but they make them worse
"Prejudices" Illinois Times July 21, 1993
Is Springfield ready for Union Square Park? Illinois Times August 6, 1987
Spot zoning nibbles away at the capital city
"Prejudices" Illinois Times December 8, 1988
A 1924 plan for building a new Springfield
"Prejudices" Illinois Times April 28, 1993
Daley's Trolley
Daley's Loop circulator is derailed
Reader October 18, 1991
Springfield’s lazy, hazy, razing days of summer
"Prejudices" Illinois Times July 24, 1981
Flood of Memories
Reflections on Chicago’s Great Leak of 1992
Reader April 9, 1993
The state moves in. There goes the neighborhood
"Prejudices" Illinois Times February 22, 1980
Return to Broadacre City
Frank Lloyd Wright reimagines the city
Illinois Issues April 2000
Will the future of affordable family housing be the 1950s?
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times November 23, 2011
Soft alternatives to soft-headed flood control
“Prejudices” Illinois Times July 29, 1993
Why Springfield street improvements seldom were
“Prejudices” Illinois Times August 13, 1992
Building highways out of habit
“Prejudices” Illinois Times November 30, 1979
A bigger, not better, capitol complex
“Prejudices” Illinois Times September 15, 1983
What Can We Do With Block 37?
Undeveloping Loop real estate: A case study
Reader April 19, 1991
Making a new downtown of Springfield's old buildings
“Prejudices” Illinois Times February 18, 1993
Springfield's downtown gets out of bed, walks
“Prejudices” Illinois Times October 29, 1981
The frontier impulse unsettles metropolitan Springfield
Illinois Times June 29, 1979
Tidying up the Lincoln home area by paving it
“Prejudices” Illinois Times June 10, 1977
In which the author’s wishes do not come true
“Prejudices” Illinois Times May 30, 1980
The newest draft city plan is a good one
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times January 4, 2018
Why Did the Children Not Cross the Road?
Kids no longer enjoy the freedom of their city
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times December. 30, 2009
Yielding to Nonsense
The General Assembly makes pedestrians less safe
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times May 13, 2010
Poor Housing
Will enforcement improve shabby housing on Springfield's east side?
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times November 3, 2011
How might Illinois towns boost population growth?
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times January 12, 2017
Arcadia at the End of the El Lines
Chicagoland’s parks and green spaces
See Illinois (unpublished) 2008
Annexing Fringe Areas—Is It Worth It?
Attachment theory and dysfunctional cities
Illinois Issues January 1979
Who pays for Springfield’s low-priced housing?
Illinois Times February 3, 2011
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SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.
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