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Title details for The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood by Carlo Rotella - Available

The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

by Carlo Rotella
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An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it's also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood?

In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents' deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Chicago Visions and Revisions

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 26, 2019

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780226624174

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780226624174
      • File size: 1554 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2019
      An ambitious analysis of a singular neighborhood that in some ways serves as a microcosm for all urban neighborhoods."We live in neighborhoods, and neighborhoods live in us," writes Rotella (Director, American Studies/Boston Coll.; Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, 2012, etc.). The concept "describes both a place and a quality of feeling, a physical landscape and the flows of population, resources, and thought moving through it." The neighborhood he specifically references is Chicago's South Shore, where he and his parents moved as it was in the midst of transitioning from a mostly white neighborhood to one that is predominantly black. It also changed from a middle-class community into one blighted by drugs, crime, and gangs, one that has seen its only supermarket close and its bank as well, with empty storefronts lining what were once bustling streets and residents doing their shopping far from where they live. Yet its proximity to Lake Michigan and convenience to downtown transportation make it attractive. Consequently, the remaining black middle class fears that it will be gentrified out of the neighborhood, just as white residents fled to the suburbs as speculators warned that their property values were dropping because of the influx of black newcomers. As in much of the country, the recession of 2008 hit the neighborhood hard, and there has been as much tension between haves and have-nots as there has been between black and white citizens. As Rotella paints it, South Shore is a community where the center cannot hold, where the middle class is disappearing, where the well-to-do and the unemployed live in close proximity, and where younger activists who want to build bridges across the class divide meet resistance from older residents who wish to erect walls. The author offers a nuanced narrative, partly personal and partly sociological, that keeps circling back to the same important truths about race, class, community, poverty, and crime.A thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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