In 1894, Mary McDowell started the University of Chicago Settlement House in Back of the Yards. She improved living conditions and in 1905 helped create Davis Square Park. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council was founded in 1939 by Joseph Meegan, Saul Alinsky, and Bishop Bernard Sheil and is America’s oldest notforprofit community-based organization. It consisted of 185 delegate organizations involving residents, business owners, churches, parks, schools, and social clubs that worked to advocate improvements. The council motto continues on as “We the people will work out our own destiny.”
Relive the bustling activity and the lives of the people in the neighborhood through the historic images in Back of the Yards.
Background Information
Upton Sinclair wrote about the seamy underside of food production in the United States and was one of the best knocn muckrakers. Chicago, Illinois, is the largest city on the Great Lakes.