The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream Kindle Edition

What attracted me to buy the book was its scope, a review of the important place
Chicago has had in the nation’s music, visual arts, architecture, politics, theater,
social/racial problems, finances and literature, from the 1890s to the 1970s. In a
real way, it is such a survey.

But I am mystified by his extended focus on the sordid and dysfunctional aspects
of the life of Nelson Algren. Granted, he was an important writer. But it is hard to
square the survey of the city’s qualities with the personal detail expounded of his
life.

Further, while a survey of a period and a place requires that names be named,
there are many lists of people in various occupations whom only the specialist,
not the survey reader, would recognize --- or be interested in. Their extended
presence in the text made me wish they had been put in fulsome footnotes and
that the author would get on with the story.

All in all, it is interesting, broad based and enthusiastically written. But it would
have benefited from a good editor.

Buy the book if this sweep of history in Chicago is of interest to you --- and plan
to be patient in reading it.

The American way of life in the postwar world was a product of Chicago. From the steel in its new Miesian skyscrapers to its stacks of golden crispy McDonald's French Fries. The city was navigating the transformation of the cultural ideal of the common man into a national mass market strategy. -- Thomas Dyja, "The Third Coast", Page 336

That statement by Thomas Dyja in his enthralling book "The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream" (The Penguin Press, 544 pages, maps, glossy photo inserts, notes, index, $29.95) sounds a little overdrawn, but native Chicagoan Dyja provides more than enough information to make his point -- in an exceedingly entertaining book.

I was attracted to the book -- as I am to all books about Chicago -- in part because it was where I moved in the summer of 1961 after graduating with a B.A. in English from Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, about 50 miles west of the Loop, and began my first real job. It wasn't in journalism -- that came in January 1966 when I joined the staff of a daily newspaper in nearby Hammond, IN -- but I was the small town boy in the mecca of the Midwest and it was marvelous -- paradise, even.

My one-bedroom apartment on Grant Place in Lincoln Park cost me all of $75 a month -- very affordable on my $5,200 a year salary -- and it was a short walk to a place I fell in love with on first sight, Old Town at Wells Street and North Avenue, home of the Old Town School of Folk Music, Second City and many other attractions. The first two institutions are covered in the cultural section of "The Third Coast."

Dyja describes -- to pick just one example -- how rock 'n' roll was born in the Chess Record studios with Chuck Berry recording "Maybellene." According to Dyja's account (page 293) Leonard Chess changed the name of Berry's song from "Ida Red" to "Maybellene" , pointing to a bottle of Maybelline mascara that a secretary had left on the studio's piano.

"It has to have three syllables", Leonard yelled (he liked to yell, usually laced with a rich variety of profanities) , and with this pronouncement, rock 'n' roll was born in 1955. (The song title's spelling was changed to avoid a copyright infringement suit from the cosmetics maker).

The book abounds with details like this -- something that appeals to my inner trivia geek .

Dyja notes that Leonard and Phil Chess were white men who made their money from black artists; but he adds that they -- contrary to some other accounts --treated Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and other blacks the same way they treated white artists. The brothers Chess were in it for the money, but so were the artists, including Berry, who earned a living as a carpenter in his father's contracting business (Page 290-291) and vowed never to pick up a hammer after he traveled to Chicago from St. Louis.

If you're a fan of "Saturday Night Live" or "The Colbert Report" you'll learn -- if you don't already know it -- the connection with those two shows with Chicago's groundbreaking Second City improv theater, which grew out of earlier efforts like the Compass Theatre. Dyja describes the birth of Chicago improv -- which led to other theatrical efforts that made the city such an important theater center -- in considerable detail. Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Shelley Berman, Barbara Harris and the parents of Ben Stiller -- Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara -- all got their start in Chicago.

Television innovations that we take for granted were born in the city by the lake: The first host of NBC's "Today" show was Dave Garroway, a fixture in the Chicago School of Television on NBC-owned WNBQ before he moved to the Big Apple, broadcasting from the Merchandise Mart, along with Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison of "Kukla Fran and Ollie" and Louis "Studs" Terkel's "Stud's Place." The latter show was an inspiration for the TV sitcom "Cheers" -- just as Dyja says the station's "Vic and Sade" was a "kind of great uncle" to Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion."

I pride myself on my knowledge of Chicago (hometown of both my mother and father) but I was surprised at some of the details that Tom Dyja unearthed and placed on display in this book, which is enhanced because of its listing of sources and a wonderful bibliography. By the way, here's a link to my 2012 review of a book about Chicago in 1919, "City of Scoundrels": [...]

New York City-based NBC used Chicago -- at the end of the coaxial cable -- as a source of low cost programming, Dyja explains, noting that before jet air travel supplanted trains nearly every coast-to-coast trip included a Chicago stop. This flow of people made made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory.

At the same time that the atom was being split at the University of Chicago -- which gets a great deal of coverage in "The Third Coast" -- the city provided a new home for the Bauhaus of Dessau, Germany, which was detested by the new Nazi regime. Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and others found a welcoming home in the city that created the steel-framed skyscraper and was the home of Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, John Root and many more.

Moholy-Nagy, a multi-talented Hungarian artist, found a patron in Container Corporation of America owner Walter Paepcke, who later bought the old mining town of Aspen, Colorado and started the Aspen Institute. Moholy's Institute of Design thrived and was later folded into the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), whose South Side campus featured buildings designed by Mies.

This expansion of IIT affected the city's African-American community, at that time concentrated in Bronzeville, where the disastrous experiment of high-rise public housing like the Robert Taylor Homes led to many of the problems affecting present-day Chicago.

Racial divisions were particularly highlighted with riots when blacks moved into formerly white, predominantly ethnic neighborhoods, Dyja points out. The maps at the front of the book are particularly useful to those unfamiliar with Chicago's geography -- and helped this former Northsider comprehend what was going on in White Sox territory.

The election of Richard J. Daley as mayor in 1955 -- he was supported by legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson -- let to more construction that changed the skyline of the Loop. It was also the time of white migration to the suburbs and violent protests by whites against African-Americans arriving in their formerly all-white enclaves.

Dyja covers the city's rich literary scene extremely well, with his accounts of novelist Nelson Algren ("The Man With the Golden Arm," "Walk on the Wild Site") and his French mistress Simone de Beauvoir; Gwendolyn Brooks and many others. His account of how Hugh Hefner changed the face of magazine publishing is one of the best I've seen.

"The Third Coast" is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand Chicago -- and, by extension the creation of post WWII urban America. On top of that, it's supremely readable. An unbeatable combination. Update: For my Friday, Dec. 20 on-air review of "The Third Coast" with Craig Hammond of WHIS in Bluefield, WV: [...]/radioactivewhis and listen to the Dec. 20, 2013 broadcast replay.

I grew up in Chicago, but Dyja's story covers the period before I reached the planet. His point is that what
America became in the 1960's - 1970's was fostered in Chicago and then exported to the rest of the nation
(thus, The Third Coast). Lots of great insight into TV, music, theater, architecture, and politics. Dyja is
point-blank about Chicago's racism and the deliberate segregation of black and white. I discovered a Chicago
I'd never known, and it made sense of the city I grew up in. A great read.

As a lover of Chicago and a resident of the Chicago area for part of the time this book covers, I looked forward to Thomas Dyja's socio-cultural history with great anticipation. I am left with mixed feelings. But that's partly because of my own interests. Ideally, such a history would go from World War I onward and cover the rise of Chicago's "Bohemia," the poetry and "little magazine" scene and the growth of early Chicago opera and dance (many people forget that Chicago was a major American ballet capital between the two World Wars).But that's the book I might write and not the one Dyja did write. Dyja offers a brief summary of Depression-era Chicago, but his emphasis is upon Chicago from 1945 to 1960 -- fair enough, and he makes all that clear. Moreover, his main interests appear to be jazz, pop, rock, gospel music, architecture and city planning, and (how can a Chicago book avoid this?) politics, about all of which he knows quite a lot. Yet he leaves important stuff out: much about the art scene, the Lyric Opera, the dance scene (as a lover of eccentricity, it's odd that he says nothing about that great choreographic maverick Sybil Shearer), or about poets other than Gwendolyn Brooks. Again, all this quibbling springs from my own biases. What Dyja does say, he says quite well in lively prose, and he's done an impressive amount of research. And fascinating facts do turn up. The book contains only one reference (but it's an eye-opener) to either Harriet Monroe, the founder of "Poetry" magazine, and the important choreographer Ruth Page: it turns out that both, along with Clarence Darrow, were major underwriters of a Leftist theatre group in the 1930's. That news astonished me, and I'm delighted to learn it from Dyja!

I thoroughly enjoyed but not for all tastes. In reality, it's a collection of vignettes about Chicago between end of WWI and early 60's. An exciting time for Chicago and I liked learning about some of the people involved. Living in Chicago surely adds to interest. But it's an important study of the larger life and times of America.