City Of Big Shoulders: Chicago Governance Shaping City Geography

8 Pages 2007 Words

t of his officers were involved in the bootlegging business,” these officers received money in exchange for their silence (Spinney 176-77). Even head politicians were involved in corruption to help pass beneficial legislation to help out their friends.
Now with the officers and politicians looking the other way, gangsters and even priests were unknowingly shaping Chicago history and geography. The gangsters needed a place to hang out and drink alcohol. So they would build or buy a business and that would engage in legal activity, but by night the business would turn into a speakeasy, or a casino. These neighborhoods would now be transformed into a gangster’s playground, where the cops that patrolled those streets where in their pocket (Spinney 176-181). Each “playground” or neighborhood was also divided up according to ethnicity. The Italians and the Irish were key gangster ethnicities in early Chicago. Thus the corrupt mafias shaped Chicago because people of the same ethnicities occupy most of those neighborhoods as they did in the 1920s. Another way that corruption shaped Chicago is that today some of the 1920s speakeasies and notorious places of mafia business are deemed historical. The City does this to protect landmarks from demolition and improper restoration (City of Chicago website).
Corruption in governance that is taking place in the present day can also be seen in the physical structure of the city. Not all corrupt doings gives way to the primary result of changing geographies, but the change in geography ...