“Although there is a Division Street in Chicago,” writes Studs Terkel in the introduction to his book (and there is, a major East-West one), “the title of the book is metaphorical… I was on the prowl for a cross-section of urban thought, using no one method or technique.” Division Street, published in 1967, is the first of Terkel’s oral histories. He wrote it in response to an invitation from Andre Schifrin, then at Pantheon Books, who had worked with Jane Myrdal on Report from a Chinese Village and wondered if something similar couldn’t be done about an American city.
As Let’s Get Working festival programmer Paul Durica points out, Division Street begins with Florence Scala and ends with Jessie Binford, “two women united by a shared cause—opposition to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s plan to establish the University of Illinois at Chicago’s campus in the neighborhoods of Little Italy and Greektown” (which has now happened). So in this sense, the book represents not only a sincerely diverse portrait of everyday Chicagoans across boundaries of race, sex, class, and neighborhood, but also a memory of a community before geographical fracture.
The seventy historians here include a mother and son who emigrated from Appalachia, society women in pearls, an ex-gang member, and a Native American boilerman. The newest edition features an introduction by Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, among other books.