go for it

by Suzanne Hanney

by Suzanne hanneyPullman was just months away from becoming a National Monument for its 19th century labor history when Matthew Hoffman, founder and custodian of the You Are Beautiful project, saw its Market Hall and came up with the name, “Go for It,” for his outdoor installation there.

“The project was as DIY as you can get,” said J.B. Daniel, a Chicago public artist with a house, studio and artist residency in Pullman known as “mosnart,” which is “transom backwards,” the idea of art and community flowing back and forth across a threshold. “I don’t think we spent over $3,000 on materials. The community supported it with sweat labor and incredible dinners.”

Craftsmen who had rebuilt Pullman’s red brick-andgreen-wood trimmed Victorian and Queen Anne rowhouses cut 2 x 4s. An architect friend visited on the eve of construction to make sure Hoffman’s 12-foot high by 36-foot wide by 4-foot deep installation weighed no more than 100 pounds at its touch points.

“Pullman is a self-determined community,” Daniel said, “used to doing lots of things.” It’s racially and economically diverse, "millionaires living next to people on assistance.” When Mayor Richard J. Daley wanted to demolish the community in the 1960s and 70s, residents fought back. Their historic preservation efforts paid off on Feb. 19, 2015, when President Obama made Pullman a national monument, to be managed by the National Park Service.

“I think Matthew picked up on that, staying here,” Daniel said. “That’s what I love about the artists residency, staying where the workers stayed.”

Mosnart

Hoffman volunteered his time and stayed at 11319 S. St. Lawrence, a former cottage for workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, which built luxury sleeping cars for railroads that crisscrossed the nation. “We would walk out of this cottage every day, but we built this art piece as opposed to railroad cars for George,” Daniel said. The reference is to George Pullman, who owned both the factory and the community, where workers lived, shopped, worshipped (but didn’t drink because Pullman didn’t allow saloons).

After “Go for It” was installed at the Market Hall on Aug. 23, 2014, it evoked both public and private response, Daniel said. “Soon after we put it up, somebody said, ‘you know, I looked at this piece and decided to apply for college.’ She took it as a sign. That’s the wonderful thing about Matthew’s work: these little points of positivity that people can cling to and adapt for themselves.”

“Go for It” was only supposed to be up for a year but remains to this day. After it weathered to grey, Hoffman and Daniel touched it up with wood-tone paint in time for the annual historic Pullman House tour.

Besides the Market Hall, the factory building, the clock tower administration building and the workers’ cottages, Pullman is still a walkable, Gilded Age planned urban community, a departure from the crowded, dirty, working-class districts of its time. But for Daniel, its labor history is more intriguing – and President Obama referenced it in his visit.

During a major recession in 1894, George Pullman reduced workers’ wages – but not the rent and not the store prices he charged them. When a grievance committee visited Pullman, he fired them. As the workers’ condition worsened, they approached Eugene V. Debs, head of the American Railway Union. In June, ARU switchmen refused to add or remove Pullman cars from any trains, tying up railroad traffic across the U.S.

But in July, after workers derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. Mail train, the U.S. attorney general sought an injunction against the strikers. President Grover Cleveland then sent federal troops to enforce the injunction and the strike ended by August.

The neighborhood also includes the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porters Museum, which documents the predominantly African American workers who provided customer service on the luxury trains. In 1925, Randolph organized 500 porters into the first African American union recognized by the AFL. In 1937, it became the first African American union to negotiate with a major corporation, the Pullman Company -- a major civil rights landmark.