American Pharaoh Read Online Free

mid-1800s to serve the poor Irish-Catholic laborers who were flooding the area to work in the
     growing meat-packing industry. The church’s simple stone building stood at the corner of 37th and Union, on the fringes of
     the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport and hard up against a vast expanse of cattle-slaughtering facilities. Standing on
     the steps after Mass, young Daley could smell the fetid mixture of manure and blood that wafted over from the sprawling Union
     Stock Yards to the south. The gurgling in the background was the cackle of “Bubbly Creek,” a torpid offshoot of the Chicago
     River that got its name from the fermenting animal carcasses and offal in its slow-moving waters. If Nativity seemed like
     an unlikely place for spiritual repose, it had once been worse. The church’s first home had actually been in the former J.
     McPherson livery stables. The name “Nativity” was a reference to the fact that the church, like Christ, had been born in a
     stable — an attempt to put a holy gloss on grim surroundings. Nativity’s new building had a pleasant interior, including ornate
     stained-glass windows, but nothing could make up for the harsh reality of geography. Daley’s spiritual home was located just
     a few hundred feet from what one parish history called “the greatest and bloodiest butcher shamble in the world.” 1
    The whole city of Chicago had a reputation for coarseness and for lacking the style and sophistication of older cities like
     Philadelphia or Boston. “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again,” Rudyard Kipling wrote after visiting in
     1889. “It is inhabited by savages.” Chicago was the industrial capital of the Midwest, a tough town dominated by factories
     that belched black smoke. Theodore Dreiser, who roamed the city as a reporter, marveled in his book
Newspaper Days
at the “hard, constructive animality” of the rougher parts of Chicago. It was not uncommon, he found on his rounds, to come
     across men standing outside ramshackle homes “tanning dog or cat hides.” The Chicago of this era was a town in which displaced
     farmhands and struggling immigrants competed for space in ram-shackle tenements and rooming houses, and hooligans roamed the
     streets. Block after block of “disorderly houses” did a brisk business corrupting hordes of guileless young girls, like Dreiser’s
     Sister Carrie, who arrived daily from small towns in a desperate search for a better life. And it was Chicago saloonkeepers
     who invented the Mickey Finn, a chloral hydrate–laced drink slipped to solitary patrons so they could be easily robbed. “The
     New York Tenderloin,” journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote, “was a model of order and virtue compared with the badly regulated,
     police-paid criminal lawlessness of the Chicago Loop and its spokes.” Chicago’s moral climate was shaped by Al Capone and
     the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and by the ignominy of the 1919 Chicago White Sox — the team that shocked the nation by
     fixing the World Series. “Chicago is unique,” journalist A. J. Liebling would conclude after visiting for a year to research
     a book. “It is the only completely corrupt city in America.” Loving Chicago, Nelson Algren once said, was like loving a woman
     with a broken nose. 2
    Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Daley’s neighborhood was a grim place. It was Chicago’s first slum,
     known in its early days by the evocative name Hardscrabble. It was settled in the 1830s and 1840s by the Irish “shovelmen”
     who built the nearby Illinois & Michigan Canal, many working for whiskey and a dollar a day. The area was renamed Bridgeport
     in the 1840s, when a low bridge was built across the Chicago River at Ashland Avenue, forcing barges to unload on one side
     and reload on the other. When the canals were completed, Bridgeport’s dirty work of canal-building gave way to the even less
     savory trade of animal