Pullman

George M. Pullman, president of the Pullman Palace Car Company, built this planned community of French-inspired row houses and colonnade apartments in the early 1880s to house his company’s workers. But it didn’t remain a model community for long.

In 1894, Pullman slashed wages without lowering rents, resulting in a strike and boycott led by Eugene V. Debs, the future Socialist presidential candidate. Four years later, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the planned community, and Pullman became another Chicago neighborhood – only with distinctive architecture that exists nowhere else in the city.

Today the Far South Side neighborhood is a National Historic District. Highlights include the Historic Pullman Foundation Visitors Center, Greenstone Church, Hotel Florence and the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum.

Read, Learn, Discover at the Chicago Public Library. Search programming and event information at your neighborhood branch (Pullman, West Pullman).