Wall of the Ogden International School of Chicago, West Campus on West Erie Street. Photos @2021 Dave Anderson unless noted.
My first relative in the United States, Martin Robertson, escaped the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 by bringing his wife, infant son, and what few belongings they could carry across the North Branch of the Chicago River, probably treading a bridge at Erie Street. At this time, his work and their home were in the North District, but after it burned, the family settled in unharmed West Town. West Town became a foothold in America for the Robertsons and many other immigrant families like them, and its welcoming of immigrants can still be seen on a walk through the neighborhood today.
Present-day Google Map showing several landmarks in Martin Robertson’s neighborhood.
Following the fire, Martin Robertson (who had previously gone by his Danish name Mads Rasmussen) began showing up on Chicago city directories on Cleaver Street. The Robertson family home from 1875-78 was at 116 Cleaver, now site of the Pulaski Park Public Pool. Starting in 1879 they lived a couple blocks north at 201 Cleaver, at the location of today’s Rowe Elementary School (all listed addresses were prior to Chicago’s 1909 street renumbering project).
Advertisement circa 1878 of the North Chicago Rolling Mill Company, which later became part of the Illinois Steel Company and US Steel.
The 1880 census lists Martin Robertson at 201 Cleaver with the occupation “works at rolling mill,” like several of his neighbors. They likely worked at a North Chicago Rolling Mill steelmaking plant (not shown on the map), then located a half mile to the northeast at Wabanasia Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River — upstream and on the opposite shore from where he had escaped the 1871 Chicago fire. Three years after releasing my Melting Pot album and writing that the American Melting Pot metaphor came from it’s burgeoning steel industry, it is gratifying to learn that my first relative in America once worked as a steelworker.
With very little space between houses, surviving homes from this era also feature steps up to sidewalk/street level.
In the neighborhood
Censuses from the period show a mix of German, Scandinavian and increasingly Polish immigrants. Homes were modest, built close together and low relative to the streets and sidewalks, which were raised starting in 1855,
Google Images: Cleaver Street houses opposite Rowe Elementary School
The immigrant past of the neighborhood is honored by prominent buildings. Pulaski Park was named for Casimir Pulaski, Polish nobleman and a hero of the American Revolutionary War, one of only eight people ever awarded honorary American citizenship.
Pulaski Park was designed by Danish American landscape artist Jens Jensen after most of my Danish family members had left the neighborhood.
Just across the street from Pulaski Park stands Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church, a historic Polish church of the Archdiocese of Chicago. While the Scandinavian Lutheran Robertson family would not likely have attended this church, they would have seen its construction from 1877-81, heard its church bells, and known it as a neighborhood fixture. As the region’s Polish immigrants increased, the nearby area around Milwaukee Avenue & Division Street became known as “Polish Downtown.”
Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church, named after a Polish saint.
Church interior.
Matt Matson arrives
In 1887 Martin Robertson bought a ticket to America for his 25-years-younger half-brother Matt Matson, my Danish great-grandfather.
Matt Matson came to America around the peak of Danish immigration in 1887. His older brother came earlier around 1867.
Matt’s first known appearance on a Chicago directly listing was as a tailor in 1889, a mile to the south of his sibling at 248 West Erie Street. Also listed at this address in 1889-1990 were other craftspeople with immigrant-sounding names including a molder, a bricklayer, a cabinet maker and for many years another Scandinavian tailor named Hans Holter.
248 West Erie Street (1221 today) was home to several immigrant craftspeople.
This Noble Square neighborhood of West Town has a now-long history of welcome immigrants. Across from Matt Matson’s 1889 address today sits the high school campus of Ogden International School (photo at top of this post), which strives to celebrate cultural differences, and has painted the phrase “We all live here” in multiple languages on its front steps.
Google Map of today’s West Erie Street in West Town/Noble Square, red mark showing location of Matt Matson listing.
Two blocks over from Matt was Erie Neighborhood House, for 150 years has helped immigrants get established in Chicago. Erie House began outreach to immigrants as the Noble Street Mission at Holland Presbyterian Church on the southeast corner of Erie & Noble. In 1882 Holland Presbyterian turned Noble Street Mission over to Third Presbyterian Church, which in 1886 built a facility for the Mission just down Erie Street, that became known as Erie House. Erie has provided children’s services, clothing and settlement housing for the many waves of Chicago immigrants that have gotten established in West Town before moving on to other neighborhoods: first Western European Immigrants, then Eastern & Southern Europeans, and in recent decades Latino immigrants. As a recent book about Erie House put it:
“Few other agencies provide observers a view of the ethnic ‘parade’ of so any successive waves of different immigrant groups through the same neighborhood over such a long period of time.” (Hellwig, p. 19)
Along the way, Erie House was influenced by Chicago’s Hull House co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, leaders of the Settlement Movement.
Today Erie Neighborhood House offers services in English and Spanish, in response to demand due to Latin American immigration.
While the presence of the Erie & Hull Houses show that many Chicagoans welcomed immigrants, there was still strong prejudice toward some ethnic groups — as there has been throughout US history. The lighting of the Chicago fire that sprang Martin Robertson from the North Division to the West Side was unjustly blamed on an Irish immigrant woman named Catherine O'Leary even though a public investigation exonerated her. A smaller 1874 fire was initially blamed on a Jewish immigrant. And Erie House itself was involved with a highly publicized 1945 incident supporting a black man named John Strong, who faced violence and threats when he moved into the all-white neighborhood (Hellwig, p. 106-108). Though not immigrants, many African-Americans came to Chicago in the 20th century via the Great Migration but were largely red-lined into non-white neighborhoods.
An Irish pub stands today at the corner of Erie & Noble, in the original location of Holland Presbyterian/Noble Street Mission.
Family Transition
Like immigrant groups in general, the Danish branch of my family became established in West Town before moving on.
In 1890 Matt Matson met and married Swedish immigrant Betty Erickson, and his directory listing moved to his older brother’s 201 Cleaver Street address through 1892. During this time Matt & Betty would have known Martin’s wife (Maren) Katherine Robertson and children well. Matt & Betty started a family, and he built a house for them to the north in West Ravenswood.
Martin Robertson died in 1896 and his widow and children would move north to Chicago’s 15th Ward. The two Robertson daughters who survived childhood, Sophie (Niemeyer) and Anna (Plinkse), would both marry sons of German immigrants, and start families of their own in the Chicago area. Anna lived for years in neighborhoods surrounding Pulaski Park, where "Cousin Ann," as she was known to Matt Matson's daughters, and her husband Leo, would look after them when they came to Chicago seeking work.
Tragically, Matt would lose Betty, my great-grandmother and the mother of his first four children, just 2 ½ weeks after the death of the brother who bought his ticket to America. Matt purchased a multi-grave plot in Rosehill cemetery where four years later the family would bury Martin's 26-year-old son Carl (Charlie) Martin next to Betty.
Matt remarried Olga Lundquist, who became a second mother to Betty’s children. They moved to Wisconsin to start a family farm near Ogema, and continued their own immigrant story.
References:
Maureen Hellwig, A Neighbor Among Neighbors: Erie Neighborhood House, 150 Years as a Home with No Borders, MIPJ, 2020.
Special thanks to family members Dorothy Wanish, Emolyn Wentdorf, Jean, Karen & Evan Anderson for their research help.