Welcome to Pullman, one of America's first planned industrial towns and a birthplace of the labor movement. In 1881 railcar magnate George Pullman built an entire model town here for the workers who built his luxury sleeping cars, with brick row houses, a market, a church, and the grand Hotel Florence, all owned by the company. Pullman believed clean housing would produce loyal workers, but he controlled everything, including the rents.
When the depression of 1893 led him to cut wages without cutting rents, his workers struck in 1894, and the strike spread nationwide until federal troops crushed it, leaving several dead. Out of that struggle, and the later Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, came landmarks of Black labor organizing. The district is now a national park.
Look at the unbroken rows of identical brick houses and the clock tower of the factory; this was one man's vision of an ordered world, and the place where workers pushed back.