Chicago’s Divisions of Class Found Along Train lines and through Shopping Bags
By Jessica Gilbert
Why the Train?
The Chicago L train fascinates me. I moved to Chicago two years ago from a city where no one used public transportation. Suddenly I was choosing my apartment based on its proximity to a brown line stop. It was all very exciting and I have no problem admitting the thrill I felt the first time I rode the train alone.
I have been able to utilize this project to study how the colors/different lines of the train and their stops act to separate classes of people. I attended a graduate workshop last year where a member of the panel is a professor at a university in Chicago. He spoke of assigning a project to his students to ride a line of the L from start to finish and see how the people and landscape changed and how various social classes and races were represented the farther the ride went from the Loop. He talked about all the various classes, ethnicities and ways of life that can be found on one single line. Then he added ‘Well all the lines work for this experiment but the brown line.” I was unaware that I took the ‘protected’ line and this is what inspired me to really want to explore all of the lines to see what portrayal of diversity I was missing and study this diversity further. This project provided me with the perfect opportunity to do that.
Why Shopping Bags?
Building off this idea I wanted to compare and contrast the different train lines and see how class is represented differently on separate lines and throughout the entirety of the line. Through our class discussion and work shopping ideas I decided upon the idea of using shopping bags as an indicator of class. I wanted to see if I could identify social class in a cultural context using consumerism. Shopping bags would be the cultural objects I would be observing as indicators of people’s social class and status group (Griswold, 2013).
I photographed numerous bags on three different lines and hope I have illustrated my argument of how much social class changes along one single train ride. I examined the brown line going north and the red line going south as an attempt to represent the greater Chicago area. I have also included some history of the areas these lines travel and portray numerous shopping bags, identifying where they were photographed on the L and what significance I have pulled from them. Each photo posted is labeled with what kind of bag, what train line, and around what stop it was photographed at.
While there has been some work done in market research as to who buys what in relation to class and goods purchased there has been little sociological research using cultural objects as signifiers of class in regards to consumption. My choice of shopping bags is unique and purposeful in that it provides me with class distinctions that I can then connect to the location they were in. My attempt at filling this gap in the literature with an original and somewhat unorthodox experiment has confirmed not only the link between economic class and social class in Chicago but also the stratification of class when comparing North Chicago to South Chicago.
Begin and End at the Loop
The amazing thing about Chicago and about the trains is everyone starts and stops at the loop. There is this whole melody and beautiful variety of people there. There is no division of class at the Loop, no one seems to be over represented or underrepresented. Rather, you have to ride a train away from the center of the city (or Loop) to see the severe segregation that exists.
When I did my research, I began each ride at the loop, (Harold Washington Library and Jackson/State to be exact), and ended back there. This allowed me to ride the entirety of each line and see it start to finish. I ended at 95th and Dan Ryan on the Red line and Kimball on the Brown Line and then turned around and rode back to the Loop. The days and times of my rides differed. Some were early morning, some mid-afternoon and a large percentage were during evening rush hour.
The rush hour rides were where most of my data collection occurred. The rides were approximately two hours long and allowed me to see hundreds of people get on and off the trains. As these occurred at the end of the day, many people were returning home from shopping or work with their purchases in hand. This busy time of the day afforded me some great photographs. I observed and photographed while both riding the train and getting off at various stops and sitting on benches to see more commuters.
Some History of Chicago’s Class Systems
Chicago is unique in the United States for its historical shifts in population concentrations and for the severe segregation that exists in its community areas (Wilson, 2006:12). The historic Chicago Black Belt held a high level of the cities poverty. The Black Belt included neighborhoods like Oakwood, Englewood, and the Near South Side (which the red line train gives access to). These neighborhoods are located south of the Loop and are considered working class. North of the Loop remains primarily white and includes neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Ravenswood. These areas are often predominately white and middle to upper class.
The opportunities or lack thereof are very important when trying to assign class to a specific locality in Chicago, or anywhere for that matter. William Julius Wilson says a good indicator of class in a neighborhood is if they get hit by the “disappearance of work” and joblessness more than other neighborhoods (1996:74). This trend can be seen in many community areas of Southside Chicago with the closing of various factories and plants, with the demise of the steel industry, and with the lack of funds that the city government allots them when compared to the money spent on the neighborhoods on the Northside of the city.
Class and Gentrification
Gentrification has affected the class landscape of Chicago, not as much in decreasing stratification rather in the movement of people from real estate rich and desirable neighborhoods to undesirable neighborhoods under the guise of urban renewal policy. Neighborhood change in Chicago has negatively affected black and Latino neighborhoods and positively affected white neighborhoods (Hwang and Sampson, 2014). Gentrification in Chicago was not only race driven though. It was and is still very class driven. The poor families that were forced out of neighborhoods and pushed farther south included poor African Americans, Latinos, and poor whites (Fernandez, 2012:174).
The history of gentrification in Chicago is heaviest in the areas surrounding the Loop but has affected neighborhoods north off the brown line and south off the red line. In the mid-1990s there was a major restructuring of Chicago’s downtown and Loop area. It was not until 2007 that gentrification spread to the north and south of the city center (Hwang, 2014:739). The cities “revitalization” efforts are very apparent when examining the stratification of classes in Chicago. Working-class residents were particularly vulnerable to these efforts as they often do not have a voice in the behind the scenes politics that are in charge of the urban renewal plans even though they are the very ones being displaced (Perez, 2004:129).
Gentrification is important to my project by showing how people with the same socioeconomic status are continually grouped together in Chicago neighborhoods, not allowing residential coexistence among class populations. This limits diversity that the city very much needs and continues the oppression of the working class. It perpetuates urban inequality and continues to isolate the more disadvantage populations of the city by constraining them to community areas with less resources, higher crime, and fewer social and economic opportunities.
I was able to identify this class distinction when comparing the shopping bags seen on the Brown Line going north which has a predominately white, middle class population as compared to the Red Line going south which has a predominately minority, working class population.
Results
I observed and photographed a wide variety of shopping bags for this experiment. I found grocery bags were especially a good indicator of status when comparing the number of Whole Food, Trader Joe, and Jewel shopping bags I photographed on the brown line with the amount of Dollar Tree and basic shopping bags I photographed on the red line.
The Brown Line was consistent in its upper and middle class travelers. Neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Ravenswood had an unusual amount of Whole Foods shoppers, particularly during rush hour times. I also saw a lot of Trader Joe bags. I think these food store bags are a great representation of middle class as they are from higher priced grocery stores that are not found in the less affluent neighborhoods of Chicago; for example the neighborhood of Albany Park located at the northern end of the Brown Line.
There was a high number of take-out Chinese food bags I observed and photographed at the Red Line’s Cermak-Chinatown stop which reflected the many restaurants located in Chinatown. I observed commuters for roughly an hour at that stop from one of the benches and witnessed 7 people boarded trains with take-out food bags from various restaurants in hand.
Then from Sox-35th thru the 95th-Dan Ryan stop at the southern end of the Red Line the bag I observed the most was non-descriptive and generic. They were white or black and had no identifying store or company label on them. They varied little in appearance, they were all commonplace, just your standard shopping bag.
This was another great find for my research as generic shopping bags tend to be used at more mom and pop stores and not corporate owned establishments. This shows not only the shopping preferences of the people in South Chicago but also shines light on their limited shopping options. Many major retail stores that exist in North Chicago do not have storefronts in South Chicago neighborhoods. This limits the shopping selections and choices available to residents of South Chicago.
Discussion Wendy Griswold defined cultural objects as shared significance embodied in form and says that they tell a story (Griswold, 2013:11). I used shopping bags as cultural objects as indicators to help me to identify people’s status group and social class standing. The shopping bags tell the story of where people chose or have to go to buy their food, their clothes, and anything else they spend their money on. The shopping bags also sometimes tell the story of where the individual falls in the hierarchy of the social class system. Using shopping bags as a class indicator allowed me to look at the broad idea of the class system and how it operates in Chicago. My analysis of shopping bags as cultural objects has drawn a clear picture of class division between North and South Chicago.
Max Weber said that class was a mainly economic category and is usually linked with ones’ job, wealth and life chances (Fisher, 1987:493). He examined the roles status, class, and ones’ political party have to do with the amount of wealth, prestige, and power one wields in society. His theory of stratification is based on the unequal distribution and access specific groups of people have to material resources in society. He examined the ability someone has to buy goods that will bring them happiness and then hopefully will improve their life and looked at the way class is assigned by those who are “positively privileged” versus those who are “negatively privileged” (Allen, 2010:170–71). An example of this would be those who are “positively privileged” are the people who own their own homes and those who are “negatively privileged” are those people who rent their homes. Another example would be the opportunity the “positively privileged” is given to shop at any number of stores in their neighborhood and to compare prices and items to get the best deal or exactly what they want while the “negatively privileged” must shop at the store that is available to them and deal with the prices or items the store chooses to carry as they have no other options available to them. I observed both the “positively privileged” when I rode the Brown Line and the “negatively privileged” when I rode the Red Line. There are exceptions as with any study but the majority of those I observed fell conveniently into these two groups.
The high numbers of shopping bags with corporate logos on them photographed on the Brown Line compared to the generic shopping bags photographed on the Red Line illustrates Weber’s argument. The lack of popular shopping destinations like Bed Bath and Beyond and Trader Joes in South Chicago shows how the consumer choice is limited for working class and much more unrestricted for the middle and upper class in North Chicago. “Social class is a useful construct for explaining consumption behavior because it offers insight into both the various resources that limit consumer choice and the preferences that direct the allocation of those resources” (Fisher, 1987: 494).
Further Research Needed
This study was done in a single semester and I designed it very much with those time limitations in mind. I would like more time for observations and also to expand the study to the other six lines of the L train. This would allow me to better discuss not only the North and South class differences but also draw comparisons at a more community area level while still using the transit lines as a guide. The severe stratification in classes found in Chicago is very unsettling. I think this study is an important one that needs to be expanded and continued so that it helps to create and perpetuate the discussion of class and inequality that is plaguing the city.
References:
Allan, Kenneth. 2010. Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. Los Angeles, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Fisher, James E. 1987. “Social Class and Consumer Behavior: the Relevance of Class and Status.” Advances in Consumer Research. 14, 492–496.
Fernandez, Lilia. 2012. Brown in the Windy City. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Griswold, Wendy. 2013. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hwang, Jackelyn and Robert J. Sampson. 2014. “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods.” American Sociological Review. 79:4, 726–751.
Perez, Gina M. 2004. The Near Northwest Side Story. Berkley, CA. University of California Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1997. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Random House.
