When Teri Gage walked through the Pullman National Monument at 111th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in February “there were trees growing in the building,” she said.
“Now we have concrete floors, we have framing for the interior walls,” said Gage, National Park Service superintendent of the 12-acre site.
Gage celebrated the progress on the new national monument at a ceremonial groundbreaking on Labor Day, along with other Illinois politicians and labor leaders who said it’s sacred ground for unions.
The Pullman National Monument links back to two historic events that helped birth organized labor. In 1894, when industrialist George Pullman cut wages for the workers who built his rail cars — but not the rents in his model community — it sparked a nationwide rail strike. The labor anger contributed to the creation of Labor Day.
And in 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — the nation’s biggest employer of African Americans — won a major contract from the company.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said those developments “would ignite the labor and civil rights movements across the country.”
Bob Reiter, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said they made the city the “hometown” of the labor movement.
After the groundbreaking, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if reports of President Trump making insulting comments about service members were true.
“I hope he didn’t say those things, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, noting he served for years in the Senate with John McCain, a former POW. “This president said that none of his heroes got captured.”
And “he refuses to even raise the issue with Vladimir Putin as to whether there was a bounty on the lives of American soldiers” in Afghanistan, Durbin said.
