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Micah Salkind
Let Me Tell You, There Was a Place: a brief history of cartography as it relates to the
mapping of Chicago social cultures
Public Lecture
October 11, 2014
MANA Contemporary, Chicago IL
Juke Cry Hand Clap
SLIDE 1: TITLE Let me tell you, there was a place: a brief history of cartography as
it relates to the mapping of Chicago social cultures
For those of you who I havent had a chance to greet yet, GOOD EVENING. Thank you so
much for supporting Honey Pot Performance, MANA Contemporary and High Concept
Laboratories. It has been my distinct pleasure to work this past year as a scholar in
residence here in Pilsen with Honey Pot Performance and Jo De Presser, and Im delighted
to share some of my early thinking about why their research matters to those of us
studying Black popular culture on a global scale.
This residency has been a particularly fun project for me because it has allowed me study
other scholars. I have used an ethnographic approach, participating in and co-performing
with Honey Pot over the spring, to better understand the aesthetic decisions they have
made while developing Juke Cry Hand Clap. But dont think Im just popping in to look at the
fruits their labors. I write about Honey Pot in three interrelated ways, understanding them
as audience members, artists and intellectuals in Chicagos house scene. This tri-part
analysis will feature prominently in the sixth chapter of my dissertation in process,
tentatively titled Do You Remember House? Mediation, Memory and Intersectional
Community-Making in Chicago House Music Culture.
SLIDE 2: Dissertation Title

My research examines the emergence and circulation of house in late 1970s Chicago, and
the contemporary Chicago-based culture that has developed around it. I analyze the social,
political, technological and cultural facets of house as a local expression of Chicagos Black,
Latino and queer communities, and examine the ongoing cultural maintenance and
memorialization that keeps the culture living and breathing today.
Do You Remember House? shows how house audiences deliberately crossed barriers of race,
sexuality and class as they developed rooted, yet progressive, cultural traditions in
dialogue with the musics DJs and producers. It also interrogates the ways that the
performance and entrepreneurial cultures of house, and its parent cultures, such as those
of the blues, jazz, r&b, rock, soul, funk and disco, have evolved in tandem with the
commercial cultures of Chicagos record stores, independent music distributors and radio
stations.
A central piece of my research with Honey Pot involves interpreting the collectives
community mapping and dance workshops, as well as the collected maps, memory
worksheets, and other ephemera curated and created within them. We are using the
Mapping Arts Project platform to add memory maps, ephemera, and stories collected at
workshops to a robust and evolving digital map of Chicago's social cultures. We hope this
online map will be a teaching tool for scholars, artists and everyday house people, and that
it will allow diverse users to share in, and contribute to, the documenting of house history.
As I began thinking about what I would say here tonight, I decided that the public,
collective, and open-ended digital maps that Honey Pot is envisioning become even more

impactful if one understands just a bit about the history of map-making in Western Europe
and the United States.
So let us begin with cartography, or the science of map-making, a technique used for
drawing political boundaries and assembling large, geographically-dispersed populations,
and one of the modern states most compelling tools of domination.
SLIDE 3:
LEFT - Map of Southern Africa 1505 showing landing places of Portuguese
Empire
RIGHT - Map of Southern Africa 1885 showing nascent political boundaries
of European empires
By the middle of the 18th century, maps had already become indispensible tools in the
colonial project. Knowledge about new worlds or at least those new to western
European explorers was no longer limited to topographical surveys and descriptions of
natural and human resources, as it was in the 16th century, but centered on scientific
inventories, classifications and interpretations of data. (Escolar 65)
Looking back to this change, we can see that science and imperialism were part of the same
project: By converting what had been verbal, statistical and graphic systems for recording
information into seemingly value-neutral tools for gathering, inventorying and
representing it, 18th century colonial maps made it easier for explorers to exploit controlled
areas and people.
The development of the idea of science as a rational, a-political endeavor didnt sever
cartography from politics, but hid the connection, making maps into scientific documents
rather than the political tools they had always been and continued to be.

SLIDE 4: 1775 Map of British and French Dominions in North America by John
Mitchell
From the dawn of the American colonial project, patriotism and manifest destiny were tied
to territorial expansion of the state, and thus, to cartography. In the early 19th century, the
function map-making fell under the purview of the armys Topographer Engineers Corp.
SLIDE 5: 1867 Map of Puget Sound with hydrological info by Benjamin Peirce
By 1863 the corp was using hydrological surveys to see what kind of water resources were
available in newly explored areas of the west, as well as trigonometric triangulation and
astronomical calculations to determine more precise political boundaries. In 1879 the
corps was transferred to the war department and the national American Geological Survey
was set up to plan expansion to the far west. (72) It shouldnt come as a surprise that
military functions were bound up with American map-making. To control and domesticate
the indigenous people and places of the American west, it was necessary to first create
detailed, descriptive inventories of them.
I am not a specialist and most of what I know here Ive learned from the Argentine
geographer Marcelo Escolar. My point in going through all these old maps is to help us
understand why we believe so deeply in maps, why we place such faith in them. As we flash
forward to Chicago, circa the late 19th century, and the beginning of the Great Black
Migrations, we can better understand the way that map-making masquerades as
culturally neutral, as just a bureaucratic function rather than a deeply ideological project.
SLIDE 6:
RIGHT - Map of Chicago and Vicinity, 1900 by Charles Vohler
LEFT - Chicago Transit Map, 1995

When one thinks of famous Chicago maps, the CTA line comes to mind, as do early maps of
Chicago railroads, the primary means by which rural Southern migrants made their way to
the City.
One of my favorite maps, one that helps me understand the City of Chicago and the Great
Migration that shaped it, doesnt even show Chicago:
SLIDE 7: Southern Distribution of Chicago Defender by James Grossman for the
Newberry Library
This map, published in 2004 by the Newberry Library and authored by James Grossman,
shows not only the density of southern Black populations, but also the circulation of the
Chicago Defender. The Defender played a huge role in advertising the appeal of The Black
Metropolis, especially, as we can see here, to those living in the Mississippi Delta.
SLIDE 8:
LEFT - Great Migration Map, ca. 2000
RIGHT Illinois Central Railroad Map, 1967
To understand Chicago culture, it helps to know that it has been strongly defined by
migrants specifically from the delta, who used the lines of the Illinois Central Railroad to
leave their homes in Arkansas and Mississippi and come north. The map on the left is very
general the type of thing you might find in a high school text book - and the one on the
right is almost too cluttered to read. Even so, they provide useful graphic information
pertaining to the northward migration patterns tied to specific rail lines.
Once African American migrants arrived in the urban north, their lives were bound to the
dense geographies of segregated inner-city slums, and later in more expansive, though still
quite contained, Black belts. In the early 20th century, the Black Belt served all the functions

of the city in a microcosm for Black Chicagoans. It also became the de facto site of the Citys
Stroll, a zone that served simultaneously as ground zero for Black cultural
entrepreneurship, and a space of escape and fantasy for whites.
SLIDE 9: Map of Chicago Vice Districts, Mumford 1997
As you can see from this somewhat limited map created by cultural historian Kevin
Mumford as a visual aid in his book Interzones, Chicagos vice districts, which featured
night clubbing, commercial sex, and gambling, moved progressively southward, with the
1910-1930 Bright Lights Area abutting 35th street. As Mumford explains, this movement
was in part caused by the rise of moral reform movements in Chicago during the early 20th
century. White reformers did their best to eradicate vice from northside neigbhorhoods
like Towertown, but this mostly served to push the Citys illicit trades further south into the
Black Belt.
SLIDE 10: Map of Chicago Slumming Districts, Heap 2010
This second vice map used by historian Chad Heap in his book Slumming better represents
Chicagos scale, and includes some different descriptive neighborhood designations, such
as Jewish Ghetto, Little Italy, New Chinatown and The Black Belt, to help orient his
readership to the spatial segregation of Blacks as well as non-white ethnic minorities in the
City. Heap represents rail lines, and specific points of interest related to travel and
transportation, highlighting the ways that the white cultural consumers that are the
primary subjects of his analysis got to and from nonwhite slumming districts.
Mumford and Heap use their maps to locate the boundaries of the specific spatial
phenomena they are examining in their work, the red light districts on the borders

between Black and white neighborhoods and the slumming districts of early 20th century
Chicago, respectively. They created these maps to help describe and visualize spatial
contours that were never delineated formally by administrative cartographers in Chicago.
Can you imagine if Chicagos boosters published maps for folks interested in gambling,
prostitution and other illicit pleasures?
SLIDE 11: Chicago Daily Tribune Map of 1919 Chicago Race Riot
Scholars and journalists of Chicago history have also attended to the spatial distribution of
violence in segregated spaces using specific flashpoints, such as the race riots of 1919. The
Chicago Daily Tribune published this map depicting clashes that took place in the wave of
white terror following the murder of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who was stoned to
death after his raft floated into the white section of the 29th street beach.
Chicago historians often use the riots of 1919 to mark a tipping point in the Citys race
relations, the moment at which such a critical mass of Black migrants had arrived in the
City that its white population felt compelled to attack and maim them. It is important to
examine the way that the event is both represented textually, in administrative reports
such as 1923s The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot and
visually. Think about how a map like this hails a reading audience differently than an image
like this:
SLIDE 12: Chicago Race Riot Image
According to Northwestern Universitys homicide in Chicago project, 23 of the 38 people
killed during the weekend of riots in the summer of 1919 were Black men and boys. Of the
537 injured, 342 were Black.

Thats 60 percent of the dead and 63% of the injured. So while the Tribune map writes the
history of the riot in geographic space, it actually covers over the human costs.
SLIDE 13: Chicago Race Riot Image with Statistics
Photographs, like maps, have been bound up in the evolution of dispassionate scientific
discourses; but unlike maps, they tend to reveal rather than cover over histories of violence.
While the map from the Tribune turns sites of violent terrorism into miniscule icons in
space, the photograph of a lifeless Black body, and the white men defiling it, carries a
different sort of emotional weight.
SLIDE 14: HOLC Residential Security Map of Chicago
In 1935, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created another map that might be
familiar to those studying the experiences of Black Chicagoans. This map of Chicago was
the single most important document used by mortgage lenders to discriminate against non-
white lenders who sought federally insured mortgages. The HOLC could have saved itself
the trouble if it had just re-published this census map:
SLIDE 15: Map census tracts, Negro Population, 1934
By showing the prevalence of Black residents to mortgage lenders, this map would have
accomplished an almost identical task as the one produced by the Home Owners Loan
Corporation.
SLIDE 16:

LEFT - HOLC Detail

RIGHT Census Detail

As you can see here, the area on the left in red that indicates the neighborhoods least
eligible for federally-insured loans is nearly identical to the area populated most by Black

residents, shaded darkest on the right. By using the density of Black residents, rather than
the financial fitness of individuals, to determine whether those living in a particular
neighborhood would be eligible to receive a federally insured mortgage, the HOLC map set
the terms for nearly four decades of legally sanctioned racial segregation in Chicago.
Mortage lenders working in collusion with real estate agents didnt cause Chicagos hyper-
segregation, however. There are bigoted, or cowardly, people behind these faceless
institutions, as well as racist homeowner groups, who fought, often with fire and bullets, to
maintain the segregated status quo.
SLIDE 17:
LEFT: Honey Pot Mapping Sessions, 2014
RIGHT: Chicago House Music Venues, Music Venues, and Recording Industry
Sites ARCGis Map, Salkind 2013
There are countless maps I could show you to illustrate just how much mapping has
changed over the past several decades. Much in the same ways that improvements in
magnetic tape technology, the production of 12 vinyl singles, and digital sampling
democratized the production of music for house artists; free, web-based digital mapping
tools have made it easier than ever for community-based organizations to narrate their
own spatial histories using maps. These new collaboratively, and collectively, devised maps
are more than ever connected to a variety of perspectives and stories about space, place
and everyday people.
I think mapping nerds like the ladies of Honey Pot and me (and I use that term lovingly)
feel as though the ground has shifted since the advent of Google Maps in particular. While
ARCGis software, which I used to create this crude map on the right, has been in circulation

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on University campuses and in planning departments since the early 1980s, it wasnt until
the advent of simple, accessible, web-based tools in 2005 that mapping came to feel truly
democratized.
Canadian geographer Sbastien Caquard says we in the digitally-connected west are
undergoing a critical turn in cartography that has had two dramatic effects on the links
between the maps we make and the narratives we tell. This turn has exposed the
metanarratives embedded in maps, the stories and ideologies that maps have historically
covered over, and it has made mapping into a compelling storytelling form in and of itself
(Caquard 2013, 136).
Since January of this year, I have been working as a High Concept Labs scholar in residence
with Honey Pot to develop data representing sites and stories of Chicagos social cultures.
By not just talking about or mapping house culture in isolation, we emphasize the ways
that the house era is part of a 100+ year process of cultural evolution. To date, we have
collected the names and locations of over 350 sites of cultural memory in Chicago, and are
off to a great start figuring out exactly when they were in operation, who patronized them,
what artists performed within them and what entities promoted them. This work is of great
political importance in terms of representing the wide spread of Chicagos vibrant social
cultures, and the wide variety of people who have sustained them.
While we love the ease and accessibility of google maps, indeed the base maps are set up
with the idea that stories will be shared on top of them, we agreed that we wanted more
functionality in our mapping tool, and that we wanted something set up to tell the stories of
artists, creative entrepreneurs, and audiences.

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SLIDE 18: Mapping Arts Main Page

We settled several months ago on The Mapping Arts Project as a host site for the archive
that we developed at monthly mapping sessions held here at MANA Contemporary during
this past spring.
Developed by Lara Stein Pardo, a multi-media artist and anthropologist, The Mapping Arts
engine was conceived of to share and analyze the archive she had developed during her
dissertation research on immigrant artist communities in Miami. The site adapts the look
and feel of google maps, indeed it runs on the open source google maps software and a
wordpress framework and builds in a variety of search functions, data comparison tools
and other options. With Mapping Arts, we can visualize data depicting Chicago social
cultures across space and time, tag this data to make it easier to find, and connect it to
various types of media. This will not only allow us to see more details related to Chicago
social cultures, it will allow us to interpret their connections in new ways.
SLIDE 19: ARCGis Near South Side Inset
For example, mapping has allowed us to see the ways that the independent soul industry,
which had declined in the decade prior to the rise of house, overlaps spatially with house
music venues. When combined with stories, like those of seminal house promoter Robert
Williams, we can begin to see that a place like Jerry Butlers songwriters studio, at 14th and
Michigan, remained a space of Black musical creativity long after it shuttered its doors.
SLIDE 20: Desi Arnaz Page

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Mapping Arts works for us because it is set up to foreground stories, media, and the
multiple ways that artists and audiences think about space and community-making. In the
first mapping subsite, created from Stein-Pardos Miami archive, users can browse and
search using locations, such as clubs, or the featured artists themselves. So if you want to
know about all the places Pardo found that were connected to the actor Desi Arnaz, you
could start with his artist page. If you want to know who performed at The Beachcomber
Motel, you can go to its page:
SLIDE 21: Beach Comber Hotel
Stories are the connective threads between the various sites and artists on the Mapping
Arts site. So an artists page is populated by spatially situated narratives, marked on the
map with colors indicating what type of artistic practice was taking place in each story, and
the page of each space lists all the stories related to it, as well as the artists featured in
these stories. Additionally, the Mapping Arts site enables users to connect digital artifacts
to these stories and sites, provided that they are either in the public domain or belong to
the contributor.
Mapping Arts is a great template, but there is quite a bit of tweaking we need to do to make
it work for us. Im excited to announce, if you havent already heard, that Honey Pot
Performance has been awarded a grant from Chicagos Propeller Fund to pay for the online
build-out. We are going to spend the next months working with the Mapping Arts
developers at Blackbird Media in St. Louis so that our Chicago subsite will be able to feature
links to audio clips and video, as well as other media-rich content like artist timelines.
SLIDE 22: Mapping Arts Submission site

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Creating the mapping site is not just about repeating what has already been done in terms
of archiving house culture, it is about expanding that archive exponentially. Because the
site is set up to receive submissions, it will, like the mapping workshops that helped us
conceive of it, be flexible and additive. So if you have a story about being at Oak Street
Beach, you could submit it on the Oak Street Beach page. We hope a broad spectrum of
Chicagos house audiences, as well as the audiences that built the musical social cultures
that preceded house, will continue to help us flesh out the map over the years to come,
making it far more than a record of whose track went to number one in the clubs. It will be
a living archive that serves a cultural justice mission.
What do I mean by cultural justice? Im speaking about the rights of a group, be it an
ethnically bounded one, or one with integrated culinary, musical, visual, and dance
practices, such as Chicagos house nation, to articulate and define its own cultural histories,
traditions and values. Cultural critic Andrew Ross book Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural
Justice lays out some helpful ways of re-imagining popular culture as a means of
transforming the world into the one we want it to be. As Ross puts it, doing justice to
culture, pursing justice through cultural means, and seeking justice for cultural claims, is
central to this utopian project.
In house musics global circulation, the music is often imagined as though it were born in
Chicago, but nurtured to maturity in the UK and Europe. Even in Chicago, promoters, like
those who produced the Wavefront festival in 2013, place the Citys house music culture in
the past. By curating a heritage stage that relegated Chicagos living legends to a bygone
era while foregrounding the white, straight, sounds and bodies of EDM artists, Wavefront

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perpetuated cultural injustice. Thats not to say that it wasnt a good party, but it is
worrisome that folks selling house music, even in Chicago, dont see how they as producers
and curators have a hand in minimizing empowering histories.
I cant blame my students, and the other cultural historians for reacting with surprise when
I tell them house is part of a complex set of cultural practices in Chicago, born from the
worlds of queer and straight people of color, many of them teenagers, in the citys post-
industrial loft spaces. The stories just arent visible to folks who dont know where to look;
indeed they are often made invisible by those who want to sell what they believe is a
market-friendly version of house.
In addition to democratizing and diversifying the types of stories that become part of the
house music archive, the Mapping Arts Chicago site will work in tandem with Juke Cry Hand
Clap to write Black joy on the Citys landscape. It will be a persistent visual response to the
countless maps speaking only to segregation, gun violence and structural inequality.
SLIDE 23: Mapping Workshop Images/HPP
The ethnographic work Ive done over the past year with Honey Pot helped me to develop
invaluable perspectives on the ways that mapping is a kind of dance a way of inscribing
bodies in space where one might not expect to find them. Looking from above, with a birds
eye view, what can we say about Chicago social cultures now that we might not have been
able to articulate as clearly before? For one, they are in constant motion. They take place in
precarious spaces that often close and disappear because of economic marginality,
disinvestment, and disproportionately severe policing and regulation.

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House dancers have figuratively danced across the landscape of this City to escape scrutiny.
And they continue do so.
Ill end by quoting dance scholar Takiyah Nur Amin, who spoke this past April at
Northwesterns The Black Body as Archive symposium. Amin called Black dance an
embodied retelling of collective memories. Quoting Alvin Aileys invocation of blood
memories, she celebrated the ways that dance activates, archives, and re-assembles ways
of knowing against the brutalities of white supremacy and global capitalism. I hope you will
join me and Honey Pot in this endeavor, on the dance floor and via our online map, which
we hope to launch in a pilot phase this coming Spring.
Now Id love to open things up for your questions, comments and ideas. This is, after all, a
collective process. Once weve spent some time in conversation, there will hopefully still be
some time to contribute your own memories to the mapping project prior to the start of the
show. Thank you to Honey Pot, MANA and HCL for giving me this platform, and thank you
for your interest and attention.