F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead by the time this line appeared in his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon: “There are no second acts in American lives.”
His posthumous book was published in 1941, a year that Chicago’s South and Southwest suburbs were very much alive.
Chicago’s South Side steel mills were vibrant, as were the surrounding factories. The nation’s rail lines converged at the city’s Near South Side, and ships were carrying cargo from the Great Lakes down the canals dug to the Mississippi River.
These veins of prosperity spread to the South and Southwest suburbs, collectively known as Chicago Southland…Please click here to read John T. Slania’s story in the Daily Herald Business Ledger.