Lost Communities of Chicago - Little Sicily "Little Hell" Neighborhood

Earlier: Swede Town Neighborhood.
Later: Cabrini-Green Neighborhood.

The name “Little Hell” was derived from the large gas house that was located at Crosby and Hobbie streets, whose nighttime flames lit the skies at night. The roaring thunder of the furnaces could be heard for blocks as coal was poured into the ovens and moistened with water from the Chicago River to create gas that was used for heating, cooking and lighting. Enormous tanks stored the gas during the day.

The Little Hell neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was bounded by La Salle Street on the east, Division Street on the North, Chicago Avenue on the South and the Chicago River to the west. Between the 1880s and 1930, Chicagoans referred to the heart of the Little Hell slum as “Death Corner,” a wholly understandable moniker given that the intersection of West Oak Street and Milton Avenue (Milton Avenue changed names to Cleveland Avenue in 1909) was the scene of well over 100 unsolved murders. 

The North Side's first great gangster, Dion O'Banion, was a product of this district. Since most of the vice districts in Chicago were on the South and West sides of the city, this area was more or less ignored for many years in the city's fight against crime. It is said that, in the first 51 days of 1906, the police made over 900 arrests.

For two decades, Chicago police remained “hampered at every turn by the silence of the Italian colony” — a reference to the large Italian-American population in the neighborhood. 

Typically, as one newspaper story put it, victims would be “murdered before an audience that vanished with the last pistol flash, much as a loon dives beneath the sheltering water just at the moment the hunter’s gun spits out its flame and shot.” Death Corner, as the district’s “central gathering place,” had gained the “international reputation of being the site of more murders than any other territory of equal area in the world.” 

By the early 1920s, murders in Little Hell continued at the rate of more than 30 per year — more than one-third of the city’s total, although Italians made up only five percent of the population. By this point, many Death Corner victims were casualties of the Prohibition-era “alcohol rivalries” between the bootlegging gangs of Giuseppe “Joe” Aiello and the infamous  Al Capone “Scarface,” leader of Chicago’s most powerful mob. As notorious as Cabrini-Green would become, the violence of Little Hell may well have been worse.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

Lost Towns of Illinois - New Philadelphia, Illinois.

New Philadelphia, Illinois was located near the city of Barry, in Pike County. Founded in 1836, it was the first town in the United States platted and registered by a Negro before the American Civil War. The founder Free Frank McWorter was a former slave who was able to save money from work and his own business to purchase the freedom of his wife, himself and 13 members of his family in Kentucky.

The story of Frank McWorter and New Philadelphia is one of daring, hard work, luck, and shrewd family leadership.

Born a slave in South Carolina in 1777, Frank McWorter moved to Kentucky with his owner in 1795. He married Lucy, a slave from a nearby farm, in 1799. Later allowed to hire out his own time, McWorter engaged in a number of enterprises, notably a saltpeter works, that enabled him to buy his wife’s freedom in 1817 and his own in 1819.

Frank and Lucy McWorter and four of their children left Kentucky for Illinois in 1830, the year the Thomas Lincoln family, with son Abraham, moved to Illinois from Indiana. McWorter bought a farm in Pike County’s Hadley Township and platted the town of New Philadelphia in 1836. The original town plan consisted of 144 lots in a 12 x 12 square, including 22 crisscrossing named streets. McWorter sold the lots.

The plat for the streets and town lots as laid out by Frank McWorter in the Pike County Deed records in 1836.

The town was integrated, albeit with some typical 19th-century segregated facilities, such as cemeteries. There was one integrated public school.

McWorter promoted New Philadelphia strenuously, and engaged in other enterprises, managing to buy the freedom of at least sixteen family members from Kentucky. The town itself became a racially integrated community long before the Civil War, the 1850 and subsequent U.S. Census data showing black and white families living there. 

Frank McWorter lived there for the remainder of his life in New Philadelphia, dying in 1854. A son, Solomon, assumed family leadership. Before the Civil War, New Philadelphia had become one of the stations along the Underground Railroad for shepherding escaped slaves to Canada. With emancipation, more settlers arrived in New Philadelphia. Its population peaked at close to 160 shortly after 1865.

In 1869, the Hannibal and Naples Railroad was built. It bypassed the town on the north; a station was built in nearby Barry, soon to be followed by transit and commerce. New Philadelphia rapidly declined in population thereafter. A small number of residents turned to farming a portion of the former town site. Such changes and abandonment were not unusual for U.S. small towns in the late 19th century, especially those bypassed by changing transportation facilities.

In 1885 a portion of the town was legally dissolved. It reverted to farmland. Modern archaeological studies have indicated the area was inhabited through the 1920s. By the late 20th century, all vestiges of New Philadelphia had vanished save fragments of glass and pottery, and traces of the town's gravel streets.

The town site was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on August 11, 2005; subsequently, New Philadelphia Town Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009 because of the significance of its history and archaeology.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Note: Philadelphia, Illinois is an unincorporated community in Cass County and is located on Illinois Route 125, southeast of Virginia, Illinois. It is about 50 miles north east for where New Philadelphia, Illinois was located in Pike County.