Hilda's Walk Down Shmatte Row

Join tour guide Matthew Schlerf for a one-of-a-kind tour of downtown Chicago following the exact footsteps of Hilda Satt Polachek, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant and garment worker. Participants will follow Hilda's walk from the day she was fired and radicalized as a labor activist in 1900, as outlined in her autobiography I Came A Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. The tour will cover the former Maxwell Street ghetto on the Near West Side, down shmatte row in today's South Loop, up State Street into the heart of Chicago's retail industry, then back across the river to the Haymarket Memorial, the Hull-House Museum and concluding at Manny's Deli. The tour will focus on Hilda's first-hand accounts of the Maxwell Street ghetto, Chicago's garment industry and the 1910 Chicago Garment Strike, Jewish social and labor reforms during the Progressive Era, Jane Addams and the Hull-House settlement, and comparisons to migrant stories…