Ezra's Bookshelf

The Lost City

by Alan Ehrenhalt · 320 pages · ~6 hrs

Society & CultureHistory

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Alan Ehrenhalt uses 1950s Chicago to explore what community meant in America before the cultural transformations of the 1960s. He focuses on three neighborhoods: the working-class parish of St. Nick's, the middle-class Bronzeville, and the commercial strip of 63rd Street. In each, he finds dense networks of association, shared norms, and accepted authority that shaped daily life. The corner store, the parish church, the ward committeeman, the school principal—these figures exercised power that residents accepted as legitimate. Ehrenhalt argues that this kind of community required trade-offs that Americans after the 1960s were no longer willing to make: accepting limits on individual choice, deferring to authority, staying put. The book is neither nostalgic nor dismissive; Ehrenhalt acknowledges that 1950s community could be suffocating and that its collapse liberated many people. But he insists that something valuable was lost along with the restrictions. The question he raises—whether community and individual freedom can coexist—remains unanswered. This is urban history as meditation on American culture, written with journalistic skill and sociological insight about a world that disappeared within living memory.

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