In one respect, Colin Fisher's study, Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago, is reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic The Jungle. Both books begin by relaying stories about an average immigrant worker from Lithuania. For Sinclair, the workman provided an entrée into a now-familiar tale of shop floor toil, ethnic saloons, and rancid city spaces. Fisher, in contrast, uses a Lithuanian laborer's story to situate working-class urbanites in a place where many historians assumed they did not venture—nature. Thus, Fisher's opening recalls the scene in 1916 as a workman, whose name went unrecorded, gazed out at the sand dunes clumped along the windswept shores of Lake Michigan. The man dropped his tools, stretched out his arms, looked to the heavens, and exclaimed, “Just like Lithuania” (2).

This story highlights key points of Fisher's thesis, which challenges assumptions of some leading environmental historians. Scholars from Roderick Nash to William Cronon have presumed that while privileged Americans knew nature through leisure, the marginal experienced it mainly through work. Fisher, however, shows that working-class people also knew nature through leisure activities including athletics, fishing, hiking, camping, and picnicking. Fisher shows, moreover, that working class people cherished nature as much as their wealthier counterparts, though they imbued it with different meanings. Nature was, for marginal Chicagoans, a means to imagine their various identities, as “ethnic Americans, as Americans of African descent, as American industrial workers, and as members of a revolutionary international proletariat” (2).

Fisher develops these arguments in five thematic chapters. The first shows where Chicagoans found nature, and the next four examine the cultures of nature developed by immigrants, ethnic youth, African Americans, and organized labor.

One of the most fascinating characters in Urban Green is Leonard Dubkin, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who used a typewriter given to him by Hull House founder Jane Addams to become an urban nature writer. Drawing on Dubkin's writings, Fisher shows that working-class people found nature in sidewalk cracks, overgrown lots, private ethnic parks, and on the muddy waterfront.

Nature was even more conspicuous in the Cook County Forest Preserve and in Chicago's English-style pastoral parks designed by landscape architects such as Jens Jensen and Frederick Law Olmsted. “Once through the gates of parks,” Fisher notes, “immigrants sometimes used landscapes to remember (and even vicariously visit) preindustrial rural homelands …” (40). After World War I, Bohemians, for instance, placed soils from sacred landscapes in Czechoslovakia into an urn in Chicago's Pilsen Park. The National Alliance of Bohemian Catholics urged their countrymen to visit, to “remember the land of our birth and bear in mind that we are a transatlantic branch of the brave and now liberated Czechoslovak nation” (59).

Young people created a distinctly American urban youth culture in Chicago's green spaces. Anglo-American reformers and ethnic leaders alike pushed the children of immigrants to spend their leisure time in parks and playgrounds learning teamwork and improving their health. Urban youth nonetheless appropriated green spaces for unsanctioned activities like smoking, gambling, kissing, and copulating. Parks, Fisher notes, became turf for gangs like the Irish Hamburg Athletic Club whose members, including future mayor Richard J. Daley, organized sport and social events in Gaelic Park. Club members also policed the park, banning African Americans and youth from certain neighborhoods.

Members of the Hamburg Club played a leading role in Chicago's deadly 1919 race riots, attacking African Americans after a dispute over the use of a city beach. Even though whites drove African Americans from many green spaces with violence and intimidation, residents of Chicago's “black metropolis” nonetheless forged connections with nature. In “black” city spaces like Washington Park and rural resorts like Michigan's Idlewild, African Americans camped, fished, swam, and played sports. They also “imagined themselves as a people with a collective past that extended back to African soil” by holding “Egyptian pageants” and “Chautauqua-style lectures” on black music, poetry, and history (109).

Organized labor, meanwhile, used green spaces to promote solidarity. Labor leaders rallied the rank and file at picnics in city parks and retreats in hinterland resorts. Workers' desire to spend time in nature was, moreover, a key goal of unionism and of Chicago's storied eight-hour movement in particular. As several thousand striking workers sang on May 1, 1886, “We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers…. eight hours for what we will!” (124).

Urban Green is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the nature found in great metropolises, including Matthew Gandy and Robert Gottlieb's Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City and Matthew Kingle's Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle.Footnote ¹ Fisher convincingly shows that working-class Chicagoans enjoyed leisure in nature. As Fisher describes it, nature was both a physical thing and a container for human ideas and aspirations.

Fisher's thematic approach allows for clear exposition of how his subjects experienced nature and used it to construct their identities. Yet, it sometimes seems that Urban Green places its subjects in silos, limiting comparative analysis. Fisher notes, for instance, that African Americans and ethnic Europeans both used nature to imagine distinctive racial and ethnic identities while, at the same time, labor leaders used it to foster solidarity. How did these exclusive and inclusive identities work alongside one another?

Urban Green foregoes analysis of larger, citywide discussions about nature. It does not, for example, discuss Daniel Burnham's iconic 1909 Plan of Chicago, which called for the rationalization and beautification of the entire region. There would, it seems, be some fruitful avenues of inquiry here. Burnham argued that building parks and civic spaces would Americanize immigrants and forestall class conflict. What did working class people think of his vision? How did they shape the Plan's implementation? That Fisher's study leaves some big questions unanswered is largely a mark of the freshness of his topic. Urban Green is, after all, at the vanguard of studies to examine Progressive Era working class people not in the usual places—taverns, fetid slums, and blood-splattered packinghouses—but in nature.