This week in history: MLK Jr. takes on Chicago’s slums In February 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., who was born this week on Jan. 15, came to the aid of five families living in a slum on the West ...

In the 1850s and 1860s, Kilgubbin was often mentioned in the pages of the Tribune and other Chicago newspapers. The name became symbolic of slums where poor Irish immigrants lived in ramshackle ...

Chicago Slums and the Long Shadow of Lead Paint The U.S. homicide rate hit a 50-year low last year and violent crime hit a 40-year low in 2010, despite the terrible economy.

Of the estimated 4 billion people currently living in urban areas worldwide, perhaps as many as a billion reside in slums. As urbanization picks up, cities around the world have struggled to keep up ...

Kilgubbin won’t be found on modern-day maps of Chicago, but there once was a place known by that name — a settlement of Irish immigrants on the city’s North Side. In the 1850s and 1860s ...

Kilgubbin’s most famous moment came in August 1865, when Chicago Times reporter John M. Wing traipsed through the muddy enclave and the city’s other “squatter settlements,” which had a ...