The Night Shift Chicago (aka: The Night Shift 92nd Street)

Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt

B.J.O. Nordfeldt uses etching to depict the architectural skyline of South Chicago in 1911. As far as you can see the great steel mills belch forth smoke and flame from their tall chimneys. A train, used to haul both the raw ore and finished product, is in the foreground. In the lower right foreground a line of people, many with umbrellas, march to their night shift jobs in the mills, which ran 24 hours a day.

Nordfeldt exhibited an impression of this print at the 1912 Chicago Society of Etchers Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was also exhibited in the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where he won a silver medal for his printmaking.

Illinois Steel (by then also known as Federal Steel, a holding company created by Chicago lawyer Elbert H. Gary in 1898) became part of the giant entity U.S. Steel, the world's largest entity, engineered by banker J.P. Morgan. U.S. Steel closed some of the Chicago-area mills, but the South Works—which employed about 11,000 people in 1910—stood as one of its largest plants.