The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
Consequently, the city was never quite sure how to commemorate the event. Huebner traces the various attempts. A statue of a cop, intended to symbolize not just the seven officers killed at Haymarket but also every other Chicago cop who had died in the line of duty, was installed at the site of the event in 1889, but it was widely abused by labor sympathizers (to put it kindly; it has the dubious distinction of being the most-bombed statue in Chicago history). Today it stands in front of police headquarters in Bronzeville, a more natural home. There’s a memorial to the eight men convicted in the trial, but it’s not at the site; instead, it’s at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park where seven of them are buried. Huebner described it as “less a publicly accessible historical monument than a decorative grave obelisk.”
