Street Fight: A Discussion with Anne Morrissy

The Book Stall is delighted to host Anne Morrissy on Thursday, June 20 at 6:30 pm for a discussion featuring her new book, Street Fight: The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s. Working from extensive research and interviews, Ms. Morrissy vividly recreates Chicago’s Taxi Wars, bringing to print for the first time this deeply compelling but nearly forgotten story. Including a supporting cast of colorful combatants and larger-than-life Jazz Age characters, this historical account restores the deadly wars that played out on the city’s streets a century ago.

This event is free with registration. To register, please visit our website or CLICK HERE.

More About the Book: Bricks and bottles of acid through the windshield. Bullets shot from the running boards of racing cabs, passengers screaming in the backseat. Bombs exploding in garages, beneath parked cars, on the front porches of jurors’ homes. Accusations of favoritism and collusion with city leaders and law enforcement; bribery and extortion and grand jury investigations. Mysterious accidents, brutal attacks and devastating fires, leaving a trail of widows in their wake. These were Chicago’s Taxi Wars, a violent and deadly battle for supremacy of the city’s new and lucrative taxi industry during the Jazz Age.

In 1915, at the dawn of the automobile era, visionary car salesman John D. Hertz and his partner, Walden W. Shaw, founded Chicago’s Yellow Cab Company. This wildly successful venture would go on to inform and inspire the modern taxi industry as we know it today. But as the Roaring Twenties glamorized lawlessness on the city’s streets, Yellow Cab’s meteoric rise invited increasingly aggressive competitors. Cab drivers battled each other in the streets over fares, allegiances and turf claims, their skirmishes escalating from sophomoric pranks to cold-blooded murder, mass shootings, and acts of domestic terrorism.

Chicago Review of Books says, “Written like a heart racing thriller or true crime podcast, Street Fight is a fascinating look at this understudied conflict in the city’s history that combined a perfect storm of labor suppression, organized crime, government corruption, and turf warfare. Anne Morrissy’s latest is a must-read for history buffs of all kinds.”

More About the Author: Anne Morrissy is a writer and magazine editor with a passion for narrative history. Her first book, Running the Reds: The First 100 Years of the Water Safety Patrol, 1920-2020, was published in 2019. A graduate of Kenyon College, she splits her time between Chicago and Williams Bay, Wisconsin.