A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs

Uncovers how Chicago's kitchenette apartments shaped housing, race, and urban life in the twentieth century

During the twentieth century’s Great Migration, kitchenette apartments served as the primary homes for Black migrants to Chicago. These small one- and two-room units were often illegally converted from larger apartments and were concentrated on the city’s densely populated, segregated South Side. Typically featuring a communal hallway bathroom, a cooktop tucked into a closet, chronic overcrowding, and exploitative rents, kitchenettes gained widespread fame and notoriety in news reports, housing code campaigns, and the works of celebrated Black artists including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. They also preceded and paved the way for Chicago’s notorious public housing projects.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs offers the first book-length cultural analysis of the kitchenette within Chicago’s history of housing, race, and urban life. Both materially and symbolically significant, the kitchenette existed at the nexus of the Great Migration and the Great Depression, of housing precarity and domestic innovation, of racial capitalism and racial uplift. Drawing on a rich archive of sources from housing court records and documentary photographs to literature, journalism, and visual art, Amani Morrison reveals how Bronzeville’s kitchenettes served residents, landlords, artists, and institutions, accommodating overlapping but often divergent needs.

Through her theory of “Black spatial affordances,” Morrison illuminates how Black Chicagoans transformed constraint into creativity. Blending history, architecture, and cultural analysis, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs recasts the kitchenette as central to Chicago’s urban modernity and to the making of Black everyday life.