Why most Chicagoans once moved on a single Moving Day

Jules Schrader hired movers to help relocate herself, her husband, her dog and all of their belongings from Uptown to Edgewater. As she looked outside on the big day, she felt a wave of confusion. In the alley was not just one moving truck but several.

“I was, like, ‘Did they get the address wrong?’ ” said Schrader, 32. “‘Did we send them the wrong address?’ ”

It turned out that a few of her neighbors were moving at the same time.

Take just this one small aspect of Schrader’s experience and multiply it by tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, and you get a sense of an old Chicago tradition called Moving Day. That’s when Chicagoans would pack up and move all at the same time and often every year.

“Why everyone would want to move on one day in the calendar year is baffling,” said Paul Durica, the Chicago History Museum’s director of exhibitions. “And almost every [contemporaneous account] acknowledges that. It's, like, ‘Why have we adopted this system? It’s not at all efficient. It’s overwhelming. It’s chaotic.’ ”

Yet, from at least 1840 to the late 1940s, that’s what Chicagoans did, usually on May 1 but also on Oct. 1. The late Chicago historian Perry Duis estimated that, at one point, a third of the population changed residences annually.

Chicago wasn’t alone. Among other places, New York City and Lancaster, Penn., also had Moving Days.

How did the tradition start? And why did it end?

Moving Day’s origins uncertain

In 1865, the Chicago Tribune described Moving Day as “the same grand old crash and confusion."

“Every wagon in the city was pressed into the service,” its story said, describing packed wagons on the streets, torn-up carpets and furniture thrown into heaps, “crying children, storming fathers, bewildered mothers."

“We should like to know who it was that first inaugurated the fashion of moving on May day,” the story said. “His name should be held in everlasting loathing.”

“How Moving Day began really depends on whom you asked,” said Durica, who searched newspaper accounts to find many different explanations for the May 1 tradition. “Some people thought it had to do with seasonal change. You’re right on the cusp of summer. It makes sense. Others tied it to annual events like the ending of the school year.”

Moving Day also connected to European traditions brought to America over many decades. Scotland had Flitting Day every May 25. The Netherlands had verhuisdag — literally “moving day” — on May 1, dating to the 17th century.

England had Pack Rag Day, on May 1, when servants would gather their belongings and change employers at hiring fairs, and also Lady Day, on March 25, when debts and payments were due for many rental agreements, coinciding with the Feast of the Annunciation dating to medieval times.

Whatever the reason, Durica said, “By the middle of the 19th century, the first of May was really well established as the date in which leases would expire, and people who want to be on the move would be on the move.”

Who took part in Moving Day?

The ability to move varied based on class, race and heritage. For people of color, segregationist housing policies often limited housing options and opened people up to exploitation.

In the 1920s, some building owners would kick out white renters, raise prices and then get more rent from new Black tenants. Weeks before Moving Day 1924, the Chicago Defender described those owners as “Vampire Rent Hogs.”

“That’s a pattern,” said Elizabeth Todd-Breland, a University of Illinois Chicago history professor. “Moving Day played a role in an exploitative practice that was gaining steam as more and more Black people moved to the city.”

Practices like these “continued for a great swath of the 20th century and in some ways still continue to this day,” Todd-Breland said. “It was also the basis of things like contract-buying or blockbusting or all of these other 20th century practices of housing exploitation that were specifically targeted at Black people.”

For people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, deciding to move was often prompted by the need for a more affordable place to live and also one that was cleaner and better maintained. Many written descriptions from the era describe undesirable living conditions, like rentals with bugs, odors, leaks and drainage issues.

For wealthy Chicagoans, a desire for greater comfort and status often inspired them to take part in Moving Day.

“Moving could be very stressful for people of more limited means, as they’re kind of piling all of their belongings into this wagon, particularly in the 19th century, and hiring movers of questionable character,” Durica said. “But, for the affluent, it could almost be sort of a charming ritual.”

Who benefited from Moving Day?

Who benefited most from the chaos of Moving Day depended on the economic conditions of a particular year.

In 1865, the end of the Civil War brought increased demand in Chicago for housing. That meant landlords could jack up rents. People “had secured a new place to live, only to discover that the landlord was able to get more money for it and reneged on the agreement that they had,” Durica said.

In contrast, a great deal of new housing had been built ahead of Moving Day 1925, and the supply exceeded demand. Years like that, with plenty of options, were good for renters. And landlords who didn’t rent their places faced the risk of having yearlong vacancies. An estimated 200,000 Chicagoans moved on May 1 that year.

“Really, the only people that seem to benefit from this kind of overarching chaos were the movers,” Durica said.

Movers could charge whatever they wanted without concerns over providing high-quality service.

“What were people going to do?” Durica said. “In some cases, if people got frustrated with a moving company, the company just decided to dump their goods wherever they were even if they hadn’t reached their new home.”

The slow demise of Moving Day

Moving Day was decentralized and largely unregulated until the 20th century, when the widespread unpopularity of the tradition led to it slowly disappearing.

In response to unscrupulous moving companies, the Chicago City Council set standard moving rates in 1910, Duis wrote in his book “Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920.”

But that measure was “virtually unenforceable” because of how dispersed the moving business was, with individual crews negotiating private deals.

“People who complained found their goods deposited to the curb,” Duis wrote.

Then, in 1911, something significant happened: “The Chicago Real Estate Board went on record favoring ‘flexible leases,’ ” Duis wrote, “thus ending the May-first monopoly.”

That meant leases did not have to be 12 months long and did not have to end on April 30.

Today, the biggest spikes for moving truck rentals in Chicago are over Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, according to U-Haul, the do-it-yourself truck rental company.