
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Street Fight: The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s Hardcover – March 5, 2024
Purchase options and add-ons
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 and 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 (better remembered today for his successful foray into rental cars) 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 in Chicago and throughout the United States. 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. In the 1920s, one rival in particular ascended to pose a threat to Yellow Cab’s dominance: the Checker Taxi Company. Behind the scenes, pulling the strings at Checker, was Morris Markin, who was desperate to expand his influence even as Chicago’s gangsters attempted to wrest his control away.
Working from extensive research and interviews with descendants and experts, author Anne Morrissy vividly recreates Chicago’s Taxi Wars, bringing to print for the first time this deeply compelling but nearly forgotten story. Buffeted by a supporting cast of colorful combatants and larger-than-life Jazz Age characters — including Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Joe Kennedy, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, and Chicago mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson — Street Fight: The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s restores to history these deadly wars that played out on the city’s streets a century ago, endangering the lives of passengers and passersby, while at the same time forming the regulatory foundation that still governs cab, limo and rideshare transportation in the 21st century.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLyons Press
- Publication dateMarch 5, 2024
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
- ISBN-101493068679
- ISBN-13978-1493068678
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Morrissy’s vivid and deeply researched account of this component of post-WWI social and commercial lore will intrigue students of business history as well as all who revel in ever-colorful and often brutal Chicago stories.”
― Booklist“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.”
― Chicago Review of Books"A seminal and ground-breaking study... Extraordinary, fascinating, and offering immense appeal to readers with an interest in the history of organized crime, the history of Chicago, and automotive/transportation history, Street Fight is recommended a prized and singularly unique addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library collections."
― Midwest Book Review“Anne Morrissy’s lively new book, Street Fight: The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s, concentrates largely on a decade-plus span, from the 1910s into the 1920s, when Yellow Cab and Checker Taxi battled it out with bombs, fists, bullets, threats, and bribery for control of a booming new urban service.”
― Chicago ReaderAbout 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.
Product details
- Publisher : Lyons Press
- Publication date : March 5, 2024
- Language : English
- Print length : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1493068679
- ISBN-13 : 978-1493068678
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #863,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #65 in Mass Transit (Books)
- #398 in U.S. Immigrant History
- #473 in Automotive History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star5 star69%31%0%0%0%69%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star4 star69%31%0%0%0%31%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star3 star69%31%0%0%0%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star2 star69%31%0%0%0%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star1 star69%31%0%0%0%0%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2024Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseThis is a great overview of a part of Chicago history that is often overlooked. These events also impacted the development of the rental car industry, and unions in Chicago and the USA.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2025Format: HardcoverThis book had so much information and history not just about Chicago and taxis but also about the men behind the beginning of the business. The name that stood out to me was Hertz, yes the man whose name would become famous for car rental, actually started with a taxi service. He and his partner Walden Shaw started the Yellow Cab company. The author takes you through the idea and then how they began, she also takes you through how they had the forethought of later starting to build their cabs with their specs. That was ahead of the times for the twenties. She then goes into other cab companies that started and fought them for power but mostly Yellow Cab always won, even when Checker Cab came into business. She goes into the few shootings and some deaths because of the fights and when you get to the end it still seems that Hertz and his partner were the ones on top because they walked away before the depression hit. It is a terrific story with many different characters. There were moments when areas were repeated but I understood because of the information.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2024Format: HardcoverThe hardest part of writing a review of Street Fight is resisting the urge to repeat all the outrageous stories within it. You will not think "wow, this book should be a movie." Rather, you will think "isn't this book already a video game?" This is far less Business History and far more True Crime, down to the Goodfellas ending.
But also labor history. And urbanism. And the Great Migration. In a recent review, I poked fun at a book of historical fiction for including too many shout outs, but this is the contrasting version, where it feels like the author is touching upon the ligature of Chicago history, something that might be mostly forgotten because of how many other, conventionally bigger stories it ties in to.
One of the problems then is the criminality. There's a drinking game to be had in reading this book of 'or maybe he just had it coming, you know,' where you take a shot at every time that the author has to admit that some act of violence has at least three credible reasons why it happened, first relating to the taxi war, second relating to some other criminal act the victim was involved in, and third an acknowledgement of the casual violence of the society at the time meaning the causation could be functionally invisible for historical purposes. (I'd love to know if the bear raid on the stock was actually real or not.) The other drinking game that I suggest for the book is whenever one of the major players takes out a big ad in the paper so as to use it like their twitter account.
The author leans towards a 'regulations are written in blood' sort of message about how the chaos that we see lead to the industry changing, and that story being repeated in the so called rideshare market, but I think that there are more interesting points of overlap with that segment of things. Specifically, so much about the development of these companies relates to what their relationship was with the workers in them, both outright and as triangulated with organized labor, who are just as often feuding with a sort of independent worker as they are with capital M-management. It speaks a lot to why things happened like they did, as well as shows some of the ways that regulatory capture happens. And it is interesting to consider if some of the subtle and not-so-subtle favoritism that sometimes happened in the political establishment relative to the ideologies they favored is something that works through into the text of the book, or whether that is only reflective of the sources and so what stories there are to tell with those sources.
A simple thing that I liked is that the author takes efforts to keep the geography straight, even in situations where things have changed, so that you always have a good idea of where things are going on in Chicago, and specifically in ways that make sense to a modern mind.
My petty complaint about the book is that whomever was writing the chapter titles and sub headings seems to have been working exclusively from Lytton's Book of Automobile cliches, and they are as cloying as they are uninformative. I worry that this ends up shelved in quirky history out of an uncertainty of where it should go, where it has some bang up stories. But all of that is not really why the book is so interesting, and I think that the author gets that. So even if not for everyone, this book will deeply satisfy a wide spectrum of interests.
Thanks to the author, Anne Morrissy, and the publisher, Globe Pequot Press, for making the ARC available to me.