Author Archive | Frances Archer

Growing Community in Chicago

Back in May I wrote a post about the Peterson Garden Project, then in its early planning stages. Modeled on the Victory Gardens of the 1940s, the community garden is located in an empty lot at the southwest corner of Peterson and Campbell in the West Ridge neighborhood on the Far North Side of Chicago, a […]

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Chicago’s Not So Hidden Gem

If I lived in a charming, historically signficant Chicago neighborhood like the Villa, I’d keep it a secret. Not so with the current group of Villa residents. Celebrating their neighborhood’s 100th anniversary in 2007 led to the creation of a public tour that reveals the delightful architecture of this Prairie School-influenced neighborhood. Led by a […]

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Girl on a Chicago Porch

This is young Florence Gantwerker, who was Mrs. Saper to me when I lived on North Central Park Avenue back in the sixties and early seventies. If you read my recent post you’ll know she was undoubtably photographed in Chicago–the back porch gives it away. You may also recognize the left-hand edge of the National sign over a […]

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Of Porches and Backyards in Chicago

Ever since I read about vernacular photography in a friend’s blog, I’ve been thinking about my old family photographs. Most have purely personal significance. But those taken in our backyard during the late fifties and early sixties capture scenes that were, and still are, commonplace all over Chicago–and nowhere else. I’m writing, of course, of […]

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Cubs Heaven

The ivy is from Wrigley Field. So are the box seats. Ditto the dugout bench. Ditto the sod. Ditto the pavers. It doesn’t get more real, unless you’re actually at Wrigley Field. But I wasn’t. I was on a walking tour of the Bohemian National Cemetery. When you’re walking past rows of monuments in sombre grays and […]

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What we remember

As regular readers of this blog know, I grew up in Chicago on North Central Park Avenue across from the grounds of the Municipal TB Sanitarium. Entirely hidden by a border of towering trees and overgrown shrubs, the TB Sanitarium was such a mysterious place I barely noticed the other large, fenced-in parcel of land in the neighborhood. The signs on […]

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A Garden Grows in Chicago

It’s been a long time since anyone has seen a community garden on the corner of Peterson and Campbell avenues. Nearly seventy years, in fact. For four growing seasons, 1942 to 1945, this corner was part of a WWII victory garden. Descendants of horticulturalist Pehr S. Peterson owned the lot and donated use of it […]

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