Author Archive | Frances Archer

Smelt Fishing in Chicago

Unlike Richard Brautigan, who learned about trout fishing in America as a child, I was an adult when I first heard about smelt fishing in Chicago. It was 1979, a spring evening of course, and I was walking along the bike path north of Irving Park Road. At dusk I arrived at what looked like […]

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Sweden_Shop

Touched By Chicago's Swedish History

There used to be a saying, “The Swedes built Chicago.”   Looking around the city today, however, you wouldn’t know Swedish immigrants made up Chicago’s fifth largest foreign-born group until 1960. The Swedish-born population peaked at 70,000 in 1930 and declined to just over 7,000 in 1970. Various neighborhoods once were predominantly Swedish. Around 1870 there was a “Swede Town” on the Near […]

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Välkommen to My Old Neighborhood

A few weeks ago I told you I grew up in what amounted to a shtetl, an Old World Jewish town, on Chicago’s Far North Side. That’s not quite the whole story. A single point of origin never is the whole story for one of the city’s ever-evolving ethnic neighborhoods. In the sixties my neighborhood, Hollywood Park, was […]

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sandwiches

Another Taste of Chicago

  Recently I discovered Chicago now has a public food market at the suburban concourse of the Ogilvie Transportation Center, the block bordered by Clinton, Canal, Washington and Randolph. While the Chicago French Market is no Reading Terminal Market and not even the L.A. Central Market, it’s ours, it’s wonderful and it’s open seven six days a week. […]

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A Taste of Philadelphia

Sometimes we Chicagoans have to travel out of town and although no city can compare to home, we do manage to enjoy ourselves. When we were in Philadelphia a few weeks ago I asked my cousin Howard Shapiro, Philadelphia Inquirer theater critic, where we should have lunch. He directed us to Reading Terminal Market. What luck. It […]

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Cardenal

Baseball’s Been Bery Bery Good to Me

I am dreading Opening Day. I haven’t lost my eternal optimism but this will be the first baseball season my father won’t be calling me to ask,  “What time are the Cubs playing?” or “Are the Sox playing tonight?” or “What station for the Cubs game?” or  “Did you see last night’s game?” Before cable, […]

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The Artist and the Restorer

Recently I heard Richard Cahan and Michael Williams discuss their new book about Chicago artist Edgar Miller and his miraculous transformation of old homes. Actually, two miracles occurred, according to Cahan. The first was Miller created this body of work. The second is the work not only still exists, it’s as beautiful as ever. The […]

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Mom and Pop–Part Two

I wrote a post called Mom and Pop, about the business district that ran through the Hollywood Park neighborhood on Chicago’s far north side, and I called it a small town Main Street. I had no idea. It wasn’t a small town, it was practically a shtetl, an old world town with a large Jewish population. As it […]

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Mom and Pop

During the 1960s, on the three blocks of Bryn Mawr Avenue (5600 North) between Kedzie (3200 West) and Bernard (approximately 3430 West) avenues there were two gas stations; an Orthodox synagogue, or shul; an elementary school (Peterson–kindergarten through eighth grade, and still there); Irv’s Barber Shop; a Grocerland and a Jewel Foods that later became […]

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