For years I’ve had a memory–really, more of an image–that made no sense to me. I remember going to a meeting with my best friend in the spring of 1970 before we graduated from eighth grade. Older girls, all strangers to me, were in charge. Some wore jackets with a club name stitched on the […]
Lazar wanted to relocate his business, Lazar’s Kosher Sausage Factory–a business he started in 1913 on the 3600 block of Roosevelt Road–to a large plot of land he owned on the east side of Kedzie, south of Bryn Mawr Avenue. The neighbors literally raised a stink about Lazar’s proposed move.
They filled in the goldfish pond before I was born. Removed the rock walk, pergolas, and stone pillars marking entrances to the park. Never built the sunken garden and the horseshoe, handball and volleyball courts. Hollywood Park had the misfortune of coming into existence during the Great Depression and growing up during World War Two.
If I haven’t yet convinced you Hollywood Park was the best thing that could happen to a Chicago kid during the 1950s and ’60s, this photograph should do the trick. We had, right in our neighborhood, the Hollywood Kiddieland amusement park.
In July 1968 Oscar Brotman made a triumphant return to Hollywood Park with the opening of the 1,440-seat Lincoln Village Theater, located in the Lincoln Village Shopping Center about two blocks upriver from Brotman’s shuttered and soon-to-be-demolished Tower Cabana Club.
His name was Oscar A. Brotman (1916-1994), and not just once but twice he brought his vision of glitz and glamour to the Hollywood Park neighborhood. Nothing remains of the Tower Cabana Club and Lincoln Village Theatre, but in their glory days Brotman’s venues were the swankiest spots around. Setting the stage for fun in the sun […]
If you been reading my blog, you’ve heard me recall the good old days of the business district along Bryn Mawr Avenue in Hollywood Park. This weekend that street will show it’s still alive and kickin’ with the first ever North Park Art Walk. Along Bryn Mawr and Kedzie, in a warehouse, in vacant storefronts […]
This survey of course proves nothing. The sampling was way too small, the subject way too complex. I can’t tell you why Hollywood Park failed to achieve the ranks of legendary Chicago neighborhoods, or why it sometimes seems to be on the verge of being swallowed up by North Park.
There was no shortage of memorable landmarks in the Hollywood Park of my childhood. When I asked 10 former Hollywood Park residents to name the neighborhood landmarks, everyone listed at least three and nearly everyone listed the same ones.
The Hollywood Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Far North Side has a lot of things going for it, but clear-cut borders aren’t one of them. When I asked 10 former residents of Hollywood Park to recall the boundaries of the neighborhood, I expected a few different answers. What I got was seven different versions of Hollywood […]
