Farrell’s South Side. Algren’s Near West Side. Bellow’s Hyde Park. And now the world can read about Martin Marcus’s Hollywood Park. It’s true. Hollywood Park, that far North Side neighborhood barely known outside its own vaguely defined borders, has joined the ranks of Chicago neighborhoods immortalized in fiction. Best of all, Marcus’s Hollywood Park is […]
John Erickson, an Illinois physician who grew up in Hollywood Park during the 1930s and ’40s, provides a glimpse of my childhood neighborhood during the years when residents were keeping the wolf from the door and local businesses were more Swedish than Jewish.
Recently I met photographer Jerry Pritikin, who grew up in Chicago during the ’40s and ’50s. Even though he attended Von Steuben High School about 20 years before I did, we remember many of the same neighborhood institutions and landmarks.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
