Most Chicagoans have heard of Albany Park or Rogers Park, but to know of Hollywood Park–you had to live there. What, I’ve wondered, does it take for an attractive neighborhood to get noticed?
Tag Archives | Hollywood Park
Basketball At Home and Away
I was, as usual, interested in the local angle. What does a book about the great college basketball coach who challenged discriminatory practices have to do with Chicago, and in particular, my old neighborhood, Hollywood Park? More than you’d expect.
The Abandoned Fieldhouse: History of a Chicago Neighborhood Park
River Park has one. Jefferson Park has one. Independence Park has one. Hollywood Park was supposed to have one. Read about the Clarence Hatzfeld fieldhouse that didn’t get built.
That Old Swedish-Jewish Neighborhood
If you have ever passed through the North Park community on Chicago’s Far North Side, you certainly will recognize the brick two-flats flanking the Victorian. Maybe not those two-flats, but you have seen countless, identical buildings lining the neighborhood’s streets like books on a library shelf. The Victorian, on the other hand, now that’s a rare […]
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 […]
Of Porches and Backyards in Chicago — Part Two
On January 15, 1963, my parents bought their first, and only, house in Chicago. According to the deed, they purchased “Lot 19 Block 8 in Oliver Salinger & Company’s Kimball Boulevard Addition to North Edgewater . . .” Which is to say, they bought the house I still consider the perfect house, the house I’d […]
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 […]
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 […]