In my memory, the walls were painted a pale institutional green and the lockers were milk chocolate brown. To a first grader, the hallways of Peterson Elementary School were like a cave, dark and endless with voices and footsteps echoing in the distance.
Tag Archives: Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School
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 [...]
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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