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 [...]
Tag Archives: Peterson Park
Forbidden Places–Part Three
More than the sight of my old house, this takes me back. The corner of Peterson and Central Park avenues, the unused service entrance to the sanitarium. That white square sign hanging on the left-hand side of the gate? Directions to the main entrance, I’m sure of it. A corner of the guard house, pictured in my first post [...]
Forbidden Places–Part Two
The Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium on Chicago’s far north side once was a place that frightened neighborhood children and once was a place of misery, as a physician wrote in a comment to my earlier post. Today, it’s a very accessible, much-treasured public resource serving many people and many purposes. Most of the original buildings were demolished, but [...]
Forbidden Places–Part One
A seemingly endless stretch of wilderness faced the house I grew up in on Chicago’s far north side. Dense stands of old-growth trees stood guard around its perimeter. Looking west from our front door, all I could see beyond the green chain-link fence was grass, trees and a tall dark tower. As we know from [...]
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