Ever since I read about vernacular photography in a friend’s blog, I’ve been thinking about my old family photographs. Most have purely personal significance. But those taken in our backyard during the late fifties and early sixties capture scenes that were, and still are, commonplace all over Chicago–and nowhere else. I’m writing, of course, of […]
The ivy is from Wrigley Field. So are the box seats. Ditto the dugout bench. Ditto the sod. Ditto the pavers. It doesn’t get more real, unless you’re actually at Wrigley Field. But I wasn’t. I was on a walking tour of the Bohemian National Cemetery. When you’re walking past rows of monuments in sombre grays and […]
As regular readers of this blog know, I grew up in Chicago on North Central Park Avenue across from the grounds of the Municipal TB Sanitarium. Entirely hidden by a border of towering trees and overgrown shrubs, the TB Sanitarium was such a mysterious place I barely noticed the other large, fenced-in parcel of land in the neighborhood. The signs on […]
It’s been a long time since anyone has seen a community garden on the corner of Peterson and Campbell avenues. Nearly seventy years, in fact. For four growing seasons, 1942 to 1945, this corner was part of a WWII victory garden. Descendants of horticulturalist Pehr S. Peterson owned the lot and donated use of it […]
