I’ve seen a lot of guides to Chicago restaurants but The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats is so authentic, I can practically hear a flat, nasal accent grating in my ear as I read the words.
Author Archive | Frances Archer
Spreading the love
Happy Valentine’s Day! Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read and comment on my blogposts. What makes blogging such an enjoyable activity is hearing from people who share my passion for Chicago and its past. After this sweet day of indulgence, I’ll be getting back to business. I’ve got another Chicago book giveaway […]
Major League Memories: An Albany Park Boyhood, Part Two
In part two of my interview, I asked Jerry Pritikin about his lifelong passion for Chicago baseball, “the official language of the kitchen table” in his childhood home. Here again, our memories matched up despite the 20-year difference in our ages. The only difference was my father, a Cuban immigrant, talked to me incessantly about […]
Hot Dogs and Baseball: An Albany Park Boyhood
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.
My Chicago Blizzards
Snow days haven’t changed much over the years.
2010 in Review
I’m running a little behind on my year-end review, but what’s a few weeks when most my posts cover a Chicago neighborhood during the fifties and sixties? At least I’ve got some new photos to go with the most popular subjects of the past year.
They wore jackets
For years I’ve had a memory–really, more of an image–that made no sense to me. I remember going to a meeting with my best friend in the spring of 1970 before we graduated from eighth grade. Older girls, all strangers to me, were in charge. Some wore jackets with a club name stitched on the […]
If they wanted to live next door to a sausage factory, they would have stayed on the West Side
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.
My Blog’s Birthday
I didn’t decide then and there to spend the next year researching the history of Hollywood Park, the North Side neighborhood where I grew up during the 1960s, but week by week I got in deeper and deeper. Between what I hadn’t understood as a child and what I never knew, there’s a lot to […]
That’s not the Hollywood Park I remember
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.