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 […]
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 […]
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.
Snow days haven’t changed much over the years.
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
Any restaurant reviewer can name the top restaurants downtown and in trendy neighborhoods, but can they tell you where to get an honest-to-goodness satisfying meal for ten dollars or less in every corner of Chicago? According to Lake Claremont publisher Sharon Woodhouse, the authors of this book can.
