Most Chicagoans have heard of Albany Park or Rogers Park, but to know of Hollywood Park–you had to live there. What, I’ve wondered, does it take for an attractive neighborhood to get noticed?
River Park has one. Jefferson Park has one. Independence Park has one. Hollywood Park was supposed to have one. Read about the Clarence Hatzfeld fieldhouse that didn’t get built.
These striking 1940s-era photographs inspired a post incorporating three of my favorite subjects: Chicago back porches, the Great West Side and the Hollywood Park neighborhood.
The Peterson Garden Project is among the gardens that will be featured in Victory, a documentary in the making about community gardening in Chicago, highlighting the history of Victory Gardening in the 1940s and detailing the ways in which gardening now impacts Chicago neighborhoods, health, families and the city’s future. The filmmakers, Dan Lerner from Cross Town Productions and […]
If you have ever passed through the North Park community on Chicago’s Far North Side, you certainly will recognize the brick two-flats flanking the Victorian. Maybe not those two-flats, but you have seen countless, identical buildings lining the neighborhood’s streets like books on a library shelf. The Victorian, on the other hand, now that’s a rare […]
Back in May I wrote a post about the Peterson Garden Project, then in its early planning stages. Modeled on the Victory Gardens of the 1940s, the community garden is located in an empty lot at the southwest corner of Peterson and Campbell in the West Ridge neighborhood on the Far North Side of Chicago, a […]
If I lived in a charming, historically signficant Chicago neighborhood like the Villa, I’d keep it a secret. Not so with the current group of Villa residents. Celebrating their neighborhood’s 100th anniversary in 2007 led to the creation of a public tour that reveals the delightful architecture of this Prairie School-influenced neighborhood. Led by a […]
On January 15, 1963, my parents bought their first, and only, house in Chicago. According to the deed, they purchased “Lot 19 Block 8 in Oliver Salinger & Company’s Kimball Boulevard Addition to North Edgewater . . .” Which is to say, they bought the house I still consider the perfect house, the house I’d […]
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 […]
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 […]
