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 […]
I wrote a post called Mom and Pop, about the business district that ran through the Hollywood Park neighborhood on Chicago’s far north side, and I called it a small town Main Street. I had no idea. It wasn’t a small town, it was practically a shtetl, an old world town with a large Jewish population. As it […]
During the 1960s, on the three blocks of Bryn Mawr Avenue (5600 North) between Kedzie (3200 West) and Bernard (approximately 3430 West) avenues there were two gas stations; an Orthodox synagogue, or shul; an elementary school (Peterson–kindergarten through eighth grade, and still there); Irv’s Barber Shop; a Grocerland and a Jewel Foods that later became […]
One day years ago, as I rode my bike through the old Chicago neighborhood known as Wicker Park, I glimpsed at what looked like Hebrew lettering on a brick building with a blue cross. I stopped to investigate and discovered the building formerly housed Temple Beth-El.
