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.
While Lincoln Village Theater may have been Oscar Brotman’s greatest gift to Hollywood Park, it was far from his greatest gift to Chicago. Lincoln Village Theater was just one in a multifaceted chain of Brotman-Sherman movie theaters. They had art houses (Carnegie, Cinema); drive-ins (Oasis); historic icons (Portage, Tivoli, Aragon); modern conveniences (Hillside), and, in […]
Back in early July my daughter and I visited Lincoln Park Zoo. When I saw South Pond I thought an environmental disaster had occurred. Gone were the curvilinear paths surrounding the pond. Gone was the island’s wild overgrowth. Gone were the giant swan paddleboats.
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 […]
Unlike Richard Brautigan, who learned about trout fishing in America as a child, I was an adult when I first heard about smelt fishing in Chicago. It was 1979, a spring evening of course, and I was walking along the bike path north of Irving Park Road. At dusk I arrived at what looked like […]
I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being. — The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann Just when I think I’m done writing about the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, more compelling information comes my way. Here’s a patient’s account of her two years at the sanitarium. It tells of a bright moment […]
Recently I discovered Chicago now has a public food market at the suburban concourse of the Ogilvie Transportation Center, the block bordered by Clinton, Canal, Washington and Randolph. While the Chicago French Market is no Reading Terminal Market and not even the L.A. Central Market, it’s ours, it’s wonderful and it’s open seven six days a week. […]
As mentioned earlier, I uncovered the history of Chicago’s Municipal TB Sanitarium but learned little about the purpose it served. Guest blogger Dr. Gilberto Gonzalez, a retired general surgeon, offered to fill in the blanks for me. Dr. Gonzalez trained at Mercy Hospital in Chicago for three years, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium for one year (1961-62) and […]
