He photographed the world, but Chicago first and best and only on film. On a cool morning back in May, my good friend Jerry Pritikin invited me to meet legendary photographer Lee Balterman. My hour spent in Balterman’s apartment, crammed with five-foot-tall wood file cabinets containing his life’s work, gave me a front row seat […]
Check out this modified version of a post I wrote about my father featured on the website Women’s Voices for Change in honor of Father’s Day.
I love how this photo captures the way seventh-grade teacher Mr. Wahle always was at the center of our attention.
In my memory, the walls were painted a pale institutional green and the lockers were milk chocolate brown. To a first grader, the hallways of Peterson Elementary School were like a cave, dark and endless with voices and footsteps echoing in the distance.
In the sixties and seventies, if little kids didn’t get hurt running around the gravel and asphalt playground at Peterson Elementary School, they had a good chance of banging up theirs knees or noses on the metal play equipment.
Three old Hollywood Park businesses, each with deep connections to the neighborhood.
In January 1929 Chicago real estate developer Erick Nelson Linn put on the market 50 Hollywood Park duplex homes, more commonly known as two-flats. It must not have seemed like much of a risk. Linn had been putting up the same buildings in the area for nearly ten years.
A week ago I reviewed Hollywood Park, a novel that takes place in a Chicago neighborhood during the Depression. The author, Martin Marcus, and I grew up in that neighborhood during different times, so I asked Marty to share some of his memories. He gave me this recent photograph of his friends from Peterson Elementary […]
Farrell’s South Side. Algren’s Near West Side. Bellow’s Hyde Park. And now the world can read about Martin Marcus’s Hollywood Park. It’s true. Hollywood Park, that far North Side neighborhood barely known outside its own vaguely defined borders, has joined the ranks of Chicago neighborhoods immortalized in fiction. Best of all, Marcus’s Hollywood Park is […]
John Erickson, an Illinois physician who grew up in Hollywood Park during the 1930s and ’40s, provides a glimpse of my childhood neighborhood during the years when residents were keeping the wolf from the door and local businesses were more Swedish than Jewish.
