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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 […]
Our new look and new home are under construction. Please check back Monday, June 28th.
This is young Florence Gantwerker, who was Mrs. Saper to me when I lived on North Central Park Avenue back in the sixties and early seventies. If you read my recent post you’ll know she was undoubtably photographed in Chicago–the back porch gives it away. You may also recognize the left-hand edge of the National sign over 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 […]
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 […]
