For those of you who grew up in Hollywood Park before 1970, no explanation necessary. For everyone else, the photo on the left is dated 1968, and the one on the right was taken in 2018. The Hollywood Bowl sold penny candy, and at lunchtime it was jammed with kids buying grape gumballs, licorice records, […]
When Andy Romanoff neared thirteen he went to learn Hebrew at Shaare Tikvah, the big, new synagogue on Kimball Avenue. It was not a match made in heaven.
Andy Romanoff went back to Chicago last week. While he was there he visited Hollywood Park, his old neighborhood.
I thought the candy counter was A LOT BIGGER.
In his deeply evocative poem, “Up from the Alleys,” Martin Marcus recaptures public history and private moments of joy and sadness from his 1940s-era childhood spent in Chicago’s Hollywood Park neighborhood.
Guest blogger Charlene (Powitz) Gelber recalls Central Park Avenue in Hollywood Park. It was really like the country, because we had the TB sanitarium on one side and the Boys Parental School across the street. There were no houses across from us and it was beautiful.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know milestones of this magnitude are few and far between in the history of Hollywood Park.
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.
This survey of course proves nothing. The sampling was way too small, the subject way too complex. I can’t tell you why Hollywood Park failed to achieve the ranks of legendary Chicago neighborhoods, or why it sometimes seems to be on the verge of being swallowed up by North Park.
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.
