Please join me for a look back at the history of Von Steuben High School as one of Chicago’s famed “Jewish high schools.” I’ll be retelling some of the fabulous stories I’ve heard from you — readers of this blog — and the photographs you’ve shared. Starting with the opening of the school as a junior high school […]
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 […]
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 […]
Once upon a time, in a place known as Humboldt Park, a little Princess lived with her father, mother and brother in a tiny flat above their grocery store.
When it can’t remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be. –Studs Terkel For several years after my parents arrived in Chicago from Cuba, they shopped at discount stores out of necessity. On Sunday afternoons we drove all over the city in search of low prices. This was back in the early 1960s. I […]
Over winter break one day we stopped at Little Louie’s in Northbrook. I told my husband we should eat lunch there because our nine-year-old daughter could have something she likes and we could have something healthier. We ordered a hot dog and fries for our daughter and chicken and avocado wraps for ourselves. After we finished the wraps, […]
It’s fascinating finding old landmarks on the Google map of Chicago. When you see, for example, Herzl Junior College, well, that’s a whole chapter of Chicago history.
