Feb 11
The Freddie from Calabria Imports (Claire Hungerford)
Inspired by a recent article in Dining Chicago on the city’s lesser-known signature sandwiches, I set out last week to find and consume three that are native to the South Side: the big baby, the Freddy and the mother-in-law. My expedition very quickly deteriorated into a desperate search, however. I met with caged, closed storefronts, wrong turns, and bad directions. I drove past blocks of boarded buildings, torn signs, and trash, then unexpectedly emerged into neat rows of houses, time-warped out of the ’70s. My physical journey through the South Side landscape to discover the sandwiches illuminated a historic movement of people, cultures, and tastes. Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 23
The story of Chicago’s Southwest Side is a classically American one. Immigrants—Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Germans, Czechs—flocked to the area in the early 20th century after the extension of streetcar lines made it an easy commute. Railroads and stockyards—including the famous Union Stock Yard portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle”—brought an abundance of jobs to neighborhoods such as Brighton Park and New City. For the next half-century, the primarily residential area thrived, until the industry it relied on began to disappear. In the latter part of the 20th century, the Southwest Side experienced a decline in population and prosperity that coincided with increasingly tense race relations in neighborhoods like Gage and Marquette Parks, where school desegregation met fierce opposition from white residents who feared plummeting property values. Residents in some neighborhoods formed community associations to help cope with the conflict—often successfully, as in the case of diverse, middle-class Gage Park. Today, a growing number of Southwest Side residents are Hispanic—approximately 80 percent in Gage Park and in Little Village, where nearly half that number is foreign-born. The area appears to be on the upswing, thanks in part the construction of the Orange Line connecting Midway Airport to downtown, which has been a boon for property values and the local economy. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 16
Firefighters on parade; Library of Congress
. The former president of the Chicago Firemen’s Union sees little official recognition of fire history in a city famous for rising out of the ashes of the 1871 blaze. But that is about to change. In the next year, two museums dedicated to fire service, the Fire Museum of Greater Chicago and the Chicago Fire Department African-American Firefighter Museum, are scheduled to open on the South Side.
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