Tag Archive
Beverly
Originally dubbed “Beverly Hills” in reference to a massive prehistoric ridge that spans it, the neighborhood has always been home to more upwardly mobile middle class families than California-style celebrities. Today, while the outskirts of the neighborhood are home to commercial development, a continuous stream of traffic, and sun-baked sidewalks, the heart of Beverly... »
Best of the South Side 2011
If you look at a map, you’ll see our city of neighborhoods carved into 77 “community areas.” The lines, drawn by sociologists in the 1950s, sometimes traced the perimeters of ethnic enclaves and sometimes created them. Flattening Chicago’s complex social geography, these semi-official designations remain in use, but even urban planners would admit they... »
Back of the Yards
Just southwest of the former Union Stockyards, there’s a neighborhood that, for better or for worse, will always be defined by them. While the area is still heavily blue-collar, the grim realities of stockyard life immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” have drifted off into history. »
Best of the South Side 2009
Chicago is regularly billed as a city of neighborhoods, but there’s an unfortunate tendency to find dozens lumped together in the phrase “South Side.” In addition to masking the distinctions between neighborhoods south of the Loop, it implies a totally unwarranted dismissal of more than half of the city’s area. There is life south... »
Best of the South Side 2009: Hyde Park and Kenwood
Hyde Park can sometimes seem like its own little world. In fact, it hosted one near the beginning of its existence: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which attracted over 20 million people in six months, was held on the Midway Plaisance and in Jackson Park. Meanwhile, at the western end of the Midway,... »
Best of the South Side 2009: South Shore and Woodlawn
South of Hyde Park stretch two lakefront neighborhoods with very different histories. Woodlawn was once a prosperous neighborhood, helped along by the World’s Fair of 1893 and the El tracks that connected it to downtown. In the 1940s and ’50s, integration brought a sudden demographic shift, and after the 1968 riots that raged across... »
Best of the South Side 2009: South Loop
The South Loop is a new neighborhood with a long history. Like many Chicago neighborhoods, it was first populated by poor immigrants in the mid-19th century, mainly Irish, Germans, and African-Americans from the South. Spared by the Great Fire, it became a bastion of the Chicago elite, who built magnificent homes along Prairie Avenue.... »
Best of the South Side 2009: Chinatown
Chicago’s Chinatown lacks the characteristic bustle and grit of a major city Chinatown. The streets are broad and the sidewalks are crowded more with tourists than with old women pushing carts of chickens and bruised greens. This Chinatown is young; it developed around the intersection of Cermak and Wentworth when a red light district... »
