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 »

To those of us who only take public transportation northwards, 95th and Dan Ryan can seem pretty far from home. However, to the intrepid traveler, it’s just a 15-minute ride on the 95 bus west from the Red Line station, or a 20-minute Metra ride from downton’s LaSalle Street Station, to one of Chicago’s best-kept secrets. Running between 88th and 107th streets west of the Dan Ryan, Beverly is a neighborhood comfortably nestled between some of Chicago’s only hills. Home to the Beverly Arts Center and formerly home to the famous South Side St. Patrick’s Day parade, the neighborhood boasts a strong Irish population, evidenced by the names of numerous pubs. An eclectic mix of restaurants and small businesses line the main roads, and along the side streets one is met with a smorgasbord of suburban architecture. Foodies, art lovers, and historians alike can find something worthwhile in Beverly. Read the rest of this entry »

The romantic comedy and the grandiose epic are genres familiar to most Americans, so much so that we may think of them as indigenous to Hollywood. But however practiced we may be in the fine art of the chick flick, we can hardly claim a monopoly on it, as the schedule for this year’s Polish Film Festival in America shows. Now in its twenty-eighth year, the festival is again bringing more than fifty features, documentaries, and short films from Poland and Eastern Europe to various venues around Chicago. Six of those films will play at the Beverly Arts Center over the course of the next two weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Often overlooked due to its distance from the nearest CTA stop and its location straddling 100th Street, hanging over into the triple digits, Beverly is a quiet and at times suburban neighborhood on the southwestern edge of the city. It was annexed to the city along with most of the South Side in 1889, but large parts of it remained sparsely populated prairie until at least the 1950s. The neighborhood’s two most prominent physical features are a glacial ridge (the highest point in Chicago) and the limestone castle built on top of it in 1886, which has served as a home, an all-girls school, and a reportedly haunted Unitarian church. Don’t be intimidated by the hike from the southernmost stop on the Red Line; two Metra lines run through or near Beverly. Read the rest of this entry »

Beverly is a community that boasts a solid, middle-class society, Irish pride, and a haunted castle that has been in the area since 1886. The neighborhood is often referred to as Beverly Hills not for an eponymous area in California but for the glacial ridge that is a prominent feature and also the highest point in the otherwise generally flat expanse Chicago. Though WASPs swarmed to the area at its founding, Beverly has since attracted a large Irish Catholic population. The haunted castle is a replica from Ireland that now serves as a Unitarian church. Like Hyde Park, Beverly is now a racially-integrated community, with Black/African Americans making up 32% of the population in 2000, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. It is one of the southern-most communities within the bounds of Chicago, but it is well worth the trek away from the better-known Michigan Avenue to experience Beverly’s shops and restaurants and, of course, the castle. Read the rest of this entry »