Voices From The Streets – The Essence of Chicagoland Areas

Inconsistent posts

In between construction, guitar, photography, the essence channel, and writing a family history book, I throw too many ideas out there and am inconsistent with them all, except for showing up to work every morning. The monotonous hammering nails and pulling measurements, all backbreaking work, isn’t the only daily accomplishment if I stay persistent in other aspects. I thought I’d add a little inside stuff from outside the channel on this day. It’s Chicago-related.

My maternal great-grandparents all came from Lithuania. Half of them came from Scotland, which was a sanctuary and refuge from the Russian Empire that was killing, imprisoning, and trying to wipe away the language and culture of various peoples(Lithuanian) in the region at the time, from late 18th to early 20th century, and my ancestors finally made their way to Chicago in the 1900s.

My paternal great-grandfather was from Michoacan, Mexico. Purepecha roots, which he may have spoken, that ancient language with Spanish, but I don’t believe he ever learned English. Nobody who ever met him could tell me if he ever spoke English to them, nor can anyone ever remember any conversation about him besides a few funny stories about him being caught cheating on his cheating wife, who was of English and Polish descent.

I have a lot of the ancestral immigration documentation. I also found 4 generations back in Mexico, all of whom have lived in the Chicagoland area since the early 1900s.

My Mexican grandfather had a few kids with a woman who was still married to a Sioux Indian. They lived in what is now Chinatown. The street they lived on had a lot of Italians and other Europeans on the same block as he was. There was a black family living in the apartment downstairs from them, and his mother-in-law living on the bottom floor. Chinatown was initially farther north and later moved to its current location for lower rents, but it was quite a diverse neighborhood in the beginning. My Mexican grandfather lived with his white wife in one apartment next to a black family(a man and his daughter who was a waitress), then Italians and Chinese in other apartments in the area. Although it wasn’t as peaceful as it sounds. My grandfather’s brother used to tell stories about how he and his brother, when they were kids in the 1920s and 30s, used to fight Chinese kids in the street and beat them up. The Chinese had a dangerous gang that was known throughout Chicago at the time, similar to how people think of the Latin Kings in Chicago these days. The Chinese gang was called the Tongs. They were quite dangerous, just as much as some of the other ethnic gangs (Bohemian, Italian, Polish, etc.) in Chicago at the time. There were lots of Chinese prostitution, drugs, and crimes during those times, which my family had been exposed to at various times, but not terribly as it is in modern times. They would import Chinese women to America and hold them as prostitutes to pay their share for whatever time was at hand. Men never had to try hard to look for women back then because prostitution happened more often. My grandfather got a blow job from a girl when he was a taxi driver in the 1940s or so.

My Mexican great-grandfather married a showgirl. Her mother worked in a brothel. A lot of widows and women who lost a lot of opportunities resorted to either prostitution or holding a boarding house. My Mexican great-grandfather was a boarder who had kids with his landlord, from whom I am a descendant.

My mother’s maternal grandparents from Lithuania moved to Springfield, Illinois, to raise their kids. Most of the kids moved to Chicago. When Victoria’s coal-mining husband died sometime in the 19teens, she became a widow and held boarders. She sold moonshine and rented rooms to boarders. There are family stories about how the officials came knocking at her door to investigate the alcohol during prohibition in the 1920s. Victoria had all of her daughters run and pour out all of the bottles of alcohol before they could answer the door. When they opened the door to the police, they acted like they didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the cops’ questions. When the cops were searching the house, they found one bottle of alcohol, but the broken English Europeans said “dats me-da-cine”. The cops left them alone then. The daughters grew up and moved out and would visit from Chicago frequently by train. They remember one boarder who became a permanent boarder at Victoria’s place by the 1950s or so.

I have all of their immigration papers and their census reports. But an interesting fact is that my great-grandma, who was the daughter of Victoria, who was born in Lithuania, moved with her family to Scotland to flee russian oppression, witnessed the birth of her sister there, then they moved to America. Victoria took the 3rd class ride on the ship to America. Her husband and daughter (my great-grandma) took first class. Great-grandma had poor eyesight as a child. She was almost blind. America wouldn’t let immigrants into America who had any problems where they weren’t able to function in society or work, so my family had to get her past immigration. First-class passengers cleared immigration on land because they were vetted on board during the first-class trip. Her eyesight eventually was fixed over time, but they wouldn’t have allowed her when her condition was bad.

Years later, sometime in the 1940s or so, I found documentation of her pledging allegiance to America and renouncing her former native land, so she was naturalized in America.

With all of the immigration taking place just after the turn of the 20th century, all of my family were proud Americans who practiced their ethnic cultural roots heavily up until the 1990s or so when families started to break apart, eventually blocked each other’s phone numbers, and embraced Americanism, leaving behind the old language, food recipes, traditions, and other cultural norms. Now, the majority of them are either proud Americans or proud American haters who disown each other due to their opinions or political preferences. At least they are proud of something.

All of this is happening while other ethnic proud immigrants who stick together are erasing the now broken America that early Europeans were proud to give up their former cultural roots for.

Chicagoland area Night Skies.

With an R6m2 and 24-70 lens, I shot this picture, but had to ask Gemini what it was. Here is what I captured in the pot of the Ursa Major constellation.

Do you believe what Gemini said? … Gemini said, “That is an incredible capture! You didn’t catch a street light flare, nor is it a permanent deep-space nebula.

What you caught is a rare, highly localized atmospheric optical phenomenon called a circumhorizontal arc (or a closely related ice-crystal halo variant like a supralateral arc), lit up by a bright light source.

Here is exactly what is happening in your photo:

Why It Looks Like a Rainbow in the Night Sky

Even though it has the full spectrum of colors, it isn’t a traditional rainbow. Rainbows require liquid raindrops and a light source directly behind your back.

Instead, this is caused by light refraction through ice crystals. High up in the upper troposphere—even on nights that seem perfectly clear to the naked eye—there are thin, wispy veils of cirrus clouds made entirely of microscopic, hexagonal plate-shaped ice crystals.

When a bright light passes through these precisely oriented crystals, they act like millions of tiny glass prisms. The light enters the top face of the crystal and exits a side face, bending (refracting) and separating into distinct red, orange, green, and blue wavelengths.

Why is it next to the Big Dipper?

Because you shot high up into the northern sky near the Big Dipper, the geometry tells us exactly how this happened:

The “Rainbow” Arc: The ice crystals were perfectly angled at that specific patch of sky to split the light toward your camera lens.
The Long Star Trails: The slight elongation of the background stars indicates you used a long exposure (likely several seconds or more).

Because your camera sensor was gathering light over a longer period, it picked up the vivid, saturated colors of this icy refraction that might have looked like a faint, pale smear of cloud to your naked eye.

Could it be something else?

Given the recent solar activity over the past couple of weeks, high-altitude atmospheric anomalies have been common, but the sharp, distinct separation of colors into a perfect “prism” band points directly to ice crystal refraction rather than an auroral arc (which typically glows in specific green, red, or purple bands without a clean rainbow gradient).

It’s an incredibly lucky framing to get a crisp, colorful atmospheric prism cutting right through a field of stars!”

Dinner and Division

Racist White People Everywhere?

At the table, the newcomer lit up with history questions. I answered. Both grew enthused, then suspicious. “Where’d you learn all this?”

Suddenly the new guy declared: “I’ll never buy books by white people. Nothing from white people. All racist.”

I laughed. “You serious?”

The Secret History of Chicago’s “Town of Lake”

Discrimination in 1800s Chicago

Ever look at an old newspaper and realize history is just a bunch of people shouting at each other to get it together?

I found this Polish newspaper clipping from 1912, right here in Chicago. It’s a fiery editorial written by an immigrant who is absolutely furious at his own community. He feels that the Bohemian and Irish have too much pull, leaving the majority Polish community feeling like second-class citizens.

The article is from a place called the “Town of Lake.” If you know Chicago history, that’s the massive independent township annexed into the South Side back in 1889—right where the legendary Union Stock Yards were. Today, the address 4840 South Paulina is the heart of the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

By 1912, this area was a brutal, industrial melting pot. It’s the exact setting of Upton Sinclair’s famous book, The Jungle, which exposed the meatpacking industry through the eyes of newly arrived Lithuanian immigrants.

But this Polish writer is mad. Why? Because the newer immigrants—the Poles and the Lithuanians doing the hardest labor in the stockyards—felt like second-class citizens. They were completely shut out of power.

The author screams, “What kind of aldermen do we have? An Irishman and a Czech!” He slams his fellow Poles for being “naive” and avoiding their own people. He says they’re flocking to Czech banks, buying from German warehouses, and paying fat legal fees to Irish and German lawyers right under their noses, instead of supporting Polish businesses.

He ends the piece with a massive battle cry: “Solidarity, and once again, solidarity!” It’s a wild look at how these neighborhood lines were drawn, the intense rivalries between the Irish, Czechs, Poles, and Lithuanians, and the grind of trying to make it in Chicago over a century ago.

This area is covered between today’s 39th Street and 87th Street, from State Street to near Cicero Avenue (other sources say to Western Avenue, and Wikipedia says Pulaski.

Auburn Gresham, Englewood, and other neighborhoods are standing in an area that had ethnic diversity that discriminated against one another. There was ethnic and family unity in one aspect of the area, but then there was lawlessness and prejudice towards other cultures that spoke different languages and waved different flags.

In 1891, on April 1st, towards the west side, Rev. Hensen(called sensationalist Hensen) spoke at a church, calling the bars and drunks there to be similar to vampires sucking the blood out of politics and civility. A lot of people pushed votes at saloons in those days. He called them hell-holes. He says “that they hang the anarchist who throws bombs, but at the same time elect the same type of anarchist that comes from those hell holes to become an alderman or a saloon keeper. He said, “that all the good conspiracies against law, good order, peaceful social relations, and good municipal administrations are hatched in the low saloons”.

When Elmer Washburn was running things in “Town of Lake”, there were about 500 saloons in the vicinity. Elmer had some power similar to that of a Mayor in the “Town of Lake”. People criticized him for letting the drunks do whatever they wanted to do. The saloons were open 7 days a week, and many people felt ill about that, since Sunday was a holy day for them, for family, not for a saloon. The saloons would stay open all night as long as there were customers, the place stayed open. Just imagine the type of community where everyone got together at their favorite saloons, and where fights, drunkenness, and houses of ill repute were part of the nightly fashion.

Years before the wild times in the Town of Lake, Mayor Roche in Chicago drove out a lot of gamblers and drunks. A lot of those people came to the Town of Lake. What started out as a peaceful community of German and Dutch truck farmers turned into some wild times by the end of the 19th century.

Roseland neighborhood Chicago

I was looking up this neighborhood for a couple days. Initially I was looking into John Ton and the underground railroad. I had no idea that the underground railroad was once in the area. There’s 178 neighborhoods in Chicago and I’m sure there’s something really cool in every single neighborhood. Roseland is actually a community area; a larger neighborhood with little neighborhoods inside. So I Doug into historical documents for hours reading tons of articles and shifting through articles that seemed even have relevant until I moved on to the next one. As always I make sketches until something more tangible comes along, and I created the Roseland video with a big focus on John ton. Before uploading I did more research and discovered an article that talked about the tone family being in Calumet park. I was so pissed. Now I had to shift neighborhoods or just give up on the whole idea. This was around midnight. I don’t like screwing up my sleep schedule. I rather wake up and start working at 4:00 in the morning then staying up all night until 4:00 in the morning. The first thing out of bed I did was research more and I discovered that John was in the area initially. Then I found old 19th century articles about Cornelius Kuyper, who was another Dutch immigrant who participated in the freedom of black slaves at the time.

When the Dutch first came, they couldn’t speak English so they got a translator to show them around. They bought highland area between 107th and 111th from Michigan Avenue and west for $5 an acre. Then after that they bought another 80 acres north of that which was split up between a some few Dutchmen including Kuyper. They had ox bring lumber from Chicago to build the houses, the progress was slow. A. de Kake was the carpenter in the group leading the team. They weren’t able to find other Carpenters to work, so the Dutch immigrants built their own houses with the help of de Kake. And once they build their houses they needed work so they employed their selves as farmers and got to work on the soil. They used oxen to plow and make things happen. Josh Billings said “he who by the plow would thrive, must no two-forty hosses drive, but worry the ground to and fro, with horned critters that skasely seem to go”.

The Roseland Dutch immigrants did thrive with their markets by doing gardening, stock raising, and dairy farms. The men from Holland worked very hard to create this neighborhood and then the produce from it.

At the time, Chicago was described as a straggling village. Not far from them was blue Island that held only a few houses. There was a couple houses in South Englewood at the time. Riverdale had a few houses and now High Prairie which was later called Roseland had only a few houses in the 1850s.

They hunted a lot of goose and duck and pigeon. In Spring and fall, the skies would still fill with fowl creating dark skies for many hours. This was a typical site throughout early America. Infrastructure housing and streets and parking lots killed most of the wildlife habitation and currently the skies are mostly clear of many birds like they had a couple hundred years ago. It would make pigeon soup and other dishes from the birds. They would utilize the feathers for various things. It was hard to live in Chicago at the time because the wages were anywhere from 30 cents to a dollar a day, so a lot of these Dutchman turned to the farms and hunting. Life and transportation wasn’t very easy back then so a lot of young people took social rides two-headed pathway to Chicago behind a yoke of oxen.

Life was hard for the dutchman. But they’re consistent prevalence soon push them out of their hardships and they eventually open the store. Kuyper open the first store in roseland. He opened it in his house. Part of his house was the first store. It was open between 1850 and 1854. By the time more Dutch immigrants came to the area in 1856, the area of what we now know is Roseland have been doing quite decently.

N Dalenberg and Cornella Gouwen were the first people of the neighborhood to get married. George de Young what’s the first child born in the area now known as roseland. George Dion didn’t live very long so he was also the first death and buried of the roseland community. There wasn’t a lot of people in the beginning. The first church had only 18 members. The women set and chairs of the church and the men sit on benches.

110th Street was the first mercantile business from a Chicago man who helped Kuyper run the business, which became a general store there on 110th Street which was then called Thornton street. Things started to happen in the Rose land area. They moved the post office from Calumet to the Roseland community and called it the Hope post office. And on 107th Street, the first school opened up in the back of the church. Peter de Young was the teacher there. They taught Dutch mannerisms, principles, and studies. But some time in the 1850s about 5 years after the other school began, the community decided to send the children to Gardner School to learn English and to learn in the English language. Gardner School was a log house.

Georgia Vandersyde and John Ton made the first map plat of the area. The values of the building started to rise and Chicago then annexed Roseland in the year 1890.

John Ton, Kuyper, and others participated in the underground railroad. They were somewhat successful people at the time. They were some of the first people to live in the Roseland area and part of the people that made the neighborhood to what it became. They shared some of her their success by helping the slaves find freedom and be safe from the hunters whose ambition sprang for a reward to capture runaway slaves.

J. Ton had hundreds of descendants that would have annual meetings and family reunions well into the 20th century. Some of the histories stayed with the family, but most of the stories have disappeared with those family members.

This is only a fraction of the history of the Roseland neighborhood in Chicago.

Robbed in Garfield Park Chicago 2024

A married Mexican couple now lives in the western suburbs with their teenage daughter. They didn’t make a lot of money, and when hard times hit, they do doordash for money.

They saw the surge prices in the Austin and Garfield Park neighborhood. Most people from those neighborhoods go to the suburbs or white neighborhoods to do delivery where it’s safer and they more likely get tipped. The lack of people in the high crime areas causes surges that nobody wants to risk their life for.

So the man and his wife went out early Saturday morning to deliver food in Garfield Park. About 10 in the morning they got to their destination to deliver food and were met by a pistol in front of a man who wanted to make the news. They gave him what he wanted and he let them go.

They said that they didn’t want to miss those surge prices because they needed the money. But that didn’t happen to him again because they were smart enough not to deliver food in the area.

Sometime later the man went out on his own to deliver some food. In the Austin neighborhood he again was held up by gunpoint. You told the man that he didn’t have any money so he knew that the man wanted to take his car so he offered it up. The car was stuck in the snow so they needed to push the car away from the curb where it’s no pile was stopping him. He said that he jumped in the car and threw the guy’s jacket onto the street. That was at least his description.

The moral of the story is, you have to decide which is more important whether it’s money or your life.

Brighton Park Chicago Times

On the South side of 51st street a couple blocks West of western Avenue lived a young Mexican kid. He was maybe 25 years old or so. I told him that I lived a couple blocks away from there at 5005 South Artesian in Chicago back in the early 90s. He said that it was a dangerous neighborhood. I told him that it was a nice neighborhood when I lived there.
The alderman lived down the street from me North one block. Across the street from me was a really beautiful Italian girl that always tanned out in front of her house. Two doors down from him, about 4 doors from the corner, lived a kid a couple years older than me that played guitar like I did. One door South of me were these glam rock band guys that played guitar on the lower level of their house. Behind our house, from the alley, you can hear some older men play music in their garage. They were a blues band. Everyone in the neighborhood was white for the most part. There was a Mexican family at the South edge of the block. A bunch of Mexican youths would always sit on the front porch and steadily watch you walk by. Every now and then they would throw big Mexican parties while they blasted their Mexican ranchero music loud enough that you could hear in the house. We did not have central air, so all the windows were open, and you heard everything outside. White prostitutes used to walk up and down Western Avenue, but they were rarely seen. It was a nice and clean neighborhood. It was really quiet for the most part. We had everything we needed there too. On the Northwest corner of 51st and Western used to be a Butera grocery store, now a family dollar. There was a VCR video store and Nintendo game rental store on the Southwest Corner of 50th and Artesian, I believe turned into a Mexican joint. There weren’t any taco places in the neighborhood when I lived there, but now there’s a few in every direction.
This kid told me that the neighborhood became really dangerous at a time. Latin gangs filled the streets. Shootings and robberies were frequent. North of 51st street had become the more dangerous side, but the South side where he lived was a little more tranquil. He stays home and plays video games now because he is used to not going outside.
He graduated from school in the year 2015. He went to Curie high school. Curie used to be a nice school, but Bogan to the South was even better than that. I got accepted to both, but my dad sent me to De La Salle instead around 1991. He said that Curie had become a dangerous and bad school. Kids were forced to cross the street at the intersection because kids were getting killed j walking across the street from the train. He said that they even had race wars in the school. Black kids against Mexican kids. It felt like near a hundred kids outside fighting sometimes. He never participated in the fights, but he remembered them well. He believes the school is getting safer though since he attended.
There was a teacher in the school that was in the SD gang. He and his friends were Latin Kings. The teacher started throwing gang signs. Nobody had him as a teacher, so they treated him just like anyone else. They ran across the street and started fighting him in front of the dollar general store.
It was dangerous at school and at home in the neighborhood. One day after school, on his regular 20 minute walk home, he was robbed with a 45 pistol to his head, demanding money. He was safer in some parts of the neighborhood than others. Although he did hear shootings quite frequently at night. There were “two six gang members” on one side, and Latin Kings on the other side. Constant battles. He witnessed a Latin King get shot in the neck across the street from his house.

He lived in Bridgeport for a while. Said that it wasn’t too dangerous in that neighborhood. 31st or 33rd street near Morgan was one of the areas to avoid in that neighborhood. You want to stay away from there or keep an eye out. He said that 51st and Western was more dangerous than Bridgeport.
50th and Western was a nice neighborhood at one time. The craziest times back then were when the biker guys used to throw parties on the center of the boulevard. There were a lot of bars on the West side of Western Ave. That’s where the biker guys came from. They would bring games for kids, carnival rides, and beer tents, and loud classic rock music blasting. I went there a couple of times and hung with the locals. I didn’t know anyone there, but I was welcomed to sit with some bikers and their families on the picknick tables that they brought onto the grass. Hopefully the neighborhood gets back to that level of safety and social bonding.

Sister’s on Drugs

A third generation German descent girl has her sister live with her on the Western end of Chicago. She’s a waitress. Her sister doesn’t work, rather she screws around with various men from the Internet and does various drugs that make her not so easy to live with.

Before she let her troubled sister move in with her, she fell in love with a guy in Chicago who moved with her to Texas. It didn’t work out, so now she’s back home to the Chicagoland area.

She stares into this distance quite often. She’s really sad. She’s been sober for years now, but has a hard time dealing with life on life’s terms. She seems like she still takes some kind of drugs or she hasn’t slept in weeks.

Nobody at her job at the restaurant understands her. People in Chicago sometimes only seem to be into themselves and don’t care about your problems, since everyone has problems of their own, and they let her know that every time she wants to rant or use her problems as an excuse for a delinquency at work. She said most of the cooks are black men and the waitresses are white girls who get it on regularly with the cooks, and she hinted that she feels unwanted or not needed.

She takes the bus to and from work. I spoke to her in the rain while she was carrying groceries home from the store after work. She’s skinny and not bad looking. But she seems like she’s under a dark spell of some sort.

Retired Man of McKinley Park to Garfield Ridge Chicago

An older guy that now lives in Garfield Ridge gave me a five hour speech about his time in Chicago. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he moved out of his parents house by the time I was born, actually about a year after. He says there were no drugs and gang problems back in those days. He said his drug dealer neighbor at his current location in Garfield Ridge was killed not long ago in the apartment next door he said.

I told him that he lived in McKinley at the same time my dad was dealing heroin and other drugs in the neighborhood. They used to shoot up bars back then I heard. Tommy Rapp, Smiley, and all those other guys who ran around with my dad were bad news back in those days, how could you say there was no drugs back then?

He said the drugs and crime were nothing like it is today. His brother’s wife got stuck up at gun point a few years back in the old neighborhood, so they were forced to move out of Chicago. White flight.

He said that he never goes out after dark in the neighborhood. It’s not safe in Garfield Ridge anymore. It was rough back in the day, but now it’s worse.

He remembers when the street signs of Chicago were brown and yellow. There used to be a bar in every cross street in McKinley Park. It was a happening neighborhood. A deli on every street, a tavern, candy stores, bakeries, and people all over. Nobody was getting shot and killed like they are today in Chicago.

There used to be a milk delivery guy that lived on the 37^th hundred block of South Hermitage. At Winter time, the kids used to skitch the back of the milk man’s truck when there was snow and ice on the road. Once a kid skitched onto dry ground and fell to his death. That’s the only one of his friends that died in the neighborhood when they were young.

They used to swim in the McKinley Park pond. Later in life he worked for the city and they found dead bodies in McKinley and Marquette Park ponds. People were killed and dumped in the river during the 90s and 2000s. They found a lot of bodies, but perhaps didn’t find them all.

There was an old cross eyed German barber on the north west corner of 36^th and Paulina that he used to get his haircut from all the time. I told him that I used to get my haircut from him when he was already very old. He said that once, his friend made fun of the man’s eyes, and then they got skolded in foul language for it. He used to run around with some trouble makers that he went to school with across the street at the Nathaniel Green grade school on the north east corner of Paulina.

He remembers Mary and Sisals bar on the corner. Another bar on Ashland was one that everyone stayed away from. Some parts of the neighborhood were known to start away from in bars.

He remembers Marquette Park area had a happening area on 69^th Street. He says that the area made 69^th a one way street towards Western ave so that the black people East wouldn’t come through. The last bar on the street at Artesian and 69^th was another one of those rough bars. I’ve interview others that hinted towards the idea, that they stayed away from it. There were near 20 bars on that street in the matter of four blocks. All the bars on the street were of live music, food, pool tables, good times, and people dressed up to be there, but the last bar on the eastern end of the street was populated with construction workers and mechanics who were still in their work clothes. Sometimes the black prostitutes would come walk to the bar to order beer to go, because back in the 70s in Chicago, bars sold beer carry out. The prostitutes would go in there to let the guys know that she’s available in the area. A guy would have interest towards her, then follow her out to have sex in the car.

A friend of his did that. Although it was frowned upon to have sex with black people in those days, so he took her to a culdesac in Marquette Park and did his thing with her there. He fell asleep in the car and the prostitute robbed him while he was sleeping nice next to her. In those days, the front seat of a car was huge and long in length because they were a bench and not bucket seats. The cops woke him In the morning with his dick hanging out. The cops asked what he was doing naked sleeping in his car in the park, he said that he fell asleep while he was jerking off. A person could pay off some cops back then to leave you alone, but he didn’t have his i.d. or wallet anymore, because the prostitute robbed him. So the cop took him to his brother’s house, to where the brother gave the money to pay off the cop.

If he was young again, he would probably go see the guys at the bar like he did in the old days, but most of those guys are dead now and the bars aren’t what they used to be, plus there’s so much crime these days in 2025, and not so many bars to hang out at like it used to be.

Mexican in McKinley Park

My dad claimed to be one of the first Mexicans to live on Paulina Street in the 1970s. He used to deal weed, coke, and heroin, running around with another Mexican guy who moved in down the block around the same time. Life was different in McKinley Park back then. Bars lined almost every cross street, and the neighborhood was said to consist mostly of taverns and funeral homes. I was the last in our family to live there, staying until 1995, when it was still a somewhat nice and safe neighborhood.
One summer day in 1995, I was walking down 35th Street with my girlfriend, Lana, to get some food. About five or six Mexican guys were hanging out in front of an apartment building on the north side of 35th Street, between Honore and Wolcott. As we passed on the other side, they shouted at Lana, saying things like, “You need a real man,” among other remarks. She flicked them off, and I followed her lead. The neighborhood was beginning to change for the worse at that point, with gang members moving in and boldly yelling obscenities on the once-quiet streets.
America still felt quiet and peaceful on the streets during those years. Overpopulation and heavy traffic didn’t start until the large influx of Mexican immigrants began moving into Chicago. I miss those days, especially the empty streets on Sundays.
Recently, I met a Mexican woman who couldn’t speak English but said she’d lived in America since the 1980s. She told me she lived at 37th and Wood Streets. I shared that I lived just a couple of blocks away in the 1980s and 1990s. We were excited to connect and reminisce about the old neighborhood. My Spanish isn’t great, but we managed to talk about many things—she had to rephrase often since I’m better at speaking than understanding it.
She described how beautiful the neighborhood once was. She moved out about 15 years ago and has daughters. One of her daughters was best friends with some of my neighborhood friends. She took my name and phone number in case her daughter wanted to reach out—though it wasn’t necessary. She often spoke with her daughter’s friend Claudia, whom I used to hang out with in grade school.
We both missed the old neighborhood. She said it was once a nice, close-knit community but became too dangerous due to gangs and shootings, forcing her to move.