Twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher Martin Kimbell blew into town from upstate New York in 1836. Andrew Jackson was president, the Potawatomi had been fought out and bought out of northern Illinois, and footloose young Yankees were turning Chicago into a go-getter city. Kimbell supposedly rejected land at Dearborn and Lake as “a damned mudhole”—the story’s so good I fear for its truth—and instead staked his claim to 160 acres five miles northwest. There he raised a crop of hay, the gasoline of the 1836 transportation system, and that was the start of what we now call Logan Square.
Today the Van Phat Chinese restaurant and a Foot Locker occupy the northeast corner of what was Kimbell’s farm, right at the suicide corners of Milwaukee, Kimball, and Diversey. The traffic, fast and heavy, might have pleased Kimbell. No subsistence farmer, he struggled to haul his hay and produce across country that was soggy even in dry weather and impassable for months in the spring. His challenge was being able to move at all.
By the early 1840s a confusing network of trails ran northwest from the center of Chicago in what’s now the Milwaukee Avenue corridor. The state legislature granted a petition to have a road surveyed there. George Powell ran an inn where Milwaukee and Armitage cross today, and the story goes that he promised the surveying crew wine, whiskey, and a good dinner if the road came his way. A few years later, three-inch oak boards were laid across the dirt path the surveyers had defined to create the Northwest Plank Road, which eventually ran 23 miles from downtown Chicago to Wheeling. Somehow it comes as no surprise that the tolls charged (two-and-a-half cents a mile in 1881) outlasted the planks.
Logan Square didn’t exist as a neighborhood or even a square in Kimbell’s day. Beginning in 1850, the relevant political unit was Jefferson Township, stretching west of Western and north of North Avenue. What few public services the township provided to its scattered settlements were usually financed by special assessment. The Chicago Fire of 1871—or rather, its political aftermath—jump-started its journey from foodshed to suburb to urbanity.
Kimbell’s fellow Yankees were in charge of what was left of the city, and they proposed to make it safe from future fires by outlawing wood structures. German immigrants fought the law (wood was all they could afford), and when it passed anyway, some of them moved out to Jefferson Township to build as they pleased. That’s right—long before there were University of Chicago economists to explain it, Logan Square showed that when government decrees one thing it often accomplishes something quite different.
There were other reasons to look to Jefferson. Factories were going up at the western edge of what would become Logan Square and at the northeast edge along the railroad. Since land was safer than most bank deposits, some workers bought lots even before they could build. But farming was still big. In 1874, one of George Powell’s sons sold 600 bushels of cherries from his five-acre lot on Western. And according to Northern Illinois University historian Barbara Posadas, another family employed seven workers to turn locally grown cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and cauliflower into pickles, catsup, and Worcestershire sauce.
As Jefferson Township grew, its residents began to demand Chicago comforts like water, sewerage, and, yes, fire protection. In Chicago History magazine, Posadas quotes one Fred Salsgeher, who wrote to the Tribune in 1887: “We are all poor workmen . . . [who] can’t afford to insure for the full amount. . . . I don’t wish to come home from the city some evening and find my house all burnt up.”
After annexing the township in 1889, Chicago’s City Hall upgraded Milwaukee Avenue to wood-block pavement, but it also renamed local streets. According to a neighborhood history written by Katherine Janega and printed by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in 1979, “Powell Street became Campbell, Byrne was changed to Spaulding, Ballou to St. Louis, Dunning to Altgeld.” Shockingly, Kimbell became Kimball. Martin’s son Charles, a peppery character, “was so incensed by the altered spelling that he went out in his horse-drawn wagon, paintbrush and bucket in hand, and reinserted the ‘e’ in Kimbell on every street sign from Armitage to Diversey.”
As this story suggests, Logan Square wasn’t overburdened with clout even then. Ever since that first influx of Yankees, most of its residents have been immigrants, hardworking people who cherish their native tongues. First there were Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes; then Poles and Russian Jews; now Latinos.
Annexation heralded Logan Square’s boom years as stores and houses replaced the remaining farms. The 1890s were to transportation as the 1990s were to computers. Cable cars replaced horse cars in 1890 and electric streetcars replaced cable in 1906. Meanwhile, the northwest branch of the Metropolitan Elevated began running trains to Logan Square on May 25, 1895. Transit generally followed a path laid down in Indian times, but the city’s boulevard system, designed in the 1860s and built in pieces over the next three decades, was something new. The generously proportioned boulevards attracted elegant houses, the side streets filled with modest homes and apartments for workers, and everybody shopped on the commercial streets. Rich and poor lived side by side; diversity was built into the neighborhood from this point on.
The boulevard mansions were built with new money, often by immigrants. Entrepreneur John Rath came from Austria as a boy in 1884 and made his name and fortune in high-quality cooperage (barrel manufacturing). In 1907 he was able to hire Prairie School architect George Maher to design his home at the southwest corner of Logan Boulevard and Washtenaw (see Lynn Becker’s story about Logan Square architecture). The city landmarked the house in 1993 and the boulevards themselves in 2005.
The neighborhood’s signature square was named for John A. Logan, an immensely popular Civil War general who’d helped keep Illinois in the Union. A native of what’s now Murphysboro, he was the founder of Memorial Day, served for years in Congress, and tried for vice-president in 1884 as James G. Blaine’s running mate. He died in 1886, just as the west-side boulevards and squares were being realized. The focal point of his square didn’t arrive until 1918, an elegant classical column marking the centennial of Illinois’ statehood.
Because they were paved, the boulevards were often used for bicycle races. In May 1896 a crowd of hundreds gathered at Logan Square to watch racers make the difficult turn from northbound Milwaukee onto southbound Humboldt. A few blocks south, at 2128 N. Humboldt, the cyclists passed the home of Ignaz Schwinn, an immigrant who’d made good building bikes and motorcycles.
Sports were big in Logan Square. In one local sandlot football game around this time, a speedy Norwegian ball carrier got waylaid and beaten up by opposing fans as he ran for the goal line. His parents forbade the game but eventually relented, and Knute Rockne went on to become a household name. The Logan Square Ball Park, aka Callahan’s Ball Park, occupied a triangular piece of land on the north side of Milwaukee Avenue starting at Sawyer and running back to Diversey and Kedzie. One old-timer recalls that it had two wooden spectator stands and a canvas fence and offered free admission to anyone who returned a ball hit into the street.
In a 1912 issue of American magazine, sportswriter Hugh Fullerton chronicled a legendary city-championship game at the ballpark between the Logan Square team and a team called the Gunthers. In the bottom of the ninth, a Gunther hit a potential game-winner, but it struck an extra ball the umpire had left on the field. Logan Square players fielded both balls, and threw them simultaneously to ace first baseman Frank McNichols—one high and to his left, the other low and to his right. McNichols caught both throws for the final out of the game. (McNichols also represented his west-side district in the Illinois General Assembly between 1905 and 1914.)
The ballpark saw its final out in 1925, when it was sold and subdivided to complete the build-out of Logan Square. The population peaked five years later at 114,000 (these days it hovers around 82,000), with Poles the largest immigrant group. The neighborhood soon entered a slow downhill slide accelerated by body blows every decade: the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of suburbia. Between 1950 and 1960 more than 22,000 people left the area. Vacant storefronts became common along Fullerton, Diversey, and Milwaukee. In 1941 Logan Square’s business district had been ranked fourth in the city in sale volume; by 1956 it was 15th.
In 1958 the Chicago Human Relations Commission officially announced that lower-income groups in Logan Square were “replacing the older and more affluent residents.” At that time there were plans in the works to build the Crosstown Expressway along California Avenue, which would’ve cut the neighborhood in half. The community was ill-prepared to fight it, but enough others did so that eventually the money was used to build the Orange Line instead. In 1962 the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) organized “to combat community deterioration,” and five years later it boasted of having “either brought up to code or demolished 140 slum buildings.” In the late 1960s subway construction crippled business along Milwaukee; a desperate (and ill-fated) proposal to reroute nonlocal traffic and turn the street into a sort of pedestrian mall between Kedzie and Diversey threatened worse.
Still, Logan Square never faced the abrupt blockbusting and abandonment that devastated parts of the west and south sides. Paul Levin, now executive director of the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, recalls that in 1973 the building on the southeast corner of California and Logan (where Starbucks is now) still housed a full-service drugstore (whose proprietor, Mr. Chelovich, lived around the corner) and a neighborhood grocery. The area appealed to new home-buyers who shared the old-timers’ interest in keeping it up while waiting for city living to become fashionable again.
Delia Perez, now a community organizer in Miami, came to Logan Square from Cuba in 1972, young enough to be terrified of snow and old enough to be delighted that the refrigerator was always full of groceries from Los 4 Caminos (now Tiangus) on Milwaukee. As she recalls, the Poles lived west of Kimball and Cubans on the east, and the twain never met because neither group had mastered English. But a “white power” gang chased Latino kids home from school with fists and baseball bats.
Logan Square was affordable to the Perez family, much as it had been a century earlier for Germans displaced by the fire. But since 1987 the number of home loans in Logan Square has quadrupled and their dollar value has multiplied 20 times. The march of the condos is now visible even to neighborhood outsiders on streets like Diversey. “No plan can stop this tide,” says the Logan Square Neighborhood Association’s May 2005 quality-of-life plan. “Then again, no thoughtful planner would try. Fresh investment can be life’s blood to a healthy neighborhood. But there are ways to meld the old and the new, to make the tapestry more interesting rather than tear it apart, or worse, bleach it to monochrome.”
That won’t be an easy task, but there are signs of progress. In what could be considered a nod to the area’s agricultural past, the chamber of commerce sponsors a weekly farmers’ market (see listings in this section), the first in Illinois to accept payment through the state’s food-stamp program. LSNA’s Intergenerational Art and Garden Project put up a multimedia neighborhood-history installation between the Logan Square subway entrance and the Norwegian Lutheran Church. (“We got tagged twice,” says organizer Rosita De La Rosa, once with a bubble caption saying, “Another condo? I’ll have to move.”) And in what was once wasted space south of the subway, Logan Square Walks has planted the Paseo Prairie Garden, nurturing a few of the native plants Martin Kimbell plowed up 170 years ago.