Category: Neighborhood News

It seems the most unlikely of combinations: single-room-occupancy hotels, those holding pens for the John Hinckleys and Travis Bickles of the world, and not-for-profit organizations, those bastions of goody-goodyism. Yet such a combination has emerged on the north side, and it may represent a new direction for Chicago in the provision of low-income housing. Acting […]

Outside the windows of the Truman College cafeteria, as a balmy breeze wafts through the trees, tennis players and softball swatters congregate, enjoying one of the gentler, more peaceful days of spring. But inside the stuffy cafeteria of the Uptown junior college, it’s all work for 200 or so north-side activists getting down to the […]

No one is certain exactly whose idea it was, but it seemed an unassailably good one. Retail sales were slumping at the Oak Park Mall. By the end of last year its rising retail vacancy rate topped 20 percent, as almost all of its major anchors–Lytton’s, Wieboldt’s, and Marshall Field’s–had closed shop by then. Isn’t […]

It’s only 7:30 in this teachers’ lounge; the morning’s first cups of coffee have barely been drained, but already the teachers are outraged. The teachers at this northwest-side high school are grumbling bitterly about petty rules, dictatorial bosses, lousy wages, and a public that just doesn’t care. “We’re out here on the front lines,” says […]

For the workers at Stewart-Warner, the signs of doom were evident long before the company made it official that cold winter day in 1985. “We propose to transfer the remainder of the Alemite pump assembly to [our facility] in Johnson City, Tennessee,” read the January 31 letter from the director of personnel at Stewart-Warner Corporation. […]

When Robert Shaw–alderman of the Ninth Ward–rises to speak, most of the wise guys in the City Hall pressroom put aside their pencils and just listen. It’s not that Shaw is particularly erudite, even by the standards of the City Council. But there’s no denying the man is downright entertaining. “He’s a self-contained Barnum and […]

In the beginning, Richard Taub recalls, it was just an idea passed to him over the backyard fence by his next-door neighbor. Ronald Grzywinski, the neighbor, and several of his friends and colleagues–Milton Davis, Mary Houghton, Jim Fletcher, and Michael Bennett chief among them–had a vision: they were going to buy the South Shore Bank, […]

If all goes well, the planners say, in a year, maybe two, the bulldozers will come and level the old neighborhood. By that time the residents, mostly working-class blacks, will have been “relocated.” And then–hooray–the White Sox will stay in Chicago, playing baseball in a brand new $120 million stadium built at the public’s expense […]

Gail Smith, a lawyer, needed a few thousand dollars to help incarcerated mothers keep custody of their children, but she didn’t know where to look. For one thing, it was not a popular cause. This was in 1985–at the height of Ronald Reagan’s popularity–when most people seemed more bent on cracking the heads of lawbreakers […]

It’s not a very large neighborhood. The major distinction of the eight-block area that runs southwest from the corner of North and Wells is that it has stubbornly resisted large-scale redevelopment for over 30 years. Tucked between middle-class Sandburg Village and destitute Cabrini-Green, this neighborhood of mainly poor and working-class families has resisted social, political, […]

The trustees of Winnetka probably did not realize it, but with little fanfare or celebration they unleashed a revolution last October. Of course, that was not their intention. Instead, the seven-member village board was merely approving what looked like a rather mundane proposition to outlaw bicycle traffic on the “Ravine”–a winding stretch of Sheridan Road […]

Before the landlord’s notice came, Rosemary Winblad and her two daughters lived comfortably and affordably in a well-managed federally subsidized apartment building at 833 W. Buena in Uptown. Then came the jolt: an immediate rent increase of 20 percent, on top of last year’s hike of 10 percent, with warnings of unspecified raises to follow. […]

As a research librarian at the Newberry Library, David Thackery has watched for years as patrons–most of them old and retired–slowly but steadily combed pages and pages of census ledgers, legal documents, and manuscripts in search of the past. They are, in effect, private investigators, unpaid but hardworking, tracing their families’ roots from Chicago and […]

Before Eddie Vrdolyak tried to make party-switching a movement and before Harold Washington even became elected mayor, Walter Dudycz decided he was so sick of the antics of the local Democratic Party that he would run for alderman as a Republican on Chicago’s northwest side. Dudycz, an athletic veteran of the Chicago Police Department, entered […]

In a few days or so, the good citizens of Hyde Park–doctors, lawyers, architects, professors, more lawyers, and other educated, cultivated people–will gather together as they have before to discuss, calmly and rationally, the leading issue of the day. If this meeting follows the pattern voices will rise, followed, maybe, by emotional accusations. The whole […]