Wicker Park Then And Now

The last time I visited Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, I was taking a city planning course at the Illinois Institute of Technology back in April of 1972. This was the neighborhood that Chicago author Nelson Algren lived in and wrote about. I can't remember what the project was that I was working on, but still have the photographs, and remember walking around the area. As I recall, the neighborhood was divided by Milwaukee Avenue. One side of the street was filled with stores and restaurants catering to the Polish community, whom Algren wrote about in his novels, and the other side was filled with Hispanic shops and restaurants, representing the more recent members of the community. Whether that meant the area east of Milwaukee was Polish, and the area to the west Hispanic (or vice versa), I have no idea. What I do know is that it has been a long time since I have seen a car with fins, like the one in the photograph on the left. I say time to bring them back.

As you can see from the photograph on the right, many of the homes in this neighborhood were, and no doubt still are, very nice. I honestly don't know if the majority of them were occupied by predominantly Hispanic and Polish people, or if it was a mixture of all ethnic groups, rich and poor. I grew up in the South Side Brainerd neighborhood of Chicago, and the north side of the city, where Wicker Park is located, is for the most part unknown territory for me. I moved to Denver back in 1981, but have still kept up with what is happening back in Chicago via WGN television news, Chicago Magazine, and lately even the Chicago Tribune. And I know that Wicker Park has become pretty upscale. It is fairly close to downtown Chicago, and as I have already mentioned, has very nice homes and apartments. A quick check of the internet shows that condos there cost upwards of half a million dollars, and houses like in the photo now go for well over a million.  And poor Nelson Algren is long gone.

I took the photograph of the kid on the left near the corner of Paulina and Moorman Streets (And yes, I did indeed make notations on the back of some, but not all, of the photographs). And just to be upfront about things, I did indeed use these same photographs in a previous blog, but I can't remember when or what I said about them. And if any of you out there actually remember that post, you must have a photographic memory or are doing some serious research about this blog, which has me worried. After all, I was not even in Washington that day. Honest!