Old Town Chicago Part 3 (May 2023)

In this blog series I am exploring the sights and scenes of Old Town, a Chicago neighborhood where I have my second home:

I am currently exploring the North-South streets of Old Town, which connect the Division and Armitage street boundaries of the neighborhood. Prior blogs covered Wells and Clark. In this installment, I will traverse the streets shown below:

Source: adapted from Google Maps

N-S Street 3: LaSalle Drive

LaSalle Drive is a wide street with a big concrete divider in between:

The Old Town stretch is labeled as LaSalle Drive, but in other parts of the city, it is called LaSalle Street. Chicago roads typically use the suffixes Street or Avenue, with a few Boulevards, Courts, and Drives. Many years ago, when I traveled to Milan for work, the main office was located on Corso Venezia, while a smaller office was on Via Borghetto. "Corso" referred to major roads, while "Via" was used for most streets. Unlike English, where road types are suffixes, in many European countries, the common noun is used as a prefix to the proper noun, such as the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

It's intriguing how associations work in our minds. Here I was in Chicago, recalling a minor detail from a decade ago. The nature of memory is indeed idiosyncratic. When a friend of mine passed away from lung cancer, I wrote an essay about our 15-year friendship. As I wrote, my memories of her felt like a blur. I clearly remembered the very first time we met, despite the mundane nature of that meeting, and the last time I saw her as she departed on a train from Stamford, Connecticut. However, the memories in between were fragmented and lacked chronological order. I couldn’t place them on a timeline—was the trip to Devil's Lake in Wisconsin before or after our meeting in Minneapolis? I had no idea!

Someone said on a podcast that the past is the present perfected. When we think of the past, we tend to photoshop away it's imperfections. For this reason, nostalgia always finds an audience. Speaking for myself, remembering the past always makes me sad because it reminds me of the transient nature of all phenomena.

The past is impossible to recreate, even though much of politics revolves around idealizing an imagined glorious past. For example, when we were kids, there was a soft drink brand in India called Campa Cola, which is now being revived by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. However, even if Campa Cola tastes exactly the same today, it won’t offer the same experience. Back in the 1980s, my family had fewer resources, and buying a soft drink was a special treat. Today, it would merely be another mindless dose of sugar.

Getting back to the subject of this narrative, it is appropriate that LaSalle Drive in Old Town has a large road divider because the two sides of the street have a very different character. One side (the east side) has high rise and mid rise buildings with a modern character:

The west side of LaSalle is full of old school quaint buildings (example below):

According to the real estate website Redfin, the house above sold for $361,000 in July 1996. Today, as per Redfin, it's estimated value is above 2 million. Real estate websites in the US publish an estimated price at the unit level. You can go to Zillow or Redfin and see the value of your home. But I am not sure how accurate it is. There are so many known unknowns. For instance, they do not know of the renovations the homeowner has done. The house above last traded in 1996 and hence, almost 3 decades have gone by without an empirically observable price.

The Old Town neighborhood is filled with homes (like the one above) which are outside my budget. Every time I walk by them, I feel a sense of envy and then wonder about the lives of the people who live in them. What human drama is unfolding behind them? Would I be willing to trade every life experience of theirs with mine if I got the house in bargain?

LaSalle Drive also houses the gym I use, which is a convenient five minute walk from my condo:

I started going to the gym when I became a working professional. I used to be very thin. Going back to my earlier observation on the idiosyncratic nature of memory, for some reason, my weight around that time is permanently etched into my mind. My weight was 55 kilograms (121 pounds), which was low for a 5 foot 10 male. While women are judged for being overweight, men are discounted for being underweight. At least, that is how I felt. Around that time, I read John Sculley's book From Pepsi to Apple, in which he describes this exact same problem. He writes how he used to hit the gym after a hard day's work when he started his career as a trainee at a Pepsi bottling plant. As a young whippersnapper MBA, he was trying to win the respect of his blue collar colleagues at the bottling plant. I was greatly inspired by this and have remained committed to going to the gym, though these days it is often to lose weight!

On a related note, language is incredibly powerful. The act of writing or speaking can inspire people to make meaningful, even radical, changes in their lives. Here I was in India, finding inspiration from John Sculley, who is better known for firing Steve Jobs from Apple.

N-S Street 4: Sedgwick Street

While LaSalle and Wells (Blog 1) are both major streets, they do not last for the entire stretch of Old Town. But Sedgwick, like Clark (Blog 2) connects the Division and Armitage boundaries of Old Town all the way.

A pleasant discovery for me was that the Old Town neighborhood is dotted with micro parks. I had always envisioned parks as grand green spaces, like Lincoln Park in Chicago, Central Park in NYC, or Lodhi Gardens in Delhi. However, parks can also be small, beautifully landscaped green spaces, like Ella Jenkins Park at the intersection of Sedgwick and Wisconsin streets:

I had to google Ella Jenkins, not knowing who she was. She is a renowned songwriter and musician who specializes in performing for children. She was born in 1924 and is still alive in 2023. In her Wikipedia biography it is mentioned that she travelled through the country performing at various school assemblies and endured racial discrimination in her travels. This image of a peripatetic Ella reminded me of a remarkable movie called The Green Book.

The Green Book, also known as The Negro Motorist Green Book, was a travel guide for African Americans published between 1936 and 1966. Its purpose was to help black travelers find businesses—from hotels to barbershops—that would serve them without degrading their humanity. Interestingly, Victor Hugo Green, who started the book, worked as a postal carrier after returning from World War I. He conceived the idea for the book based on his own experiences during his postal routes. Mr. Green was named after the famous French author, Victor Hugo. It’s moving to reflect that by naming their child after a renowned author, his parents chose not to internalize the hateful messages of a racist society. Nothing is more enchanting about human existence than the dreams parents have for their new born babies. And nothing more poignant than their fear about who will care for their children after their death, even when children have become old adults. The ability of human beings to love from an imagined state beyond the grave is ennobling.

I spent some time sitting in the park, enjoying the pleasant weather and solitude:

Talking of discrimination, it seems Sedgwick Street is a victim of it! The Ella Jenkins Park's official address is listed as the intersecting street (Wisconsin Street). If that is not bad enough, the same treatment is meted out to another landmark on Sedgwick Street-the LaSalle Language Academy. The usurper this time is Orleans, which runs parallel to Sedgwick and forms one of the institution's boundary. LaSalle Language Academy is actually a full-fledged school within the Chicago Public School system (unlike the Latin School mentioned in the previous post, which is a private school) and what I was seeing on the Sedgwick Street side was the sizable school playground:

The school's name reflects its strength in teaching foreign languages to students. A regret I have is not continuing with Spanish classes, which I pursued for over a year. Learning Spanish seemed to activate different cognitive skills in my brain. A language is full of mysteries for the learner. For example, the Spanish word derecha has the same two meanings as its English counterpart: derecha de intimidad means 'right to privacy,' while a la derecha means 'to the right.' I believe this similarity is not mere happenstance.

While Sedgwick Street lost out to other streets on the park and the school, it proudly hosts the Sedgwick Station on the Chicago transit system:

Sedgwick Street is also home to low income housing in the form of Marshall Field Garden Apartments:

The apartments are kept affordable through a public private partnership.

A school, a park, a train station and low income housing-Sedgwick is certainly the workhorse street of Old Town.

N-S Street 5: Cleveland Avenue

While Sedgwick seeks to be useful, Cleveland Avenue just seeks to be beautiful. What else could explain these triplets below (even the sky cooperated to add to a vivid image):

Earlier, I had mentioned that as you move towards the Armitage boundary of Old Town, the neighborhood becomes more European. In fact, there is one road that marks a very clear demarcation between the two. Confusingly, the road is called North Avenue (see below in red):

Source: adapted from Google Maps

The name North Avenue is confusing because it actually runs East-West! The Division side of the North Avenue divide is more North American and less upscale (needless to say I live on this side). The Armitage side of the North Avenue divide is more upscale and European. The Armitage side of Cleveland Avenue is just a row of beautiful homes:

A curious building is 1810 North Cleveland Avenue:

The ground floor of the building appears to be a neighborhood grocery store. In fact, it was for decades since 1886. But now, the ground floor is an apartment that recreates the old facade and lettering as a tribute to it's history. I did not know this and was in fact planning to go in to buy a bottle of water. Luckily, I did not. I probably would have frightened the apartment dweller, though I am sure many others make the same mistake.

A store which is not a store! Reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock's concept of McGuffin, which is an object that appears to be central to a story but it does not exist. For instance in Psycho- spoiler alert- Norman Bates' mother does not exist. The term McGuffin derives from a British joke about two men traveling on a train, in which one man is carrying a parcel and the other man wants to know what is inside the parcel. There are many versions of the joke but in Hitchcock's telling of it, the man replies that the parcel contains an apparatus called McGuffin, which is used to trap lions in the Scottish Highlands. The other man remonstrates that there are no lions in Scotland, to which the parcel carrier responds that then there is no McGuffin!

N-S Street 6: Larrabee Street

Just like Cleveland and Sedgwick, Larrabee Street also reflects the industrial-boutique divide between the Division and Armitage sides of North Avenue. The Armitage side houses a beautiful community garden called the Fire Station Park behind a Chicago Fire Department station:

This green space is maintained by the neighborhood community organization. I read that anyone can pick up herbs and vegetables grown here to take home for cooking!

The Division side of Larrabee seemed a bit grotty to me. There were hardly any people on the street, which made me a little nervous. But in case I was attacked, help was at hand in the form of Shaolin Kung Fu:

N-S Street 7: Halsted Street

Finally, I landed on Halsted Street, which forms one of the boundary N-S streets of Old Town (the other being Clark). Halsted is the second longest street in Chicago (Western Avenue being the longest) and houses such illustrious Chicago neighborhoods as Bridgeport (a working class neighborhood), Boystown (known for its LGBTQ nightlife) and Wrigleyville (home to Wrigley Field baseball stadium owned by the beloved Chicago Cubs). Halsted Street captures the famous North-South divide in Chicago. The South side is supposed to be the real part of Chicago while the North side (where Old Town is) is the yuppie and pretentious part. Halsted, being such a long street, cuts across both north and south sides of the city.

The Old Town stretch of Halsted is a relatively small subset of this long street. But it packs quite a punch! Walking from Division towards Armitage on Halsted, one soon comes across a large modern shopping complex, which also houses an AMC multiplex:

I observed murals on the Halsted street facing facade of one of the corner buildings in the complex:

On getting closer, I learnt that each of these murals were numbered and represent a movie:

These illustrations were created digitally by art students of Chicago's Columbia College and installed here. Students had been asked to create posters inspired by a movie that had won the Best Picture at Oscars but without using any text. Passers by are encouraged to post a picture on Instagram and guess the name of the movie to be eligible for a reward. I am guessing mural 1 above is the Titanic.

A charming facet of Old Town is how the old and the new coexist in aesthetic harmony. Just a a little ahead of the modern shopping complex is an old building with a mysterious epigraph Zangerle (1538 North Halsted):

The building's epigraph refers to Alfred Zangerle, who immigrated from Austria (in consonance with the German roots of Old Town) in mid 1880s and moved into this building in 1900 after his wedding.

The Old Town stretch of Halsted also hosts the famous Steppenwolf Theater:

Opposite Steppenwolf is another theater that closed permanently during the pandemic:

The city government was proposing to repurpose the Royal George into an apartment building. However, it is being opposed by residents of the neighborhood. This is part of the broader NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem of housing in America. People support the cause of affordable housing until somebody tries to build in their neighborhood. Then they complain about all the urban problems of traffic and parking the new development will bring. People are probably afraid that the value of their existing property will go down if supply increases and find excuses to oppose net new residential construction.

I was at the end of my Old Town excursion for the day. Click on this link for the next installment. I will sign off with a picture of the Chicago skyline from the pier at North Avenue beach. The pier is actually located a mile outside the Old Town neighborhood, but like President Xi Jinping, I dispense with the niceties of respecting borders, especially if it is just a few miles of adjoining territory!