Old Town Chicago Part 5 (May 2023)
- condiscoacademy
- May 26, 2023
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 23, 2024
In this blog series I am exploring the sights and scenes of Old Town, a Chicago neighborhood where I have my second home:
These posts use Google Maps' definition of Old Town as the neighborhood that resides between the boundaries shown between the streets marked yellow below (though many Chicagoans would consider areas close to Armitage Avenue as part of Lincoln Park neighborhood):
Source: adapted from Google Maps
The first three posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of the series described the major North-South streets that connect Division and Armitage. The previous post (Part 4) explored the Old Town Triangle part of the neighborhood. This final post covers the major East-West streets that connect Clark Street to Halsted/ Clybourn.
E-W Street 1: Division Street
Division Street hosts a Saturday farmer's market in the summer. There are several of these pop-up markets in the city across neighborhoods on designated days. The Division Street market is held at the very beginning of it's Old Town stretch (at its intersection with Clark):
Most vegetables and fruits in Illinois get harvested in June, July and August. Hence, while the farmers market on Division runs on Saturdays between May and October, the pickings are slim right now (May).
The area on both sides of Division Street (including the Old Town side) once hosted a public housing project called Cabrini Greens, which consisted of 23 apartment towers and about 600 row houses. By the late 1990s these buildings were demolished, the poor eased out and in came the Laptops and Latte (refer post 1) crowd! The Cabrini Greens housing units opened between 1942 and 1958, as a model to replace slum like housing conditions and providing dignified residence for the poor.
At the turn of the 20th century, the South, despite the abolition of slavery, was a rough place for blacks, who started migrating North in search of a better life. Chicago was one of their top destinations. The Cabrini Greens, named after an Italian nun called Francis Cabrini, was built by the Chicago Housing Authority for these domestic migrants. The project, thus began with a lot of hope. But by late 1970s, Cabrini Greens became infamous for being violent and dangerous. In 1981, Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne moved into Cabrini Greens for 3 weeks as a publicity stunt!
The Cabrini Greens story reminds me of the Mumbai slum Dharavi featured in the movie Slumdog Millionaire (I would love to see the Mayor of Mumbai move into Dharavi for even a week!) :
Source: https://beta.flim.ai/
The Dharavi Resettlement Project has been talked about in India since 2004! India's richest man Gautam Adani won the bid in late 2022. The project is expected to cost more than $ 2 billion and involves resettling nearly 70,000 people! One issue with middle class elites like myself is that we see places like Dharavi and instinctively think that almost any apartment with indoor plumbing would be a less degrading habitat. But for people who live there, it is their home and community. Because so many people are packed together in such a small place, they cannot lead the atomized lives that well-heeled people live. Hence, the people being resettled are quite picky about what they would accept in a new apartment.
The Indian company Tatas learnt this lesson the hard way when they introduced the world's cheapest car Nano for less than $ 2000. Their intent was good. They thought they were offering a safer mode of transportation than a scooter for lower middle class Indian families. But the product never took off. People would rather live in a slum and drive a scooter than opt for homes and cars that they perceive to be cheap.
Interestingly, just as Dharavi was featured in Slumdog Millionaire, Cabrini Greens inspired the 1992 horror movie Candyman:
Source: https://beta.flim.ai/
Back to Division Street, as you start walking towards Halsted, one comes across the Chicago Public Library:
The only time I’ve been inside the library recently was to vote in the US Congress mid-term elections in November 2022. This indifference to a library just a short walk from my condo starkly contrasts with how much libraries meant to me during my childhood and college years. Books were expensive in India relative to our income. In middle school at St. Michael’s, a Jesuit school in my hometown of Patna, we could borrow books from the small library run by Father Cox in his single-room apartment on the school grounds. The authors we had access to included James Herriot and Gerald Durrell whose works have inspired popular TV series. Later, while studying in Delhi, I would change two buses to visit the British Council and American Center libraries. Today, with the ability to buy books from Amazon, it's easy for me to argue that government-run libraries are unnecessary. Yet, I doubt I would have read John Kenneth Galbraith in college without the support of the US government-sponsored American Library.
Walking around Old Town, one notices how many parks there are all around. The William Seward Park is a huge green space on one side of Division Street:
And even though this part of the city is very well developed, there are large unused tracts of land like the one below:
People move to the cities for hustle. These parks and empty spaces urge its residents to slow down. A reminder that all destinations are futile and the path we take is all that matters.
E-W Street 2: North Avenue
As mentioned in the previous post, the name North Avenue is misleading because it runs East West. The street also has the distinction of bifurcating Old Town by running through its center.
North Avenue hosts a beloved neighborhood landmark, the Old Town Ale House:
The Old Town Ale House is a dive bar. Wikipedia defines a dive bar as below:
typically a small, unglamorous, eclectic, old-style drinking establishment with inexpensive drinks; it may feature dim lighting, shabby or dated decor, neon beer signs, packaged beer sales, cash-only service, and a local clientele
You know a dive bar when you walk into it. Despite living less than a mile away from the ale house, I was not aware of its importance in Chicago culture. The bar is the setting of a book (Last Night at the Old Town Ale House), whose foreword has been written by none other than Anthony Bourdain, who featured it in his TV show! The author (Bruce Elliot) is a Chicago based artist (who now also owns the bar) and the book recounts the tales of some of the bar regulars.
In contrast to India, where I was raised, the neighborhood bar plays a significant role in the social landscape of American cities. In my hometown of Delhi, there are bars in residential areas, but they aren't truly neighborhood bars where people share intimate details of their lives with the bartender. This difference, I believe, stems from the fact that in India, the primary unit of social interaction is the family rather than the individual. Neighborhood bars typically exist in environments where adults are single and not part of a family structure. More broadly, in India, the self is always relational; one's identity is defined by a network of relationships—son, brother, nephew, friend, and so on. Man is a social animal but the human being is also a lonely creature who finds himself thrown from the mother's womb into a random universe and must contend with the existence of a brain that can constantly conjure up frightening future states.
This website describes a framework to describe the self. I prefer the definitions given by the guest on this podcast, which is:
The secret self consists of things about yourself which you do not want anyone to know
The private self consists of things about yourself that you are willing to share with someone you are deeply comfortable with
The public self consists of things about yourself that you are willing to share even with casual acquaintances
The relational self in India is mostly the public self, which is carefully contrived and crafted. In India, even children mostly present their public selves to their parents. But when you walk into a dive bar, you are more willing to present your private self to strangers and perhaps, after a few drinks, even the secret self (that is usually a signal to call it a night!).
The Chicago Bar Project, which bills itself as a bunch of drinkers with a writing problem, has a lovely review of the Old Town Ale House. Given everything I read about it, I had to go inside for a drink. The things we have to do for research...sigh!
The wall of the bar has portraits of various regular patrons (all with their secret, private and public selves!):
Right opposite the ale house is another Chicago landmark:
The banner above is missing the apostrophe for Piper's Alley, a small low rise indoor mall, which opened in 1965. I have seen movies at the cinema that used to reside there but sadly, has shut down. The building gets its name from a bakery called Piper's Bakery that existed at the site before the mall opened. By now, I can recognize a pattern on how the new acknowledges the old in Old Town. I saw numerous examples of this throughout this series. For instance,
the Cobbler Square condos that stand on the site of a shoe factory
the Old Town Market storefront which is actually an apartment
the facade of the Germania Theater on a building that now consists of condos
the Schmidt Mitzgerei building, which is no longer a butcher shop
the Old Town Triangle, where one side of the triangle (Ogden Avenue) no longer exists
A thought experiment that I like is the Ship of Theseus. If every part of a ship is over time replaced by new parts over years as a result of routine maintenance, then, is it still the same ship? It seems to me that Old Town, in its 150 years' history has changed once disruptively (the 1871 fire) but mostly incrementally. The Old Town of today is probably not the same neighborhood it was at the dawn of the 20th century. Yet, I wonder if there remains an essence that has stayed the same.
We ourselves are like the Ship of Theseus. We are constantly changing, both biologically and psychologically. But there seems to be something essential about us, which does not change. If you are lucky enough to have a close friend from your childhood, you would notice that there is something essential about them. And since we recognize that unchanging essential in a world that constantly seems to be eluding our grasp, we love them dearly.
Piper's Alley is home to Chicago's famous comedy club Second City:
The name itself refers to Chicago. I always thought that Chicago is the second city with New York being the first. However, it seems there are two alternative explanations for the name. In one explanation, it is alluding to the second avatar of the city that emerged from the ashes of the 1871 fire. The other explanation is what I believed-that Chicago was competing with New York for pre-eminence but was always relegated to the second place. In 1952, an essayist called AJ Liebling published a series of snarky articles under the title Second City, about Chicago in the New Yorker magazine, comparing it unfavorably to his hometown New York. The Second City theatre took this self-depreciating name when it opened in 1959.
E-W Street 3: Armitage Avenue
While North Avenue tricks the observer by assuming a misleading name, Armitage Avenue confounds with its pronunciation. It is actually pronounced as army tidge. Along with Division, it forms one of the North-South boundaries of Old Town. At the intersection of Armitage and Clark is a somewhat strange sculpture:
I tried to find more about it unsuccessfully. Prior to cultivating the intentionality required for writing about the neighborhood, I could walk by without noticing the buildings and artifacts around me. However, the practice of paying attention made me realize that our environment is created with a certain degree of intentionality, regardless of whether the design is aesthetically or functionally pleasing.
The significance of how intentional design choices impact us became especially clear to me when I was entering a grocery store with a takeaway coffee in hand—an experience quintessentially American. I wondered how I would manage to shop while holding my hot coffee until I noticed a coffee-cup holder built into the grocery store cart:
The coffee cup holder was not placed there at random. Somebody reflected on the grocery shopping habits of Americans (though the standard warning on carts not to place toddlers in it may be for legal reasons!). In fact, the coffee cup itself is designed to insulate your grip from the heat.
Strangely, an example of bad design was also brought home to me because of coffee. This time I was sitting in a coffee shop on the below chair:
There seems nothing wrong with the chair except that the extra button sewed to my back trouser pocket got caught in it and the barista had to come with scissors to cut it off! Most embarrassing! And it was not a freak accident either because my other trouser back pocket got caught in it too but luckily this time I was able to tear myself off the chair. Bad design choice (the chair or the trouser button?)!
Armitage Avenue is a mix of residential and condo buildings. Like all other streets outside the core downtown area, Armitage Avenue is replete with an ubiquitous design feature-the wooden back porch:
Simpatico with my earlier observation on intentional design, these back porches serve a utilitarian purpose. They are in response to a building code requirement that every residence has a second exit in case of a fire. In high rise buildings, this requirement is met via two fire exit stairways. It is somewhat ironic though that the porches meant to protect us in a fire are made of wood!
When I first came to the US in 2003, porches in Chicago were in the news for an unfortunate reason. Not very far from Armitage Avenue, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, a porch hosting a party collapsed. Thirteen people died and many more were injured. Ever since then, I have steered clear of wooden porches. On a different note, there are so many words we use interchangeably: porch, balcony, terrace, veranda, patio, deck! I wonder whether there are subtle differences between them or are they purely synonyms.
Finis
I moved to Old Town in October 2019, six months before Covid changed the world. I moved here because I loved the neighborhood. But in retrospect, I knew very little about. It is only now four years later through the act of chronicling the neighborhood that I discovered its treasures and have a whole new level of admiration for its charms. When people visit Chicago, they want to see the iconic skyscrapers, the lakefront, the Bean at the Millennium Park, Wrigley Field, the Mag Mile, the river walk, the museum district etc. Chicago has an embarrassment of riches and all these landmarks are absolutely worth visiting. But visitors should spare at least half a day for one of the neighborhoods. It is like stepping from the living room to the inner quarters of a person's home.
I will sign off this series with where I began: one of the iconic arches on Wells Street:
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