Old Town Chicago Part 1 (April 2023)

Chicago has been my home since 2003. Though I moved back to India in 2022, I maintain a second home in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. As a personal summer project, I explored the neighborhood and have written about it in this series of five posts.

In Chicago, people refer to the neighborhood they stay in. People say they live in Lincoln Park, Ukrainian Village, Lakeview etc. But these are not official designations and do not appear on mailing addresses. This is different from Delhi where I grew up. In Delhi, the name of the neighborhood ( Chanakyapuri, Hauz Khas etc.) is usually a small part of the mailing address (and a BIG part of your social status!).

The Old Town neighborhood is commonly believed to be the area within the boundaries of the streets shown in the sketch below:

Chicago, like many North American cities, is laid out in a grid pattern, with streets running either north-south (N-S) or east-west (E-W). The N-S streets intersect the E-W streets at crossroads with traffic lights. I once heard someone on NPR claim that roundabouts are safer than traffic lights, but I'm skeptical of that. When I first started driving, I was terrified of roundabouts in Lutyens' Delhi—though part of that fear could be due to the way people drive in India. Years later, I faced many roundabouts in the Greater Boston area and felt just as frightened.

The Economist published an article that mentioned that there exists a measurement of how grid-like a city is. Below is the relevant paragraph from the Economist’s December 20, 2022 issue (link to the full article here):

Geoff Boeing of the University of Southern California created a measure of city “entropy”, looking at how consistent the direction of streets in over 100 major cities worldwide is, as well as how continuously they run through any given city without interruption. A measure of zero suggests a city with absolutely no consistent street direction. A measure of one implies a perfect grid, with no interruptions or curves. Chicago hits 0.89, higher than any other city on Earth. London, a city stitched together over millennia from villages on the lines of haphazardly placed Roman, medieval and Victorian thoroughfares, gets just 0.015.

The grid structure of Chicago is a boon for directionally challenged people like myself. I never needed GPS when I drove within the city limits.

Within the boundaries illustrated in the sketch of Old Town above, there are multiple East-West streets (connecting Halsted and Clark) and North-South streets (connecting Division and Armitage). I begin this series by describing some of the major N-S streets. Interestingly, a resident of Old Town, Shirley Baugher, has written a couple of books on the neighborhood. Unfortunately, she died in December 2022. From her obituary, I learnt that apart from being a historian, she was a Cordon Bleu-trained chef.

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N-S Street 1: Wells Street

I start with Wells Street simply because my condo is located there. Besides, when Chicagoans mention going to Old Town, they are usually referring to Wells Street, the neighborhood's main hub for bars and restaurants. I moved to this neighborhood in October 2019, marking the first time I ever lived in a home I owned. Little did I know that, in just a few months, the world would change dramatically with the onset of COVID-19!

There are six arches along Wells Street serving as neighborhood markers:

Plaques on the street describe the history of the neighborhood:

The Old Town neighborhood was settled by Catholic immigrants from Germany in the 1830's. This entire area was marshland and was converted to meadows and gardens by these German farmers. This place got to be known as the Cabbage Patch, possibly because cabbage was one of the crops that was grown here. It is a marvel that these early immigrants could settle in a place where temperatures fall 10 to 15 degrees below zero in the winters. In fact, these German immigrants were not the first inhabitants of the area. Native American tribes lived here and they were removed by the US Federal Government which negotiated and signed the 1833 Treaty of Chicago with the tribal leaders. It gave me goosebumps to realize that the history of my neighborhood mirrored the broader history of the nation.

I started walking from Division street towards Armitage avenue on Wells :

Source: adapted from Google Maps.

The first building of interest is right on the intersection of Wells and Division. It is a liquor store called House of Glunz:

The store was founded by a German immigrant named Louis Glunz in 1888 and still stands today. I can imagine the German farmers of yore stopping by for a tipple after a hard days' work! The interior of the store looks like something straight out of a Charles Dickens novel!

The history of Chicago is inextricably linked to alcohol. In 1920, the US Government made the consumption and manufacture of alcohol illegal. This act is referred to as Prohibition in popular parlance. As one would expect, this spurred the sale of bootlegged alcohol. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 but during this period, Chicago's famous mafia boss, Al Capone, made a fortune supplying alcohol. I read here that the House of Glunz survived prohibition by selling sacramental wine to Catholics and medicinal whiskey to malingerers! The film Untouchables is a somewhat fictionalized account of how Al Capone was eventually convicted (of tax evasion charges!).

Wells Street today is a very gentrified area. Close to the House of Glunz, on the opposite side of the street is a dazzling supermarket that opened in the fall of 2022:

Before Dom's Kitchen & Market, there was another grocery store called Plum Market at this location. I loved Plum Market, but it was quite expensive, so I'm glad there's a more affordable option now. The store is just a 2-minute walk from my condo building (picture of my condo building at 1309 Wells Street below):

As you walk down Wells Street, you will discover that the street's character is bifurcated into two aesthetics. On the Division Street side of the boundary, the buildings are more modern (though not exclusively) like my condo building. But as you walk towards Armitage Avenue, Wells Street looks increasingly European, with low rise buildings.

Today Old Town is very polished but it was quite gritty not very far back. The term gritty is often used for any visual depiction of reality that does not conform to our aesthetic sensibilities. Sex, death, poverty, disease- in modern culture, the animalistic nature of the human condition must be depicted in a way that is pleasing to the eye. In India, when growing up, it was common to see people carrying dead bodies to the cremation ground on a wooden plank. Four people would shoulder the rectangular plank on each side as they walked, chanting in Hindi Ram Nam Satya Hai, which literally translates to Lord Ram's name is the truth. I believe the contention behind the chant is that the Lord's name is the only reality and our physical lives are just an illusion. But now such public sightings of death are rare.

I discovered a gritty fact about my gentrified neighborhood. A building just half a block from my condo, at 1349 North Wells Street, used to be the Bijou Theatre, which showed gay porn. The real action, however, was on the second floor, which had a play area where men could engage in anonymous sex. Below is the picture of this building today:

What’s astonishing is that the establishment only closed in 2015! It turns out that this stretch of Wells Street, where I'm walking, was once Chicago's original gay ghetto, lined with gay bars. As the area became more gentrified, the last of these bars closed in 2013. Today, the gay neighborhood has shifted further from the city center to an area known as Boystown.

Another building of interest right next door to my condo is Cobbler Square.

Cobbler Square has an interesting architectural history. The buildings began construction as early as 1880. This was the site of a shoe factory run by by the company Scholl Inc which later relocated its operations to Tennessee in 1981. This abandoned shoe factory was then converted to a fancy residential condo building. Hence, if you came here today singing Cobbler Cobbler mend my shoe, it is unlikely that your wish will be fulfilled and certainly not by half past two!

One aspect I love about North America is the way street addresses alternate between odd and even numbers on opposite sides of the street. For instance, if you're trying to find Cobbler Square at 1350 North Wells Street, this system helps you quickly determine which side of the street to search once you understand the odd-even pattern.

Also, cars in North America must always be parked facing the direction of traffic. While driving in Chicago, I often encountered suburban drivers unfamiliar with the concept of one-way streets, who would come barreling toward me in the wrong direction. Quite apart from my understandable fear of mortality, I found this behavior exasperating. On streets where traffic flows in both directions, cars are typically parked in both directions. If you only see cars parked in one direction, it’s clear the street is one-way. Hence, I did not see the one-way signage is not an acceptable excuse for driving in the wrong direction.

When I first traveled outside India to the United States, I assumed this parking rule was standard across the Western world. However, my first visit to London proved otherwise. I was startled to see my cab driver driving against the direction of parked cars, and that’s when I realized London does not follow this rule.

A building on Wells, which always brings a smile to my face is the Mexican pub Broken English (which they speak fluently!). The exterior walls of the pub is a mural of cartoonish fat cats:

As is common with many of us, we are more likely to drive miles to a restaurant somewhere in another part of the city than dine at the place right next door. Hence, I have never actually eaten the Mexican street food here. I do think they have a lovely entrance gate:

Another building of historic significance is the Emmel Building at 1357 North Wells:

The Emmel Building (pictured above) has commercial space on the ground floor and residential space on the top two floors. It was built by a German immigrant called Peter Emmel in 1854. According to the Redfin real estate website, it was sold for 2.4 million USD in July 2018! It seems I have some very rich neighbors! The US government maintains a National Register of Historic Places. There are about 95,000 properties listed individually in the register and the Emmel Building is one of them.

An epochal event in the history of Chicago was the Great Chicago Fire which occurred between October 8 and 10 of 1871. Some of the buildings that appear in this narrative, like the Emmel Building, were built before 1871 and were destroyed from the fire. They had to be reconstructed. Popular legend has it that Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocked over a lantern in her barn, which set off the fire. However, there is no definitive proof that this is what happened, though the fire started either in or around the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary.

I retrieved the issue of the Chicago Tribune from October 11, 1871 that reports the fire:

Archives of American newspapers are available digitally for free at the Library of Congress' website. Further, any content older than 95 years has no copyright restrictions.

My favorite part of browsing through the Chicago Tribune archives was the classified ads. Here is a charming ad from a store reassuring its customers that they are not using the Calamity as an excuse for price gouging (notice that "Calamity" is capitalized as a proper noun):

Returning to my walk on Wells Street, one of the most impressive condo buildings is Schiller Place:

There are 39 townhomes within this gated community and they have been selling a bit south of a million dollars. Friedrich Schiller was a well known German playwright who lived in the 18th century. Now that I understand the history of Old Town, I am noticing all the German names of streets and buildings in the neighborhood.

Continuing on Wells, I came across the O' Brien's Clock. This ornate metal clock carries the name of an upscale restaurant, which used to be right next to it but has shut down now. The clock is a beloved landmark of the neighborhood:

A lovely feature of Wells street is the diversity of stores. Of course, you have the usual restaurants, dry cleaners and Starbucks. But there are also off-beat establishments. For instance, a shop devoted to spices!

But my favorite is a cigar shop! This is one of the few places in the world where people can smoke indoors. Although I don't smoke, I’ve always found it to be a glamorous activity, and I can’t help but envy those enjoying a cigar inside this shop.:

There is another store where you can buy vintage posters:

Like I mentioned earlier, Wells Street is the bar and restaurant hub of Old Town:

The whole place comes alive in the night and if you take a walk on a Friday night after 11, inevitably, some happy drunk will come and shake your hand:

Wells Street also has a comedy club. Though I have not seen a show there, I walk by Zanies almost every day:

Wells Street is home to a small 75 seater intimate theater called A Red Orchid Theater as well:

I also love the old fashioned street lights and the way they light up the trees (in the winter, on days when the bare tree branches are laden with snow, the impact of the light shining on snow is just stunning):

One often overlooked feature of Chicago is it's alleys. Below is the picture of an alley that runs behind my condo:

Garbage is disposed off in trash cans placed in the back alleys, from where, the municipality picks it up. In New York, on the other hand, the garbage is placed in the front of the buildings. Hence if you walk around the Times Square area after 9 in the night (as I have done numerous times, in both sober and inebriated states), the whole place stinks. I always thought this was New York's way of telling people I am the greatest city on earth, so if you don't like the smell, too bad! But what I discovered is that New York City developed before alleyways became a feature of town planning in the US. By that time (around 1830s), it was too late for New York to incorporate alleys. You can read here a wonderful essay on this subject.

Chicago's alleys are like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story—often unnoticed and overlooked. There are so many things around us that we don’t notice, and even if we do, we rarely take the time to understand them. However, the environment around us didn’t come about by chance; there is always a reason behind it.

I was reminded of this insight when I couldn’t find any garbage cans on Wells Street. Normally, this would be something I wouldn’t notice, but with no place to discard takeaway coffee cups, it became an issue. This went on for three days before I asked my doorman, who explained that the Chicago Marathon runs through Wells Street, and the police had removed the garbage cans to prevent a Boston Marathon bombing-type attack. It was initially suspected that the Boston bombers had used trash cans to plant their bombs (though this later proved to be incorrect). Sure enough, after the marathon, the garbage cans were back!

The Chicago Marathon takes place in the fall and Wells is one of the streets that closes to traffic because of it. Below is a scene from the marathon on Wells in the fall of 2021:

As mentioned earlier, as you keep walking on Wells towards Armitage, the character of the neighborhood becomes increasingly European. Below is my favorite building on Wells:

How I would love to climb up to those lookout cabins on the top!

There is a lot of red bricks in this part of the Wells Street (below is a condo building) and this stretch of Wells reminded me of the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston:

This brings me to the end of Wells Street. The Old Town stretch of Wells between Division and Armitage is a little less than a mile and can be walked in 15 minutes. But this small stretch has much character and beauty in it. Wells Street is also home to the Old Town Art Fair that occurs every year in August. The art fair dates back to World War 2! Below is a picture of the fair from 2021:

As I was coming to the end of Wells, I noticed that the street ends rather abruptly. Notice the map below carefully on where Wells ends:

The blue line that you see connecting Wells to Armitage is Lincoln Avenue. I previously mentioned that Chicago scored a .89, with 1 representing a perfect grid. The end of Wells Street falls within the 11% deviation from this ideal grid. It’s fascinating that this deviation occurs in the most European part of the street, as European cities are typically not grid-like, which makes sense!

Researching the neighborhood, I stumbled upon a company called Esri. They offer a proprietary household segmentation system called Tapestry, which is widely used by retailers and real estate developers. This system divides the North American population into 67 distinct groups. Stereotyping is alive and well !

Apparently 70% of Old Town residents fall within two Tapestry Profiles: Metro Renters and Laptops & Lattes. It seems that I would fall into the Laptops & Lattes category! In deference to this segmentation system, I ended the trip with a coffee at the Dom Supermarket (it was a black coffee, I am too cheap to buy a Latte'):

It has become fashionable to trash cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco as hubs of crime and dysfunction. The billionaire Ken Griffin relocated his company out of Chicago in 2022 fed up with the rise in crime. Yet, despite their imperfections, these cities possess soul, culture, and beauty. A century from now, they will still stand as some of the world’s greatest cities. Not every city needs to be as orderly as Singapore. We will do well to remember the Orson Welles line from the movie The Third Man:

in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Everything I have documented in this blog is just a 1 mile stretch of one Chicago neighborhood. Does this look like a city in decline!

A small grammatical tangent. The previous sentence is a rhetorical question, hence I have ended it in an exclamation sign rather than a question mark. But not every one agrees with this punctuation. You can actually google whether rhetorical questions should have question marks and there is tonnes of opinion around it!

Click here for part 2 of these Old Town chronicles. I will close this installment with a beautiful dusk view of the neighborhood: