Sweet Home Chicago: A Personal Geography
There it is! Chicago, a world-class city, home to an international community of people. As you
fly into O’Hare International Airport, you approach Lake Michigan east of the city, then the skyscrapers
of the Chicago skyline, perhaps seeing the “Bean” of Millennium Park or one of the world’s largest
fountains, Buckingham Fountain. You might notice the one red building of the skyline where my dad
worked as an accountant. Next, heading northwest through the city along the Dan Ryan expressway,
you pass the remains of housing projects and U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox (boo).
From the plane, you might see the giant, red lips of the Magikist sign. Next, you will linger over the
Kennedy/Edens junction, two expressways, merging together like spaghetti. If you knew the area, you
might notice an area of forest preserve with names like Labaugh Woods and Bunker Hill, as well as a
couple golf courses, Billy Caldwell and Edgebrook, familiar places of my youth.
As you approach O’Hare, without knowing it, you might see my high school along the highway,
beige-bricked William Howard Taft High School with Norwood Park with its pool and ball fields, where I
watched my brother play T-ball.
Ahead you would see the nearby suburb of Rosemont (long rumored to have mafia connections)
with its new casino and the All-State Arena, formerly called the Rosemont Horizon, home of all-star
concerts and sporting events. Very near Rosemont is the place where American Airline Flight 191
crashed in May, 1975, killing all 258 passengers aboard. Having lived near O’Hare, it was common to see
a whole line-up of planes along the Kennedy Expressway, awaiting permission to land, looking like a
string of stars like the Big Dipper. We often would experience the shadows and booms and roars of
planes, interrupting conversations we might be having on the sidewalks in front of our house when I was
growing up in my little ethnic community of Norwood Park.
The area known as Norwood Park is nearly as far north and west as you can live within the city
limits of Chicago. Our neighborhood has boundaries of Harlem and Higgins Avenues on the west and
north, and Foster and Nagle Avenues on the south and east. The Kennedy Expressway, Illinois 90, roars
nearby as well as the Blue Line of the “el” (short for elevated) even though it rides along the ground at
this point in its journey. At other points along its way, it goes underground (a subway), and at still
others, it is perched on top of tall, iron beams (the elevated). The Kennedy is where I first learned to
drive, merging into traffic, hoping other cars would just give way and not really knowing what I was
doing. Higgins Avenue is the closest “busy street”, a street lined with taverns (bars), little ethnic stores
and some businesses where is seems like no one ever works, leaves or enters.
My family had been in Chicago for five or six generations on my Dad’s side and three or four on
my Mom’s. All four of my grandparents came to the Logan Square area of Chicago in the 1920’s and the
1930’s for various reasons. My mother’s parents came to Chicago from Norway like many immigrants
for a better life, and they met at the church I grew up in. My Dad’s mother came to Chicago for nursing
school in the 1930’s from South Dakota. She met my Grandpa in church also, which was pastored by my
Grandma’s brother-in-law. My Grandpa was raised in that church, and his family had been in Chicago
for several generations.
“Home” for me on Balmoral came about forty years after these events. Having been raised in
the same multi-ethnic church (four language groups) with all my grandparents, we had moved around
the area, always staying close enough to the church, which was the center of our lives and relationships.
We had been living in the northwest suburbs prior to this, but the distance between us and the church
prohibited us from being as involved as we could have been. My parents made the decision to move
back into the city. My Dad worked also worked downtown, so this cut down on his daily commute and
allowed him to take public transportation to get to work each day.
There is a story connected to the house I called “home”. My Dad wanted us to move back into
the city. My sister and I wanted us to move back into the city. We thought the suburban kids were
stuck up. But my Mom did not want to give up our suburban life. Mom’s parents and most of the
people she grew up with had homes in the suburbs. Dad’s family mainly lived in Chicago, the city or in
other large cities. We (and I include myself) were always “city folk”.
So every weekend, Dad dragged us to the city to look at available homes for sale. He especially
wanted a home on the “Circle” of Old Norwood Park. Old Norwood Park is on the other side of the
Kennedy Expressway from the house we settled on. I used to walk our dog Cookie there, crossing the
expressway, admiring the large and old, wooden homes, looking like mansions, leftover Queen Anne or
Victorian homes with wooden wrap-around porches. Mom didn’t care for them. Most of them needed
work, and she knew Dad did not have the skills or the time to invest in home repair.
Eventually they settled on a little bungalow at 6963 W. Balmoral. We seemed fairly isolated for
being a few blocks from the expressway and about two blocks away in any direction from a busy street
with restaurants, places of business and bars. We were within blocks of two churches, one St. Monica’s
Catholic Church and Norwood Park Evangelical, a Protestant church shared with a Korean congregation.
Predominantly a Catholic area, I felt very much an outsider being one of the few Protestants I knew in
school. The neighborhood consisted of mostly Polish, Russians and Italians, historically mainly Catholic.
In 1979, due to the number of Poles in our area, Pope John Paul II paid a visit to Chicago, and his
motorcade traveled down Milwaukee Avenue and stopped in nearby Jefferson Park at what is now the
Polish Cultural Center.
I lived in a working class neighborhood, yet my dad was a white-collar worker. In our house,
education was important, but it wasn’t seen as such by our community. Hard work was an important
value. Most of the people I knew were honest, hard-working people. I know I am loud as were most of
the people I knew. Often, we talk all at once, getting louder to speak over others. My children think it is
funny, but this seems normal to me. Most people speak in Chicago-ese, “dese” and “dose”, “da Bears”,
etc. Everyone speaks nasally. People tend to be gruff on the outside and teddy bears on the inside,
especially men.
It was in this little community that I had several paper routes. The first was north of Harlem
Avenue in what is known as Harwood Heights. This is very near the home where serial killer John Wayne
Gacy killed and buried 31 boys within the walls of his house. As a teenage boy myself, I found the news
story very disturbing. As I sat on the floor, rolling up my newspapers to deliver each day, I looked at the
pictures of the police searching his house for more bodies. Since his house was located less than a mile
away, I decided to ride my bike past the house to have a look. I did this many times over the next couple
months. They were taking the house apart piece by piece and digging all over the yard. There were
always people watching including journalists and camera crews. I did not tell my parents where I had
bee. I thought they wouldn’t like that I had gone there.
For at least two year, I delivered newspapers: a local paper (“The Northwest Side Press”), and
later two big Chicago papers, the “Trib” and the Sun-Times. This I did during Chicago’s two worst
winters on record, 1978 and 1979. In the area immediately south of the route in Harwood Heights, I
delivered papers the longest, and I delivered papers between Foster, Harlem and Higgins. I had to
collect the money from the customers in the afternoons and evenings. Here is where I began to learn a
lot about other cultures and about life in general. Women in house dresses would answer the door with
curlers in their hair. Various smells of foods and spices I knew I had never experienced before wafted
through the house and out the door. Foreign accents spoke of countries and ways of life far different
than my own. I entertained my family later with my versions of their accents.
It was during this time that without knowing it, I passed the landmarks which would later inspire
the experiences that would become the movie and musical Grease. It was after I moved away and
married that I read about Jim Jacobs, the writer of Grease. He wrote of houses and restaurants which
later became iconic parts of the Grease phenomenon. Parse’s hot dog stand was on my route and
behind it a small auto mechanic’s garage became the 50’s soda fountain and the home of the song
“Grease Lightning”. When I think of how small and insignificant these places look, it is rather startling
and disappointing. The inspiration for Danny Zucko, John Travolta’s character, lived less than a block
from my home. When I think about it, all the names in the movie are either Polish or Italian names,
basically representing the ethnic make-up of my neighborhood. These places are within a stone’s throw
of Schultz’s Hardware (German), Harczak Sausage (Polish deli), a Cantonese restaurant, two Taiwanese
restaurants and Dino’s Pizza (Italian). Signs outside these places were often in both English and their
respective languages. I learned to think this was the way things were everywhere.
As I grew older and saved up money, I was able to make my first big purchase, my very own 26inch, ten-speed Schwinn bike. It was orange with the thinnest of tires. It would be an antique now, but I
can picture the curved handlebars like ram’s horns, the small, black seat hardly big enough for my butt,
the thin tires, pulled around by a chain tightened with a derailleur which allowed for the change of ten
different speeds. I rode this bike, mainly alone, all over the city. One of my favorite rides was from my
house to my aunt and uncle’s house near Riis Park, a favorite place of my childhood. This ride was
several miles, and I tried taking as many side streets as I could, but I still ended up crossing many “busy
streets”.
I began by heading east on Higgins, the main street near my house. When I crossed at the two
lights of Nagle and then Foster Avenue, I headed south, taking a right turn on one of the side streets. I
took this route past the all-familiar Chicago bungalow and two-flat housing, mostly brown or tan brick.
Some of these streets, if full of parked cars, were very narrow and tricky to maneuver around, especially
when typically a car would stop and wait to pick up someone in the middle of the street.
To the south of us and slightly east, cars might pass the Mount Olive Cemetery, surrounded by
big, cement arches and tall, wrought-iron fences, the home of many of my dead relatives and other
Scandinavian people, many of them familiar, people I knew growing up in church. There are also
sections of Italians and newer sections where Hispanic families are burying their dead, some of them
young and possible victims of gang violence. These newer graves are covered with sophisticatedly
laminated photographs and ornate flower arrangements. When my Dad’s mother was buried there in
1977, the cemetery was more sparsely populated. Her stone was flat to the ground and modest
compared to the more ostentatious, more recent graves.
I would eventually arrive at my aunt and uncle’s house in a neighborhood more Italian in makeup. Riis Park, near their home, had its very own bocce ball playing area where old, Italian men played,
none of them speaking English, and young Hispanics played soccer, again with little English to be heard.
As I continued to get older, my boundaries enlarged, and I was allowed to explore other
neighborhoods of the city, all of some certain ethnic origin. Chicago is home to people from nearly
every country in the world with newspapers written in people’s original tongue, restaurants boasting
succulent, foreign menus, stores selling ingredients not to be found anywhere else. I rode the bus and el
throughout the city, watching people, listening to the many dialects and languages of the world,
wondering how and why people came to Chicago.
The “el” is central to my view of Chicago. Basically, I grew up riding it, first from Jefferson Park
and later they built a station at Harlem. Mainly, I rode the el to Garrett’s Popcorn Shop on Randolph
Street when it was across the street from Marshall Field’s Department store (alas, it is no longer
Marshall Fields, but Macy’s). I used to take the el with my sister to church, getting of the California
station, to take piano lessons. I can hear the conductor’s calling off the various stops and transfer
points.
Many late nights, dark with the warm, orange glow of the city lights, buzzing, I walked about
two blocks at 10:30 at night from Garrett’s Popcorn Shop on Randolph, across from the renowned
Marshall Field’s Department Store. I could see the signs for the Greyhound bus terminal, Walgreens, the
famous marquis for the Chicago Theater, but the glamour ended there as I passed old, drunken men
curled in a fetal position in doorways or asking for a few coins. I did not look at them, but walked with a
purpose towards the stairway to the Blue Line subway near Daley Plaza that would carry back to Harlem
and my home.
As I think now of all this, I grew up in a very multi-cultural world. And the assumption was that if
you were not born in a foreign country, your parents or grandparents were. Everyone came from
somewhere other than the U.S. My family and most of the people we knew were obsessed with
nationality. It was like a game. “What nationality are you?” “What kind of name is that?” “Do you
think she is Polish? …Italian?” People always talked about “this is how we do it in my country”. It
wasn’t that we weren’t proud of being American, but much of our identity and pride centered on our
country of origin.
Most people we knew belonged to a larger ethnic community that had its own neighborhood in
the city or their people were spread across the city, but they came together in cultural organizations or
churches where they kept their traditions intact. One of my best friends from high school, Frank,
belonged to a German Club, and he worked at a German meat market, Schmiezer’s. Often, nearly every
weekend, they gathered together to eat German food and dance. My family belonged to a historically
Norwegian church where we celebrated Norwegian Independence day (May 17), participating in a
parade, wearing traditional Norwegian apparel and eating traditional Norwegian food. At Christmas, we
gathered to walk (dance) around the Christmas tree, singing Norwegian carols and folk songs.
When I first met my wife, she asked, “Why do you always ask what nationality everyone is?”
That was the first time I realized not everyone does that.
Now that I don’t live in Chicago, I still wonder what ethnicity people are, what nationality their
names represent, and I really miss the multicultural flavor of city life.
I have lived in a lot of “homes”, but there is one that is integral to my identity, and that place is a
little bungalow on the Chicago’s Northwest Side at 6963 West Balmoral in an area known as Norwood
Park. I lived there full-time when I was in eighth grade through my senior year of high school and parttime during my college years. Some of these years were the most difficult of my life, and some were
very pleasant. All of them have shaped me into the man I am today: the way I think, the eyes through
which I see the world.