Where would you walk and what route would you take to revisit long ago personal landmarks and haunts of your past city life?

One of my favorite old haunts is long gone now. I think it was 1962 when the state started to fill in the old Illinois & Michigan canal east of Harlem Ave. We used to visit there from Harlem to past Austin Ave, but the canal was already gone east of about 5900 W. We would venture as far as Central Ave. where we would check out the old boats and autos at an old boat yard.

Because of the nuns at St. Daniel I learned about the I&M early on, we had many a session in early Chicago history. That area struck me as being very pristine, almost idyllic. We knew others had visited, in fact worked there before us, but you didn't see a scrap of paper or even a cigarette butt.

Progress is necessary but sometimes it's a bitch.

b.a.hoarder

I once explored out of curiosity in the direction of the canal, in line with Merrimac Avenue - the street on which I once lived - sometime in the mid 50s, but only as far as I now can remember, to the remnants of the old I & M canal. The area you write about was the Chicago Portage of the early French. I am also familiar with St. Daniel's, having attended it in the 1950s,but not at their school. I was a student then of Lane Tech H.S. with a long commute to the north side.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2012 11:14PM by nordsider.

That's kinda funny for me, as I wound up owning the house I grew up in as a child. I go around the block telling all of the neighbors what the neighborhood was like fifty years ago. One neighborhood I would like to walk around, however, is my grandmother's old neighborhood at Armitage and Kostner Avenues. My grandmother lived on the 1900 block of Lowell Avenue, and I remember the old Schwinn factory, Agoranos "Radioland" Liquors, and my dad's cousins had "Fritz Service Garage" in the back of Radioland. Our doctor was down on North Avenue, over the old Tiffin Theater, and I remember a hobby shop my mother would take me to after a visit to the doctor. I wish I had the model of a 1959 Edsel she bought me one evening! I remember walking down to the Dairy Queen on Armitage Avenue near Keeler, and occasionally visiting St. Philomena Church with my grandmother. My parents moved to my current house when I was three months old, so any visits to my grandmother's neighborhood were strictly as visitors, not as a resident.

When I was young, my grandfather used to send me to Root Brother's Hardware, on Michigan Ave., in Roseland. He knew Nate Root during WWII and always insisted I get a "deal" from Nate, because my grandfather was in procurement with the Army Corps of Engineers then, and I guess bought from Root Bro's. Talk about collecting on a "favor" for years and years. :X

Anyway....

At that time, the mid and late 70's, Roseland was already well on the decline, but the area to me was very interesting, especially the Michigan Ave. commercial strip.

Lately, I have been over in Roseland/Kensington/Pullman area for various reasons, and retracing some of my steps there. I once gave some sort of talk at the Pullman Factory for Scouts, and now that building is a shell of what it was. Pullman has always been an attraction to me, because of its history, and lately I was walking that area, near and around the Hotel Florence.

Kensington Ave. going east from Prairie reminds me of an Old West ghost town, but I understand the ward voted itself dry in the 1990's, so there's none of the "excitement" that use to be on that street.

Dunning1, I grew up in the same neighborhood as your grandmother did. I live in Rockford now, but I grew up in the Hermosa neighborhood.I lived on Kenneth and then the 2100 block of Kostner and I would like to go back and see how it has changed. My grandfather used to take me to Radioland all the time, and later my friends and I bought baseball and football cards there.There was a hot dog stand across from it that I think at one time was called Nick's.There was also a National foods that turned into a Butera's where I had my first job.We went to church at St Timothy's on Kildare and Dickens where we also had a Scout troop in their Parish Hall across the street.I also remember Hermosa Park and went to Nixon school. Walt Disney's boyhood home was on Tripp and I must have went by it a hundred times on my way to school not knowing about that. I also remember Tastee Freeze (Dairy Queen?) before it turned into Mahilio's(?)and the Armitage Gyros a few Blocks farther.Around 1984, there was a huge fire at the Schwinn plant and I think a high school is there now. I also remember Jewel and Turnstyle before it became Venture.

We kids had few places to play a game of baseball or touch football, unless we walked a mile or more to nearby Lincoln Park. So we played on the street or a factory's yard or on the lot across the street from our school at the corner of Burling and Armitage Streets. The front yard of the factory on Burling made a good place in winter to play a skate-less hockey game on its frozen puddles, but unknown to any of us, were the kids that surely played in the yard; kids called "inmates" of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum.

We often went up Burling to a large empty cider covered lot across from the school to play baseball. I'm sure that we didn't know about the building that once stood here. This was the location of the Uhlich Evangelical Lutheran Orphan Asylum, and with the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, they had both lost their old homes in Chicago's Great Fire of 1871. The fire had reached within only a block of the Newberry school, located at the south end of the Burling block at Willow street, which sheltered refugees from the Fire. I have read that Chicago at the time of the Fire, had an exploding population and many at-risk children living in the streets.

The factory on Burling occupied the original building of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, built in 1871 was an orphanage until 1916. The Uhlich Orphan home at the northwest corner at Armitage, was built in 1872 until 1928. The kids at both orphanages must have attended my old public school, Arnold, built in 1886.

In the late 1940s, the former the Uhlich Orphan home's property was transformed into the Bauler playlot, named after the Forty-third alderman Mathias (Paddy) Bauler; I spent many hours there. A virtual tour via Google Map street views, now reveal only parking lots where my school and playlot once existed.


Uhlich's Orphan Asylum --- 1900 Census
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~orphanshome/censusrooms/uscensus/illinois/1900/iluhlichs00.htm

Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan's Asylum --- 1900 Census
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~orphanshome/censusrooms/uscensus/illinois/1900/ilchinurshalfor00.htm

The pre-condo industrial area bound by:

. . . . Belmont

Ashland . . . Racine

. . . . Webster

As kids we knew every nook and cranny.

[b]I would go through the back of the yards. 47th & ashland to 51st & damen.[/b]