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I
grew up in Chicago. In Chicago. Not in a bordering
suburb, not in the “Greater Chicagoland Area.” I was born and raised with an address in the “606” (the
Chicago zip code) and a phone number in the “312” (which is now the “773” but
still within city limits). My Dad
was a Chicago Police officer, and Chicago has long clung to its residency
requirements for first responders, so my parents did like all cops and firemen
and bought a house as close to the edge of the city as possible, but still
within legal city limits. For that
reason, I grew up on the Northwest Side, in the “L” streets of a neighborhood
known as Jefferson Park, right next to the Lawrence exit of the Kennedy
Expressway, just past the Junction.
Jefferson Park has a bus terminal and a stop on both the Metra and the
Blue Line. For many years, Jeff
Park was the last Blue Line stop, the end of the line, until the City extended
“el” service out to O’Hare Airport.
There’s an actual park called Jefferson Park in my neighborhood, and when
I was a kid, it housed the newest public pool – much closer than the one at
Portage Park, more than a mile away.
But we tended to spend most of our time at Wilson Park, which didn’t
have a pool but which was across from Pete’s candy store (now the fire station)
and wasn’t surrounded by busy streets.
Where
I grew up might seem unusual to some in that a large number of my neighbors
were cop and fireman and city employee families. (At one point, the president of the Fraternal Order of
Police lived on the corner, and half a dozen other police officers’ called our
“L” street home.) But, really,
such a makeup was pretty typical for Jeff Park and other Northwest-Side
neighborhoods. No, what made my
block – my childhood – special was the people who lived there, the unique mix
of personalities that somehow found themselves living side by side in houses built
so close together, you could hand a cup of flour through an open window.
Our
neighborhood teemed with kids, more than a dozen with ages within four years of
mine. But I? Was the only girl. Six years separated me from my older
sister, and her peers on the block had a more even mix of male and female. But not mine. In my age range, it was me and twelve boys. Me and Jimmy and Michael and John John
and Danny and Marty and Myles and Timmy and Andy and Tommy and Johnny and Eric
and Todd. I was the adopted little
sister of an entire team of brothers, like it or not. For the most part, we all liked it. Once they realized I wouldn’t break,
they let me play football; once they realized I could pitch, I was welcome to
join any softball game (16-inch, of course). We spent every summer day riding bikes and playing
basketball or Frisbee and every summer evening playing Ghosts in the Graveyard
or Catch One, Catch All. When we
wore out, we’d sit on someone’s porch and talk, always careful to choose the
house of someone whose dad was not “on midnights” at the police department
(and, thus, forced to sleep during the day).
During
the school year, we attended different schools. Most of us went to Our Lady of Victory, the closest Catholic
school, but Eric and Todd and Andy walked a little further over to St. John’s,
the Lutheran school that bordered Portage Park. I was in the same grade as Michael and Johnny, which means
we sometimes shared homerooms, but in school, our relationships shifted. Michael joined with the cool kids and
Johnny moved around from group to group, but back home, we forgot all
that. We just hung out, a dozen
kids connected by their addresses.
We
shared hundreds of good days growing up on our “L” street, many incredible
memories that we keep to this day:
our marathon Kick the Can games, the day Jimmy fell out of his tree and
broke his arm, the band Eric started in Kemp’s garage, the time Todd forgot his
dad had removed the front steps from his porch and he went right down with a
little “Oops” and a big oomph. I
can still hear Timmy’s sister calling him in for dinner (“Tim-o-thy
MI-chael!”), and I will always remember the sound of Eric and Todd’s dad’s sharp
reverse wolf whistle, a sign to drop the bat and ball and run home. But if we had to pick one thing we all
loved, one event we wouldn’t ever give up, I think we’d all choose the annual
block party. It started as a
one-off Bicentennial celebration and somehow grew to an annual affair; indeed,
in the many decades since its inception, the Block Party skipped only one year,
for reasons none of us can recall.
Our “L” street holds the record for the longest-running block party in
Chicago, having pulled a permit more times than any other block in the entire
city. We close off the ends of the
street with yellow horses and pull patio tables onto our lawns while the little
kids ride their bikes up and down the usually forbidden asphalt. There’s a raffle – and, yes, I
voluntarily put on a bright orange Sun-Times smock and sell tickets (fifty
cents each, twelve for a dollar), walking up and down the block, saying hello
to people I’ve known so long that I don’t remember not knowing them. We play games usually reserved for
small towns: the egg toss, the
water balloon toss, Bingo. We sit
at long tables assembled in the middle of the street, generations of families
mixed together, my kids playing alongside the kids of my own childhood friends;
the boy I babysat, Shay, calling the numbers and reminding me that the little kid
I once watched is now a father of three.
Most
of us no longer live in Jefferson Park, but some do. Todd (whose now a police detective) bought a house across
the street from his family home, and Andy and Johnny still live in their
parents’ houses. Tommy (who now prefers
to be called “Thomas” . . . but I refuse) bought a place across the street from
the Jefferson Park pool. The rest
of us live in nearby neighborhoods or in one of the suburbs. Only Michael and Eric moved out of
state, to Missouri and Florida, respectively. I left briefly for Los Angeles when I was in my early
twenties, the first on the block to move across the country (though Eric had
already been to England thanks to the Air Force). On one of my visits home, I went with Todd to meet up with
some of the guys at a neighborhood bar.
Jimmy came in and gave me a hug and asked me how I liked California. I liked it. He looked at me and said, “You’ve got balls, Dee Dee,” and I
took that for the compliment I knew it was meant to be. I’d grown up with him, one of the guys,
and even at 24, I didn’t expect him to change how he treated me. And I didn’t want him to.
We’ve
lost some of our neighbors over the years; most have moved but some have
died. Eric and Todd’s family has
taken the biggest hit. They lost
their mom when we were still kids, and their dad followed years later. They also lost a brother, Rick. Even though he was almost ten years
older than us, he was one of us just the same, and his wake looked like a
neighborhood reunion. As he
requested, his ashes were scattered across Wilson Park, where they belonged,
where he belonged, where he had felt happiest. New people have moved onto the block, too, and, for the most
part, the more recent residents are as friendly and community-minded as those
who have left. My parents still
live in the house they bought when I was just a year old, and my Dad has long
said that he will remain there until he dies. I hope he gets that luxury.
The
surrounding neighborhood has changed, and not for the better. Gone are the stores we walked to in our
youth: the department stores,
Ann’s and Weiboldt’s; Ideal Bakery (home of the best potato bread ever); Sub
Tender; Woolworth’s and Jupiter.
They’re all gone, replaced by rotating storefronts hawking Polish phone
cards and cheap electronics. I
wouldn’t walk to Wilson Park alone at night on a bet, no matter how many times
I’d done so as a child. Yet,
almost magically, our little “L” street has largely remained unchanged. Perhaps more impressive, though, is how
those of us who grew up there remain connected, how we remain friends. We of course don’t see each other every
day (though what I wouldn’t give for another round of Kick the Can), but we
call and text and catch up on Facebook – and there’s always the block party. So much has changed, but so much has
also stayed the same.
When
my husband and I were dating, we were at a neighborhood fest in a nearby
neighborhood, just walking around.
“Hold on,” I said, and I ran over to a police officer and gave him a big
hug. It was Timmy, who’d followed
in his dad’s footsteps to become a CPD officer. Years later, my husband admitted that it took him some time
to get used to seeing me greeted with a hug and kiss by guys he saw as
strangers, but who I saw as brothers.
But what won him over was the respect he was shown by the dozen boys-turned-men
I’d literally known forever. They
all shook his hand, patted him on the back, welcomed him to the neighborhood, into
the family.
