Dominic Pacyga
Neighborhoods are concrete places. They are bound in space with borders, real or imagined. Almost instinctively one knows when one is in one's neighborhood. It has borders. Borders that are widely agreed upon, but flexible. Somehow residents know when they are in their neighborhoods, when they belong. They know that just the other side of the street or boulevard or railroad track lays somebody else's neighborhood, peopled by someone else. Their place has a different name, a different story.
While neighborhoods are concrete places marked in Chicago's geography, they are also places that make sense, or at least did at one time, economically, socially, and even symbolically. Chicago came to maturity as a streetcar city and many of its neighborhoods are holdovers from that reality. Streetcar and railroad tracks crisscrossed Chicago leaving boundaries and borders in their wake. Other boundaries were erected as a result of political decisions, but these proved to be not only artificial, but also hardly permanent. Congressional districts, wards, school districts, parish boundaries, even police districts and telephone area codes all changed over time. Still Chicagoans identified neighborhoods with names such as Merigold, Slag Valley, Bucktown, and Marquette Park with a regularity that transcended domination by one ethnic group or another and even time. Residents began to see these borders as real and permanent.
In Chicago there are over two hundred such places. Most often they are small and they function almost like small towns. There are seventy-seven community areas, but these are almost all artificial constructs that contain two or more neighborhoods. Residents often ignore them and don't even know their name. How many inhabitants of Pilsen know they officially live on the Lower West Side? Most citizens of Canaryville and Back of the Yards on the city's South Side hardly recognize the name New City and would never say they live with each other in the same neighborhood. Sometimes they use the old suburban name of Town of Lake, but this too is receding into memory. The old stockyards separated Back of the Yards and Canaryville despite the fact that sociologists in the 1920s and the takers of today's census say they live in the same geographical space. The stockyards have divided the two areas since 1865, and even though the "yards" are gone they remain a boundary both real and imagined. To the north of Canaryville, just across Pershing Road lies Bridgeport. Once the street (then simply called 39th Street) was lined with industry, especially packinghouses, creating an urban border, but after they disappeared this simple street remains a frontier between these two rival districts.
Even within various neighborhoods other borders quickly emerged. In the 1950s and 1960s in Back of the Yards West 47th Street was such a frontier. Polish American and other East European ethnic youth identified with one side of the busy street or another. To the north stood the parish of Sacred Heart catering primarily to Polish Americans. To the south of 47th Street stood the parish of St. Joseph also catering to families of the same ethnic group. These and other Catholic parishes in Back of the Yards had their own borders, often fiercely defended. They marked geographical space or sometimes simply ethno-cultural space. In some cases social class space were marked by these invisible parish boundaries. If you were Polish and lived north of 47th Street you attended Sacred Heart, but Lithuanians living on the same blocks attended Holy Cross just around the corner. Mexicans on those same blocks went to Mass at "La Capilla" officially called the Vicariate of St. Mary on Ashland Avenue. Furthermore, neighborhood kids identified with either Davis Square Park on 44th Street or Cornell Square on 51st Street. Sometimes in high school these artificial boundaries disappeared as neighborhood teenagers ended up going to the same institution.
Of course borders could always be crossed, sometimes causing great strife, but crossed nonetheless. Racial borders were the most rigid. African Americans crossing a viaduct or a railroad track that separated them from whites often met violence or at least knew they were not in "their" neighborhood. This was true even if the census takers said that both sides of the dividing line were in the same community area. The divisions between white ethnic groups were often more permeable. Many an inter-ethnic marriage took place in Back of the Yards. Often those couples might belong to a territorial parish such as St. Rose of Lima on 48th and Ashland where mixed ethnicity predominated as the original Irish parishioners left the neighborhood. Over time Polish names and Mexican names mixed with others as ethnic lines blurred.
Maybe the most important reality about neighborhood borders is that they change and shift. At times this is the result of ethnic and racial groups moving across the cityscape. On other occasions change is imposed from an outside agency like the federal, state, or city governments. When the expressway system cut across the city in the late 1950s and 1960s it changed some borders, obliterated some districts, and at least changed the geographic orientation of others. Important landmarks that once marked neighborhoods disappeared. The Fuller Park community area is still on the map, but the neighborhood largely disappeared when fourteen lanes of asphalt, now moving cars and trucks with a rapid transit line running through its center, splattered across the middle of it. This neighborhood, once called by the local sobriquet of "Between the Tracks" simply ceased to exist. To the north the Kennedy Expressway removed hundreds of families from West Town and the once predominantly Polish Catholic parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka. Most residents simply moved farther north towards Niles and other suburbs. Today perhaps seventy percent of all Polish Americans live in the suburbs. Demographic shifts often result in border shifts.
Sometimes borders shift and so do names. The name Wicker Park encompasses a much larger area than it did just thirty years ago, including the old Polish neighborhood turned Latino neighborhood turning Yuppie neighborhood around St. Stanislaus Kostka Church. New names such as East Village and River North have appeared across the cityscape as real estate developers christen old neighborhoods with new names in order to attract upscale residents. The city map shifts and changes with time. Borders were meant to be crossed and redrawn. It is all part of the growing process.
About this contributor
Dominic Pacyga, Ph.D, teaches history at Columbia College in Chicago. He has authored or co-authored four books on Chicago's history. Currently Pacyga is serving as guest curator for the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Chicago Bungalow exhibit scheduled to open in Septermber 2001. He is also working on a study of Chicago in the 1950s.
