The Chicago Reader just came out with their best of Chicago issue.
Logan Square was voted the best Chicago neighborhood.
I have lived in Logan Square for 37 years.
I have always liked it here. I like my block. But I don’t think we ever won the Reader award before.
Most of my neighbors have lived here for as long as I have. I have seen the kids next door grow from babies to become adults with babies of their own.
I have attended celebrations in the backyards and Quinceañeras at the Logan Square Auditorium.
We have battled the gangbangers and the landlords at different times over the same building. Although we fought over different issues, we beat them both, both times.
Neighborhoods change. And Logan Square has changed over 37 years.
It is whiter now than 20 years ago. Less Puerto Rican. More Mexican. The cultural make-up varies block to block. There’s a lively Farmers Market on Sunday that mainly has a white clientele. But the Armitage Produce that is two blocks in the other direction gets two deliveries of warm tortillas every day. They sell Malta and fresh culantro which you can’t get at the Farmers Market. And their parking lot is overflowing on Saturdays.
And on weekends you can get home-made pork, green and sweet tamales from two trucks on Milwaukee Avenue across from the Cubano place that sells good and strong cafe con leche.
I had a baguette and a latte on the Square the other day. And across the square was a drum circle pounding out a Latin beat on their congas.
Last summer it seemed as if white kids over the age of six disappeared. As if suburban schools had literally kidnapped them at age six.
This summer something has changed. I’m seeing white families with older kids.
The last time I checked, Darwin elementary school across Kedzie, was down over 500 kids from capacity. White families were moving into the neighborhood, but they weren’t sending their kids to the neighborhood school.
There are more places to eat. A micro-brewery that gets mentioned in national travel magazines along with a a number of very hip restaurants. New cocktail bars. A sushi place and tapas place. A friend is opening a place called Jam next to the New Wave coffee shop.
This was all unimaginable (was it 15 years ago?) when Virginia gathered up some old junk-store furniture and opened Logan Beach, the first place you could get an (non-Cubano) espresso in the neighborhood. Logan Beach is now Lula, another destination eatery that expanded into Burt’s cigar store. Burt’s, back when we first moved here, was the only place to get the Sunday NY Times. He had five copies flown in and you had to reserve them. Now Lula has bought the cleaners next door and will expand into it soon.
In the summer it seems like we are the bike mecca of Chicago, with every black wrought iron fence becoming a gallery of Treks, Bianchis and Schwinns attached by Kryptonite.
I don’t know whether being recognized by the Reader is a good thing or a bad thing.
But we’re not going anywhere.
Fred Klonsky 