Letter from a Former Uptown Resident

I get a lot of readers, but I don't always hear a lot of feedback on this little ol' history blog, so e-mails like this just make my day:

I really love the website that you have created, I’m a product of uptown, I lived there from the late 1950’s until 1970 and the moved back for 2 years in 1975. Your website has brought back many memories, I went to school at Stewart, then transferred to Brenamen on Clarendon & Montrose and from there I was sent to Catholic school at St. Thomas of Canterbury on Kenmore and Lawrence. I had my first paper route delivering the American on Winthrop from Lawrence to Argyle in 1962. We use to go to the Lakeside theater on Saturdays and see three movies for a quarter, and the Uptown theater was the coolest, you get lost in that place and it was so fabulous inside, I remember a section that was hard to find that was all enclosed in glass and was located in between the upper balcony and the lower balcony all the seats were blue velour with polished brass it was definitely made for the elite. I spent many days at the Robert R. McCormick Boys Club on Sheridan and Gunnison what a great place for a boy to stay out of trouble. I can’t think of many places in uptown that I didn’t see as me and my brother wandered the streets all summer. Well I could go on forever about the great life I had there, so keep up the good work and if you ever have any questions about uptown I would love to share. -- R.C.

Thanks for reading, R.C.!

And what's your favorite memory of Uptown? Write me at blog(a)compassrose.com and I'll feature it here!

Uptown Travel Guide

From WikiTravel.com:

Uptown is the result of a divine message received by men with a tremendous amount of money in the early 1920s. Here, by the lake, there was to be an entertainment district of such magnificence that it would shift the entire center of Chicago to the north, and within a few years, overtake even Manhattan for supremacy in the nation. Up went canyons of Art Deco magnificence: hotels, department stores, palaces of music and the arts; all in accord with the vision. Ever see a movie where cigar-chomping gangsters escort gorgeous molls into a damn good jazz club? That's the Green Mill. Where thousands of earnest teens dance their hearts out for a famous live radio broadcast? That's the Aragon Ballroom. And the crowning achievement was the Uptown Theater, the "acre of seats in a magic city," where every man could see a movie like a king.

But there was the small matter of the stock market crash in 1929. Right as Uptown was reaching its peak, new construction slammed to a halt and Uptown never recovered. Needing tenants, many buildings were carved up for low-income housing, and maintenance was lowered to match the rent. There was still revelry, but it was seedier, and less of a destination for the fresh-faced teens of yesteryear. Unlike other parts of the city, which were reinvented by changing fortunes across the decades to come, Uptown stayed on the mat, beaten down by poverty.

At last, though, Uptown is reaping the rewards of that heritage. Years of cheap living created a diverse community that's still resident there today, highlighted by the amazing Southeast Asian pocket on Argyle between Sheridan and Broadway. (It's sometimes mistakenly known as "Little Saigon" or "North Side Chinatown," but it's too diverse for one label.) For the first time in decades, the entertainment district is growing again, with the survivors holding strong and joined by some great new options. In an area where a dilapidated pancake house from the 1950s still counts as new construction, the seedy atmosphere of Uptown can be absorbing like few others in the city, and makes for a memorable night out.

Want more? Go to: WikiTravel.

Broadway Lawrence Racine, 1920

This image kind of reminds me of waiting for election results during the last aldermanic race!

Here we see the results of some election being projected onto the front of the Sheridan Trust Savings Bank (before it moved across the street into what is now the Bridgeview Bank building).


Original caption: View of a crowd at North Broadway and West Lawrence Avenue in the Uptown community area of Chicago, Illinois, watching election returns on the night of Nov. 4, 1920. The returns are projected on a large screen stretched above the crowd. DN-0009882, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society, Library of Congress