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Argyle and Glenwood

Apartment building at the northeast corner of Argyle and Glenwood. It looks like at some point the porches were enclosed. Top image courtesy John Chuckman. Bottom image courtesy Google Street Views.

Somerset Hotel, 5009 Sheridan at Argyle

The Somerset Hotel, on Sheridan at Argyle, looking north. What a great image! I wish the terracotta buildings just to the south were still there, instead of the mid-rise.

This is how the hotel looks today. Now known as Somerset Place, it functions as a nursing care facility. Image from Google street views.

The Somerset was designed by Samuel N. Crowen and opened in 1920. It originally had 441 furnished rooms arranged in 205 suites of one to four rooms. It was described as "the ideal dwelling place for those desiring the homelike atmosphere and privacy of an apartment combined with all the modern conveniences of a hotel." Jazz Age Chicago has an excellent history of the hotel.

Hmong in Uptown

1892 Descriptions of the Uptown/Edgewater Area

One of the books I have in my collection is The Artistic Guide to Chicago and the World Columbian Exposition. Published in 1892, it is more or less a travel guide on what to see and do in Chicago while attending the world's fair.

There is a brief section on the best "suburban towns" to visit, most of which were later annexed to the city. I live at Winthrop and Argyle, part of a village that was once known as Argyle Park. From what I've heard, Argyle Park had many large, beautiful homes and mansions that were later torn down for the six-flat apartments of the twenties (which I also love) and apartment hotels. The brief description from the book reads: "Situated on the Evanston division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul R.R. It is is distant from the City Hall five and a half miles. It is a beautiful suburb with wide avenues and macadamized streets."

I had to look up what macadamized meant. It sounded fancy. The American Heritage Dictionary defined it as "to construct or pave (a road) with macadam." Not very helpful, that. I finally had to look it up on Wikipedia, which describes the entire process. Skip ahead if this is more than you want to know: "Macadam is a type of road construction pioneered by the Scotsman John Loudon McAdam in around 1820. It consisted of creating three layers of stones laid on a crowned subgrade with side ditches for drainage. The first two layers consisted of angular hand-broken aggregate, maximum size three inches, to a total depth of about 8 inches. The third layer was about 2 inches thick with a maximum aggregate size of 1 inch. Each layer would be compacted with a heavy roller, causing the angular stones to lock together with their neighbors."

The description of Edgewater in the Aristic Guide was a little more detailed: "Situated on the Evanston division of the Chicago, Milwauke & St. Paul Railroad, seven and a half miles from the City Hall. It is charmingly situated just north of the city limits, on a gently sloping eminence overlooking Lake Michigan. The town was originally laid out in a natural forest of beech, birch, and maple. Only enough of these were removed to allow space for avenues and building, leaving the town itself buried in a wilderness of foliage. It is the most charming suburb of Chicago. The residences are all of modern architecture, elegant in design, solid in construction, and rich in furnishings. Between the spreading branches of the trees a fine view of the lake is presented. In short distance from the city, together with its many natural charms, makes it a favorite residence for the wealthiest citizens."

Sounds idyllic, doesn't it?

"Reel Chicago" on Essanay Studio

Founded 100 years ago, Chicago's Essanay studio launched the movie careers of Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery and helped a cockney comic named Charlie Chaplin rocket to fame.

By Robert Loerzel

Two days before Christmas 1914, on a windy and bitterly cold Chicago day, a small, scruffy man with tousled black hair descended from a train just arrived from California. He wore no overcoat, and his luggage totaled only a small bundle of clothes. No one in the station's bustling crowd gave any indication that they recognized the man—assuming they took any notice at all of the diminutive tramp...

For complete article, go to:

Chicago Magazine

Coming Home

I was born in Chicago in 1969, but grew up in the suburbs—Bloomingdale, Illinois, to be specific. I went to college in Iowa, spent some time in Minnesota, and eventually found my way back to the City in my late twenties. I now live in Uptown, a stone's throw from the Aragon Ballroom, and just around the corner from "Little Saigon" and the excellent Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese restaurants that line a short stretch of Argyle Street.

While I'm relatively new to the Uptown neighborhood, both of my parents grew up around here. My dad lived in Andersonville, and my mom grew up near Lawrence and Hermitage. (That's her in 1948 or so with a new Brownie camera.) Technically, I'm the fourth generation on both sides of the family to call this neighborhood home.

It didn't take long for me to completely fall in love with Uptown and its rich culture and history. Here's a description I wrote a few years ago; it's from a petition to save and restore the Uptown Theatre at Lawrence and Broadway:

“A 20-minute train ride north from the Loop takes you to Uptown, one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. Originally settled by German and Swedish immigrant farmers, by the 1920s Uptown had become the premiere retail and entertainment center of the Windy City—rivaled only by the Downtown district. It boasted the very fashionable Loren Miller department store, the Edgewater Beach Hotel, Essanay Studios, several public beaches, and dozens of luxury apartments and hotels. Uptown was known for its cafes, vaudeville theatres, restaurants, music venues, dance halls, ballrooms, and movie houses. As one author wrote, 'Here is a community complete in itself...it has every accessory of a city—delightful places in which to live, dozens of smart and utilitarian shops, great churches and strong banks, and every imaginable form of entertainment.'

“The Uptown neighborhood was a place to see and be seen and attracted thousands of young single adults. A number of famous entertainers performed here early in their careers including Judy Garland (when she was still known as Frances Ethel Gumm), Hoagy Carmichael, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ruth Etting, Gloria Swanson, the Andrew Sisters, Larry Fine of The Three Stooges, and Charlie Chaplin...”

Of course, that was Uptown in its so-called heyday. Since then, it's gone through many cycles of decay and rebirth, and has been home to numerous new immigrant groups. Uptown is always reinventing itself. Today, it's one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago, and one that is--for better or worse--undergoing rapid gentrification.

The purpose of this blog will be to share some of the many hundreds of images and stories I've collected about Uptown these last five or so years. If you have stories to share, or if anything I post triggers a memory of your own, please feel free to make a comment or send me an e-mail.