Lawrence Avenue is Chicago`s version of Ellis Island.
Actually, it is the only one still around. New York`s immigrant reception center closed its doors in 1943. The North Side`s equivalent, though, is still going strong. From Uptown on the east, to the middle-class bungalows of the Mayfair neighborhood on the west, the street is home to more than a dozen different ethnic groups.
Thais, Cambodians and Vietnamese, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Germans and Poles, Cubans, Salvadorans and Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Arabs and Jews, Indians and Assyrians–have all lettered Lawrence Avenue`s store windows with their native scripts. Collectively, those shop signs mark the street as our city`s all-but- offical hospitality suite for newcomers to America.
”The fascinating thing about our part of town is that all of these different groups have come to the neighborhood without all hell breaking loose,” said Joe Cicero, executive director of the North River Commission, a Lawrence Avenue-based community group. ”People who bought commercial property only a couple of years back already have seen their values double. That`s because of the stiff competition for shopfronts by the merchants of each ethnic community.”
Indeed, along some stretches of the street, yesterday`s immigrants already have picked up their own apprentices from among the newcomers of today. Seventeen years ago, Harold Gzesh opened up a Jewish delicatessen near Lawrence Avenue`s lakeshore terminus.
”Back then, this was still a high-class neighborhood; all the teams who came to town to play the Cubs would stay in the Lawrence Hotel,” the Polish born Gzesh says of the high-rise building that houses his business. The towering marquee of the nearby Aragon Ballroom still provides a visual memory of the days when an Uptown address was a first-class status symbol.
By now, though, most of Uptown`s once-flourishing Jewish community has long since moved to suburbia. Gzesh counts some long-time customers among the residents of the retirement home that now occupies the hotel above him. He also has picked up a few new ones from the urban pioneers of nearby Castlewood Terrace, a tree-shaded street of large homes that still recalls the Jazz Age era when the neighborhood housed Chicago`s smart set.
However, these days, he sells most of his cornbeef and kosher hot dogs to the Spanish speakers and blacks who displaced his own countrymen and picked up on their predecessors` passion for noshing. ”Until we opened up our store, I don`t think I`d ever seen an American Indian!” recalls Mae Gzesh, Harold`s wife and business partner.
Some Lawrence Avenue newcomers have even set about taking their history lessons in a more organized fashion. In Albany Park, three miles west of Uptown, store windows that once bore Hebrew signs have now been relettered in the Korean script.
Many of their proprietors must be quite conscious of how their forerunners used the premises as a stepping stone out of the city and into the middle class. A while back, the Korean Times newspaper published a well-read series entitled: ”What We Can Learn From The Jewish People.”
If traveling along Lawrence Avenue for the first time, it might hard to understand the intense territorial competition told in Joe Cicero`s report. For miles on end, the street is a masonry canyon whose two- and three-story buildings inevitably carry tenement apartments piggie-back-style over their street-level storefronts.
Indeed, so invarying is the no-nonsense architecture that a passerby might well forget the about earth that those man-made structures sit upon except for the empty spaces where an older building or so must have fallen victim to urban decay or urban renewal. Only in its westernmost stretches does Lawrence allow itself the luxury of an occasional tree or a small patch of grass.
Yet to many of the people who live here, their quintessentially urban landscape symbolizes something quite different from the oppressive sameness that native-born Americans might see in a place like this. To those immigrants, it is a welcome refuge from the poverty and political oppression of the homelands they left behind them.
For Jeong Sa, Lawrence Avenue offered a chance to escape the male-dominated mores of her native Korea. ”In my country, women are expected to remain in the house,” explained the 23-year-old, who works in her aunt`s Lawrence Avenue drugstore. ”If I`d stayed there, I would have gone from my father`s home to my husband`s.”
Yet no New World is ever an unmixed blessing. So notes Mohammed Jara, who runs the Holy Land Grocery, at the intersection of Kedzie Avenue and Lawrence. Ten years ago, he came here from his native city of Ramallah, on the Israeli occupied West Bank. For him, the economic opportunities of Lawrence Avenue have long since far outdistanced those of his troubled Middle East home. Yet everything in life comes at a price, Jara reports.
”For my wife and I, it is a constant battle to remind our children that we are a Muslim family,” he said. ”The kids will see a tavern on TV, and we have to explain that our religion doesn`t allow us to drink alchohol or eat pork. Or they will see advertisements showing women in shorts and ask why their mother still wears the long dresses that are considered proper in our society.”
A while ago, Jara considered throwing in the towel on that cross-cultural battle, but a quick visit home quickly persuaded him that his Lawrence Avenue years had left him an outsider in his native land. ”No Palestinian comes to America thinking that he`s going to stay permanently,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders. ”But when you try going back, you discover that you`re caught in the middle: You can`t live here, and you can`t live there either.” Jara and his fellow Palestinians are not alone in that feeling. George Kritikos runs the Olympic Coffee House in the Greek Town stretch of Lawrence Avenue. Step inside, and you feel instantly transported to a peasant village in the Peloponnesus. All day long, the men of the community sip tiny cups of thick, sirupy coffe while exchanging the latest gossip from their homeland and playing tavli, the backgammon-like game that is their national passion.
”Everyone comes to Chicago thinking that he`ll stay, maybe, five years, and then go back home,” Kritikos says while surveying his customers from behind his espresso-brewing machine. ”But five years comes, and then 10, and everytime the answer is the same: `Well, I think I`ll stay on a little while longer, until I have a little more money in the bank. Then I`ll go for sure.” Yet even along Lawrence Avenue, eventually the time comes to move on. For three decades, Maury`s Red Hots has been a fixture of the Albany Park landscape. Long after the bulk of the Jewish residents moved away, Maury Andes` counter-stools remained a virtual community center.
Twenty years ago, there would still have been a dozen synagogues in the vicinity; now, with scarcely an exception, they all have been converted into Korean churches. The Max Strauss Center and Deborah Boys Club have also passed into the history books.
Nonetheless, for all that time, Maury`s offered Albany Park alums the opportunity of an afternoon reunion for the price of a red hot. Indeed, for the last few years, as the neighborhood became more and more Oriental, the tiny shop with its well-worn tables, and scrawled numbers flanking the wall phone, has more often than not been filled with commuters rather than local residents.
Wayne Masica, for one, has been coming back for 15 years, to rendezvous with the guys he grew up with when this was still a solidly Jewish stretch of Lawrence. ”I played basketball at the Deborah, just like the other kids on the block,” he recalled. ”Until we left the neighborhood, I don`t think I even realized I wasn`t Jewish!”
Soon now, these mustard-and-relish accompanied reunions will be ending. A while back, Maury`s new Korean landlord must have decided that if you don`t have to be Jewish to love Rosen`s rye bread, the same rule also applies to selling the stuff. So when the lease was up, Maury got notice that he is being evicted.
Probably, the landlord will install some newly arrived relative behind the counter, and who is to blame him? Ethnic succession is never a pretty game. No doubt, when Jewish merchants first came to the street, they similarly played hard-ball with their predecessors.
Still, sociological rules of thumb don`t help much when it is your memories that are being violated. Ever since the word got out, Maury has been getting long-distance calls from far-flung alums asking if there wasn`t something that they could do. A guy from Houston phoned to reserve a night at the stand for 43 of his old buddies.
Maury is the kind of old-time philosopher-shopkeeper who was never too busy to listen to a kid`s troubles, and give him a pat on the back when good fortune came his way. So over the years, his legion of customers have always checked in to keep him posted on the post-Albany Park chapters in their biography. ”I`m part of their lives,” he said, speaking of the now grown men he still refers to as ”my boys.” ”You can`t just dismiss that because a landlord wants to make a few more bucks, can you?”
So if any of Maury`s boys have been out of touch for a while, be advised: June 30, the place closes forever. If you ever played softball in the Roosevelt High School yard, why not stop in for an afternoon and let Maury know what has been doing by you? You won`t get another opportunity: Comes the end of the month, it is sayanora, Albany Park.
