The North Side does not defy description. That is one of the problems in writing something about it. The North Side has been the subject of more bits of journalism in the last 20 years than even Jane Byrne (who lives there) or the Cubs (who play there). What can I tell you different?
Yeah, yeah. That`s the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger saw his last movie. So what?
Yeah, yeah. That`s Halsted Street, where all the joints are, a glittering jewel of booze and bad music stretching from North Avenue to Fullerton. The pit traders and the merely pitiful pack it most Friday nights with loud voices and rumbling BMWs.
Yeah. That`s Sam`s Warehouse, which used to be the best wine store in the Midwest. Then it got rehabbed into a bank, and Sam moved a couple of blocks west on North Avenue into, appropriately, a brewery.
Yeah, that`s the Germania Club, which is a neat place inside, but you have to be a member. Right across the street used to be the Red Star Inn, a fine German restaurant that was knocked down to make another monolithic addition to Carl Sandburg Village. Carl deserved better, and so did we. The unfortunate thing is that the North Side of Chicago, containing stretches of the most civilized bit of urban scenery on Earth, is as overexposed as Big Ten girls in a Playboy photo spread.
So what can I tell you that`s different, that you haven`t already read about in Style or Tempo or Arnie Matanky`s paper, which has gotten very limp since the Machine died and the Machine enemies got co-opted into city government?
Still, it is a great place for a walk, one of the best urban walks in the world. You can walk the North Side and make all your own discoveries exactly the way you become the only person to discover Manhattan or Paris` Left Bank or The City in London. The North Side is easy to learn, though it keeps changing the storyline every day.
The North Side is an urban experiment that worked. Dozens of rehabilitated neighborhoods provide an architectural treat rare in America-no dinky ”historic districts” with a couple of interesting houses but literally mile after mile of building gems. And then there is the relatively easy way in which North Siders of different races and economic backgrounds have learned to live with one another. The neighborhoods are not enclaves; they reach out and spill into each other, making this part of the city open and charming. It is hard for the West or South Sider, let alone the lock-our-gates suburbanite, to appreciate the ease of the North Side. It makes you think this whole polyglot urban experience might actually work someday.
You can do the lakefront walk and get all the way to Evanston (though you`ll have to detour at Hollywood Beach to Sheridan Road and walk a piece through canyons of condos). This lakefront walk has its own rhythm, not exactly urban and not exactly of this planet. The lake hugs at you on one side, and the strange face of the city on the park on the other. Take joggers. Just studying the pained faces of joggers as you stroll north toward Evanston along the lake is fascinating. Or the kinds of people perched on bicycles or skateboards or roller blades (mere roller skates, my dear, are simply not allowed). As you move north, the faces keep changing, and yet the pace stays the same and you have an appreciation of the complexity of the city while seeing how very much alike it is in all its parts. You could walk the lakefront through the 1,200 acres of Lincoln Park for years and still discover new places in its leafy glades.
You can also take Clark Street north to Diversey, the exact geographic heart of New Town (called that to mock the previously discovered Old Town, one of the few neighborhoods in the world named as a joke). From here, you can catch one of the more invigorating urban journeys, up Broadway.
Chicago`s Broadway isn`t very broad at all for the first mile or two, but then, in Uptown, it widens out and gets funkier. It really changes personality, and that can be somewhat unsettling-but that`s what urban walks are for, to unsettle old ways of thinking.
Uptown begins around Montrose and sprawls almost to Foster. Uptown is the Third World crammed into a neighborhood of immense neglect and immense promise. The real estate developers have been licking their chops over Uptown for more than a decade, but inertia, combined with radical politics, has kept the promise of Uptown a tomorrow thing. Helen Shiller as alderman is the reincarnation of Paddy Bauler, the benign-neglect boss of the old 43rd Ward. In the end, Bauler`s do-nothing attitude actually saved a passel of buildings that would have been torn down in a more progressive venue, thereby providing the housing base of Old Town and Lincoln Park. The same might happen someday in Uptown.
Uptown has always been a point of entry for city newcomers. There are Vietnamese in numbers there, along with Japanese and Chinese, Koreans, Hispanics of all countries and colors, blacks, Southern whites, Native American and just about any other ethnic group you can name.
A daytime stroll up Broadway (nighttime can be scary in Uptown and Edgewater) can give you a feeling for the raw bigness of Chicago, from the muscular ”L” station that sprawls across Wilson Avenue (and is one of my alltime favorites for no particular reason) to the long stretches of the Broadway of little shops and myriad businesses still doing it day by day.
Broadway eventually leads you to Sheridan Road at Devon. Loyola University`s Lake Shore Campus is just to the east, and you can stroll through it if you want. The neighborhood is rickety and, here and there, bookish. You might see someone reading a book in a coffee shop here without anyone commenting on it.
From here to Evanston is Rogers Park. There is a Chicago tradition that if you are young, newly married or just in town from Peoria, you find an apartment in Rogers Park. It is still that way. The streets are full of fresh faces. The apartment buildings-real monsters, sometimes with 60 or 70 units strung out on three floors-are as shabby as ever but bulging with optimistic life. If Lincoln Park reflects the people who Have It Made, Rogers Park reflects those Making It.
That`s the Broadway-Sheridan Road Walk. You can also choose Clark Street for a leisurely two- or three-hour stroll up the spine of the North Side.
Clark Street is like someone`s alley for most of its length. You need alleys if you`re going to have magnificent streets, but nobody sings a song of the alley. Even when it shuffles by Wrigley Field at Addison, Clark Street seems a little ashamed of itself. It is a very human street that whistles past graveyards (north of Irving Park Road) and walks with its hands in jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind. You`ll like Clark the way you acquire a taste for Chicago hot dogs-one bite at a time.
A guide to eating on the North Side? Are you kidding? Does this look like the Friday section? All right. Just this once:
1. There are tourist places, and then there are North Side places. The tourist goes to Paris and pays $10 for a glass of beer, but, obviously, the native knows better. Same on the North Side. Lincoln Avenue, in a four-block stretch from Fullerton north to Diversey, is home to dozens of small, neighborhoody ethnic joints, even though it is part of the elite heart of Lincoln Park. Alas, at this writing, the wonderful old Seminary restaurant is gone, doubtless to be replaced by a Yuppie bar. But late-night hamburger lovers know the Snow White Grill at Wrightwood and Clark is still doing the job for a new generation of cops, cabbies and other night workers of all persuasions.
2. The old shopping area of Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland is still there, still breathing, missing a few stores but still a street-level experience. Everyone knows about the German delis on Lincoln north and south of Belmont, so I won`t mention them-except that you can load up on your wurst and bread there, stroll over to the lakefront and do a picnic overlooking beautiful Belmont Harbor. Just hanging out in the delis (one north, one south of Belmont and impossible not to find) gives you Old World nostalgia via voices, smells and an oompah-pah ambience.
3. One more personal eating tip: This guy has been running the hot dog stand at Dickens and Halsted since I ate there in college. I swear the hot dogs taste exactly the same today as they did then. There are no bad hot dog stands, only bad people, but this is one of my favorite stands in the city. It is also a great hangout for Lincoln Park High School kids.
High schools generate terrific street life, and none is more interesting than Lane Tech, at Western and Addison, at 3 in the afternoon. This school has a campus that De Paul would like to have. (De Paul-like UIC over on Taylor Street-presides over the only ugly buildings in a pretty neighborhood. The sheer hideous bulk of the Schmidt Center on De Paul`s campus at Fullerton might have been designed as a bunker by Saddam Hussein.) Kids still come from all over the city to Lane Tech to get one of the better educations available in a public school. Their vibrancy carries onto the streets and makes you feel there is still life and hope for those under 20.
I digressed. If you get a bad meal on the North Side, it`s your own fault. Make your own good-dining guide to the North Side and publish it by word of mouth with friends. I could tell you where to get great Mexican food for a pittance, tell you about a joint that serves firehouse meatloaf, steer you to a whole string of very good German restaurants on and off Lincoln Avenue and take you through a culinary tour of New Greektown (around Lawrence and Western). But it`s better for you to find them yourself. Native North Siders delight in finding new off-the-track eateries and then announcing their recommendations to their pals before the places get discovered in the reviews. Better to stick to general walks of the south-to-north variety, on Broadway, Clark, the lakefront to Sheridan Road. The east-west streets don`t turn me on; they tend to be wide roads designed to move cars and dat`s dat.
Hangouts? The North Side is one big hangout, especially on weekends, when it gets filled to capacity early in the day.
One of my hangouts is Fourth Prez, as the neighborhood calls it. It is the church on North Michigan Avenue across from the Hancock Center, and it has an open-door policy every day. God has a very nice house there, and it is so quiet and cool on summer afternoons that you can hear yourself think. There are churches all over the North Side, among them the hideously over-restored Holy Name Cathedral just a few blocks away, but Fourth Presbyterian has always been one of the great whispered secrets of the city, a true oasis for mind and spirit. St. Mary of the Angels is the magnificent old church in the heavily Polish neighborhood off Milwaukee (at the 1800 block of North Wood), which ordinary people have been trying to save for a couple of years.
Another quiet hangout is the campus of the old McCormick Theological Seminary. (Amazing how the godly find quiet spots in noisy cities.) The seminary moved out years ago, and the buildings were sold to private parties and to De Paul. The neighborhood is literally a village in the city, with quiet lawns and immense mansions behind fences and gates. You can walk through there and even picnic on the public lawn in front of the old library building. It is as intimate as a kiss and one of the nice things that happened to the city in the last 20 years.
So much for quiet.
Hang out around the Addison-Sheffield area on Cubs game days. Any of the hot dog sellers around the park have better dogs than you`ll get inside the park. Ald. Bernie Hansen has tried to make the area less colorful on game days by hassling the street vendors, but they give it life and a sense of everyday- is-fun, even when the Cubs have a losing streak.
Some summer game days, I walk up to Addison (on good old Clark or via a detour to Sheffield) and spend the afternoon mingling with the cops, vendors, scalpers, T-shirt and peanut sellers and all the rest who don`t realize that pedestrians are supposed to be an endangered species. The crowds are always good-natured, which is more than can be said for other sports crowds in the city. (Maybe the Bears should move back to Wrigley Field and leave their uglier boo birds behind.)
One of my recommended Saturday-afternoon-when-it`s-raining hangouts is Bookseller`s Row, a used-book store on Lincoln. I love used-book stores, but this one staggers me, with its selections stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves adorned with stepladders on wheels. It may be the most complete such store within a thousand miles, and it is categorized and alphabetized within an inch of its life. I always leave it poorer in money but richer in expectation every time I visit.
Few hangouts beat the Lincoln Park Zoo. Oldest free zoo in the country. A much neater place than the big thing in Brookfield, less commercial and more charming. Lincoln Park Zoo is reachable by car if you are insane and have nothing better to do on a weekend than wait in a traffic jam on Fullerton or Lake Shore Drive. If you drive in from somewhere for a day in the zoo, make it early and park your vehicle over by Halsted Street and walk over. In the zoo area is the restored Cafe Brauer, which is nice to look at, but don`t eat there. There is also a phony farm in the area, and if your kids have never seen a farm, don`t waste your time on this one. Drive up to McHenry County instead and give a farmer $5 to show you around his place.
In general, there are too many cars on too narrow streets on the North Side on weekends. Getting around on foot is much easier. Or take the ”L.”
The north-south line goes to Evanston and just across its boundary into Wilmette and for the most part is safe to ride day or night. If you get footsore at any point in your North Side exploration, a foot-saving ”L”
station is probably less than a couple of blocks away. The same goes for the Ravenswood branch of the ”L” that snakes into west Wrigleyville from the northwest, as well as the airport ”L” that goes right into O`Hare from the Loop.
Gentrification of old neighborhoods is old hat on the North Side. The factory districts northwest of the Loop-River North and River West-gentrify before your eyes with loft apartments, art galleries and jolly new restaurants and taverns. When a restaurant giant like Rich Melman discovers gold on Weed Street (Bub City), you know that nothing is safe from the hordes of rehabbers remaking the North Side.
Lincoln Park-the park, not the neighborhood-was a good idea gone bad. It is flat, full of statues, riven with highways, overpopulated with things like the Historical Society building and the driving range and the Farm in the Zoo and . . . well, things. Despite the miles of joggers and bicyclists, it is no Central Park, though a fair number of muggers call it home after dark. To me, it is not one of the great attractions of the North Side, but it is better than a sharp stick in the eye.
The North Side is Chicago for most people who visit the city. Chicago`s West Side and South Side are foreign territory for most tourists and other out-of-towners, and that`s too bad for them. (Jackson Park is much prettier than Lincoln Park and more thoughtfully laid out, and the Garfield
Conservatory beats the Lincoln Park Conservatory all hollow.)
But although everyone has already discovered the North Side years ago, it is still full of surprises because it is alive and making urban music from one end to the other. You can spend your life finding new things about it. I have. Any good long walk on a good warm Saturday morning up Clark or Broadway will prove that the city still has music in its bones. And it`s worth hearing.
