Just about every Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, Dorothy Reynolds can be found in the small gift shop at the Berwyn Public Library.
There, she sells used books and coffee to visiting patrons, later depositing the money in a fund that goes to improving the library.
Reynolds, 73, has been volunteering at the library about three years and was first attracted to the facility for a simple reason:
“It’s very satisfying for me to volunteer,” says Reynolds, a Berwyn resident for 26 years. “I like to help people. I was raised that way.
“A lot of people around here help out. That’s the way it is.”
All across Berwyn and neighboring Cicero to the east, that attitude is reflected by many of the people who live and work in the two west suburban communities.
“I’ve been here all my life and that’s something that’s prevalent in this city,” says Thomas Shaughnessy, 72, who has been mayor of Berwyn for five years.
“This city is full of people who have been nowhere else. And as a result of that, they take great pride in their community and their homes. This is a place where you see people scrubbing down their porch stairs or sweeping the streets–or pitching in where help is needed.”
“We are traditional working-class communities, and when anyone has to work hard for something, they appreciate it more,” says Betty Loren-Maltese, the town president of Cicero since 1993 and a resident there for 20 years.
“There’s a lot of pride in ownership here and people care a great deal about their homes and the community their homes are in.”
“I think what drives people here is that they focus on their families,” says Alfred Pena, the founder and president of the Latinos of Berwyn and Cicero organization.
“In that respect, this is a close-knit community,” adds Pena, who has lived in Berwyn for 16 years. “Because of the strong focus on families, people get really involved in things for their families.”
“There are very solid roots here,” says Ken Cechura, 48, who with Bruce Brucki co-owns the Berwyn Ace Hardware store at 6316 W. Ogden Ave.
“Here’s an example of that: There are a lot of customers who came in here as kids with their parents and now they are parents who bring their kids in here,” says Cechura, a lifelong Berwyn resident.
“Berwyn considers itself a blue-collar community where people are interested in maintaining their homes,” he says. “The fathers did that a generation ago and now the sons do it. So did moms and now their daughters. That’s roots in my book.”
Cechura’s business is also a testimony to the longtime roots found in the community. The business was started more than seven decades ago. Cechura has been involved with the store for more than three decades.
“Living in a working-class town, people feel like they need to pitch in,” says Bobbi Krmaschek, 37, a resident of Cicero for 16 years.
Every Tuesday afternoon, Krmaschek can be found volunteering at the Cicero-Berwyn-Stickney Anti-Hunger Foundation, 4836 W. 13th St., interviewing families seeking donations of food or filling bags with donated food for the families.
“This is also like a small town in a way, and people know that if they do help out, it will probably affect someone they know,” says Krmaschek, whose daughter, Essence, 17, and son, Raymond, 16, occasionally help out at the foundation.
“When it’s that small of a community, you need to do what you can,” she says. “It’s always been that way here.”
That strong sense of community, say those in Berwyn and Cicero, helps negate the often negative stereotypes that occasionally get attached to the towns.
Cicero, for example, still bears an image that associates it with crime, dating to Al Capone’s relationship with the town in the 1920s, and it recently wrestled with the Ku Klux Klan over plans to hold a rally in the community.
Berwyn, meanwhile, has often been painted as a tough-edged town that seems resistant to change.
But town officials say change is no stranger to Berwyn and Cicero. They point to the growing Hispanic population–mostly Mexican-American–found in both communities as an example of that.
Berwyn officials estimate there are now as many as 55,000 people in the town, up from the 1990 U.S. Census count of 45,000. Cicero officials estimate the town’s population is now around 75,000, up from 64,000 in 1990.
Census figures from 1990 showed that Hispanics made up 37 percent of the Cicero population; in Berwyn the figure was about 8 percent. Town officials do not have more recent figures but say the number of Hispanics in both towns has grown.
“The character of our town is getting more diverse, more than we ourselves realize,” says Kimberly Bares, the executive director of the Berwyn Development Corporation. “Things are changing ethnically, age-wise and job-wise, and we’re even seeing a gay and lesbian community here.”
“We have a changing community here, one that is different from what it was a few years ago,” says Jean Rehor, director of community affairs for the Cicero Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “But we’re still a town of middle-income people who are very dedicated workers and are looking for an improved way of life.”
People have been coming to Berwyn and Cicero for just that since the mid-1800s. The early settlers, mostly Irish, came in the 1830s to help build the Illinois and Michigan Canal (now buried under the Stevenson Expressway), which opened waterway travel between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.
By 1857, the 36-square mile Cicero Township was established in what is now most of the near west suburbs. The township was named after an early settler’s hometown in New York.
Ten years later, Cicero incorporated as a town as it was quickly transforming into a major railroad center outside of Chicago.
This also helped establish the town as an industrial community. Around the turn of the century, Western Electric began constructing its massive Hawthorne Works telephone equipment manufacturing plant at Cermak Road and Cicero Avenue.
In the late 1800s, Berwyn founders were taking a different path, developing the town as a residential hamlet away from the hustle and bustle of Chicago, reachable by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy commuter railroad. They named the town after a Philadelphia suburb.
“Berwyn was developed when eight miles out of downtown Chicago was considered far away,” Bares says.
By 1908, there was enough of a population in Berwyn to incorporate as a city. That population rapidly grew as many first- and second-generation Europeans, such as Poles, Bohemians and Czechs, were lured there by the industrial jobs available in Cicero.
By the 1930s, the two communities were nearly built out and had populations comparable to what they had in the early 1990s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, two factors greatly affected both towns:
The first was a declining industrial base in Cicero. The most significant event was the announcement in 1983 of the closing of the Hawthorne Works plant. Today, a shopping center bearing the plant’s name stands in its place.
The second factor was a graying population, which resulted in smaller families and declining census figures. In 1980 there were 46,849 people in Berwyn and 61,232 in Cicero, according to the U.S. Census.
That started to change in the late 1980s when the influx of Hispanics began.
“The Latinos coming into the communities are hard-working people who moved out to the suburbs to better themselves,” Pena says. “As they did that, they rejuvenated the communities somewhat.”
“The Hispanic families, like the Poles and Italians and Czechs before them, have brought new life and a new culture here,” says Rino Pescatore, 28, owner of two Supermercado Chapala grocery stores, one at 5909 W. Cermak Rd. in Cicero, and the other a few blocks down, at 6220 W. Cermak Rd. in Berwyn.
“Like the people before them, they care about their families and their homes,” he adds. “They have hard work ethics, but families come first for these people. And their homes aren’t fancy, but they’re kept up.”
Despite the loss of industry, the towns have taken steps to keep their economies strong. For example, both have initiated tax increment financing districts.
With a TIF, municipalities take part in a development project by funding improvements up front. A TIF then repays itself through the additional taxes that the new development creates.
“I’m happy with the way things have been progressing around here, especially for a community as mature as ours,” Cicero’s Town President Loren-Maltese says.
“Our vacant industrial sites have been filled, but with smaller businesses,” says Rehor of Cicero. “But they’re filled.”
“We’re still a mostly residential community, and that’s not going to change,” says Bares of Berwyn. “But we’ve maintained the business base–which is mostly service and retail-oriented–we have here, and that’s significant, considering the competition we have from DuPage County.”
“What we’ve done is try to put a program in place to keep this a town that people will keep appreciating,” Berwyn’s Mayor Shaughnessy says.
“That’s important to everyone here. And so it’s important to us.”
