A modest beauty salon on a busy Rogers Park street is a snapshot of what diversity means in this neighborhood.
Outside, Salon City’s signs are in Spanish, announcing bargains on cortes de pelo, or haircuts. Inside, owner Nighat Jamal, who is Pakistani, leans over a salon chair shaping a customer’s eyebrows using a technique common in India and the Middle East. And sitting in the chair is Tina Ware, an African-American who has trusted her eyebrow’s arch to Jamal for the last two years.
This racial and ethnic potpourri is the pride of Rogers Park, long considered one of the most eclectic neighborhoods in a city that historically has been racially segregated.
Although Chicago as a whole is made up of relatively equal parts white, black and Latino with a growing Asian population, many neighborhoods boast a dominant racial or ethnic identity. At the extremes, for example, are Englewood, which is 97 percent black; Lincoln Park, which is 79 percent white; and South Lawndale, known as Little Village, at 80 percent Latino, according to 2005 estimates by the non-profit Metro Chicago Information Center.
“By and large, the diverse neighborhoods are the exceptions,” said Kiljoong Kim, research director for the Egan Urban Center at DePaul University.
Rogers Park is among those exceptions. With gentrification reshaping some neighborhoods and new Latino and Asian immigrants transforming others, exceptions also include Uptown, Albany Park, Bridgeport, Lincoln Square and West Ridge, according to an analysis by Metro Chicago Information Center. The group used 2000 census data to determine which of Chicago’s 77 community areas have the most proportional representation of blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos.
Although those neighborhoods remain among the city’s most diverse today, demographics are constantly shifting. For the most part, the white and black communities are staying put and Latinos are driving the changes, boosting their numbers in Jefferson Park, Albany Park, Portage Park, Irving Park and Forest Glen, said Jim Lewis, executive director of Roosevelt University’s Institute for Metropolitan Affairs.
Many areas don’t stay diverse for long, Lewis said, because the residents who made a community diverse to begin with eventually can dominate the population if they keep moving in.
In Rogers Park, which has long been attractive to new immigrants because of its copious rental options, diversity has become one of the neighborhood’s biggest selling points.
“This is a place where you are welcome to come in and no one is saying, `You can’t live here,'” said Cary Steinbuck, executive director of the Rogers Park Community Council, a neighborhood improvement group that estimates about 80 languages are spoken in the community.
“It’s kind of a funky, integrated community and increasingly people thrive on it,” said Steinbuck, who is white. “People want to raise their kids where not everyone looks the same.”
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