Neighborhoods: East Garfield Park

Although Chicago is a huge city, it's split into lots of neighborhoods. Chicago is made up of 77 concrete community areas which are used to map community development, but has somewhere between 77 and 215 neighborhoods, depending on who you ask. These neighborhoods are also constantly shifting, in size, name, and population. Usually a Chicago resident will know which neighborhood they live in, and derive some part of their own identity from their neighborhood. The closest I can compare it to for Lincoln residents is like asking where somebody went to high school - the name means a lot more than just a building.

I've lived in Chicago for essentially four years now, but still feel more like a resident of Hyde Park (where the University of Chicago is) than Chicago itself. Living in a completely different neighborhood now certainly is helping to change things, but I'd like to travel more. To that end, I'm going to try and visit every neighborhood in Chicago.

Q: But Katie, you explain, Chicago neighborhoods change all the time. So how will you find an actual list?
A: Tourism! I'm using the neighborhoods map at Chicago's official tourism site, http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/neighborhoods.html. This is just a bit more extensive than the 77 official community areas, and tends to include tiny-but-popular neighborhoods like Boystown and Wrigleyville. Unfortunately, I will be a tourist in these neighborhoods, so the perspectives offered here are going to be pretty incomplete and possibly sometimes incorrect - people in Chicago reading this, feel free to add things!

Thus far I have been to many neighborhoods (at least a third!), but have only consciously visited a few. First off, though, I suppose I should start with East Garfield Park where I live. (Some maps list this area as Fifth City, but nobody who lives here has yet identified as a Fifth City resident. I asked Krista about it, and she assured me that the two designations have melded together.)

East Garfield Park is, confusingly, in the west side of Chicago. It is, logically, east of Garfield Park, which is absolutely gigantic and has a beautiful conservatory. East Garfield Park has had a lot of shifting demographics in the past 60 years - it's gone from mostly German to Italian to Jewish to Southern White to finally African American all within one lifetime. This is where the original Sears Tower was - which is still here, but is only a few stories tall. Sears and Roebuck had their first magazine factory/shipping center here, and was a major employer before they moved. The neighborhood has changed a lot since then, especially because of the race riots in the '60s. Right now the neighborhood is around 97% African American, which makes myself and my roommates stand out. Since everybody in the house travels a lot, people in the immediate area seem to be pretty used to us, and consider us "people with the church".

The church in question is First Church of the Brethren, who owns Faith House and is graciously hosting us this year. I spent a summer hosting mission trips in that church, so being inside there stirs memories of hymn sings and very early mornings. The church's windows are my favorite sight in Garfield Park, although the Conservatory's greenhouses are technically more beautiful. The church has a relatively small membership now, but has been a staple of the community through huge memberships and tiny ones. The window has a tiny Dr. Martin Luther King Jr at the bottom corner in recognition of his work in the neighborhood -- when he was working for equality in Chicago, he had an office in the church building.