In the middle of North Lawndale, now one of America’s most shamefully impoverished neighborhoods, there’s a boarded-up apartment building where Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, lived briefly when she was a young librarian.
A mile east, on Francisco Street just north of what was then called 12th Street and is now Roosevelt Road, there’s a narrow empty lot where the childhood apartment of the jazz clarinetist-bandleader Benny Goodman once stood. Nearby is a Baptist church that was once the Central Park Theater, where Goodman made his professional debut in 1921 at age 12.
And as dismal as these environs are today, no street is out of bounds for an unprecedented chronicling of Chicago’s cultural assets being assembled by a travel writer and a cadre of de facto urban anthropologists.
As part of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the Office of Tourism got $219,500 in grant money to inventory attractions in Chicago’s 77 “community areas,” or what one can just loosely call neighborhoods. And despite the vote in Copenhagen denying the bid, the city kept the money and is compiling a treasure trove for the curious, be they from Amsterdam; Ames, Iowa, or even suburban Algonquin.
The project is overseen by Lois Weisberg, 84, the human Rolodex who heads the Department of Cultural Affairs and is Mayor Richard M. Daley’s longest-serving commissioner — and the only one profiled in The New Yorker and in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller “The Tipping Point.”
Specifics are handled with seeming military precision by Dorothy Coyle, the city’s tourism chief, and Andres Torres, 22, the project manager who is a Yale graduate and a multilingual (English, German, Spanish) son of North Side immigrants. They started with focus groups of experts, and then hired 12 young political scientists, ethnographers, photographers and others to visit neighborhoods in pairs. Two pairs went separately to each “community area,” interviewing and assembling lists of attractions, restaurants, retail outlets, notable events and existing tours.
And, now, there’s Alan Solomon, my former colleague and a premier travel writer. Mr. Solomon, a Rogers Park native, is semiretired after taking a Chicago Tribune buyout. Inventories in hand, he inspects each neighborhood for himself, has a meal and crafts the essays. With appropriate profiles, directions, etc., all 77 essays will appear on ExploreChicago.org and be part of a larger marketing campaign and brochures.
The field researchers and Mr. Solomon aren’t visiting the usual destinations. Instead, they have collected data on 2,000 sites that previously had not already been featured on the city’s Web sites.
That includes Filbert’s, a soda bottling company in McKinley Park/Bridgeport, the city’s last soda bottler, as well as the Monastery of the Holy Cross, a bed and breakfast run by Benedictine monks in Bridgeport.
There’s the nearby Ling Shen Ching Tze Temple, a Buddhist temple in the former gym of Immanuel Presbyterian Church. Oak Woods Cemetery in Greater Grand Crossing contains the remains of hundreds of Confederate soldiers from a Civil War prison camp in the Douglas neighborhood. It also has the graves of Jesse Owens and former Mayor Harold Washington.
There’s a replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta at Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in Pilsen. And did you know there’s a good Senegalese restaurant, Yassa African, in Chatham? In nearby Washington Heights is a gem of an African-American art and history collection at the Woodson Regional Library.
Try a Belizean restaurant, Garifuna Flava, in Chicago Lawn (Marquette Park to most) and Cafe Trinidad in Grand Crossing, both favorites of Mr. Torres. The North Side gives us Jazz’e Junque, which has a nifty cookie jar collection; the quirky Robot City Workshop; and a restaurant, Northwest Cafe, inside the Norwood Park rail station.
Mr. Solomon knows that this is not unvarnished, neutral journalism; Danish tourists won’t learn about crime or aldermanic corruption. But, all in all, it appears a grand endeavor, with the world traveler himself most taken with the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods.
Driving down 18th Street in Pilsen, Mr. Solomon pointed out gorgeous murals; a church that was originally Polish and is now Hispanic; great bakeries; and a favorite Mexican restaurant, Nuevo Léon.
“It’s one of the best Mexican spots outside the Rick Bayless places,” he said. “I’ve seen a table of Muslim women in there at lunch. It’s just made for tourism.”
