Walking Chicago
The Importance of Community
As a freshman student at DePaul University, I was required to take a “Discover” class. The one I chose featured exploring Chicago’s history through the most basic means of transportation: walking. My twenty-five or so classmates and I traveled to a different piece of the city each day for a week. This is a reflection on what was learned during that week from delving into different neighborhoods.
Getting Lost
Lincoln Park
Monday afternoon featured the first walk of many off of DePaul’s beautiful campus. My group, purely in the effort to travel a unique route from the two other teams, decided to head west down Fullerton Avenue towards the Chicago River. Darting off and on this main road and witnessing the juxtaposition between run-down storefronts and million-dollar homes, it was incredibly evident to me that the people of Lincoln Park held money, but there wasn’t a strong community goal to support local businesses. The path my group and I took showed a definite majority in things commercial and industrial, which is too bad. Among all the places we toured, Lincoln Park was the ugliest neighborhood because of this.
Not Quite Downtown
John Hancock Center, Gold Coast, Old Town, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park
Division Street was the class’s yellow brick road for Tuesday. Starting with a distant view of the city from Chicago 360 ° in the John Hancock Center, we made our way down Division Street in the center of Chicago. Multi-million-dollar homes in Gold Coast transitioned into the vibrant shops and restaurants of Wicker Park. From there, the group traveled to the heavily Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park. Our final destination was the first area I had ever been where I felt entirely alien ina neighborhood. Old Town and Wicker Park were areas that attracted and thrived off of young people, and Gold Coast was so old and empty that it had the same feeling of a museum. Humboldt Park, though, gave me the sense that the people there thought, “We take care of our own and are suspicious of outsiders.” And, the area did look like it was investing in its children and families. I just didn’t feel welcome.
Testing the Night
Wilson Avenue, Uptown, Asia on Argyle
“Don’t walk at night,” I’ve always been told, “You’ll be attacked.” While we were a large group comprised of capable (enough) adults, this warning still stayed in my mind all of Wednesday evening. We were not in a necessarily nice neighborhood, made evident to me by the stranger joining our group for a moment to complain of crime in Uptown and by the excess of bars and boards on storefront windows, but we still continued on. The old entertainment district of the 1920s was a horrible Frankenstein-like stitching of old and new. Distinctly, I remember an ugly stain of a modern, metal bank leering across the street of an ornate theater that was barely being held up by its walls. People that lived there were not supporting what was around them. Asia on Argyle, however, was a completely different story. Flowers surrounded the road in front of small businesses lining the main street of the neighborhood. Murals could be found on nearly every building. Community played the biggest role in both of the areas’ developments, and one obviously benefited more from that.
Paradise in the North…
Rogers Park
There is something very special about someone who loves something. It’s in the way her words flow with passion and her eyes betray tears when such pride is felt for something beloved. The tour guide we had for the Thursday trip to Rogers Park had this rare emotion for her neighborhood. It wasn’t perfect, she said, but she and others in her community worked to decrease crime in the ways they could. Family-oriented and diverse, I have to agree that Rogers Park was something special to preserve. People there put work, money, and time to make it a place to be loved, and the neighborhood definitely showed that.
…And in the South
Beverly, Morgan Park
Friday was by far the most important day for me in this eventful week. Media, at least the kind my parents listen to, blows up the violence that occurs in scary “south side” Chicago, but Beverly was the most homey-feeling neighborhood I traveled to this week. Again, it had a large emphasis on diversity and community. Churches, schools, and historic landmarks dotted every street we walked. Children and dogs walked everywhere with their guardians. Everything screamed, “Safe!,” and it was. The community there made choices that protected its future, making it into a place that still grows today.
The Point
Bear with me
Money does not equal success. Rich neighborhoods may be safe, but they do not have the strong communities that I witnessed in areas like Beverly and Rogers Park. In addition, Gold Coast and Humboldt Park didn’t show another theme that was very prominent in the northern and southern areas: diversity. While there may not be a perfect formula about how to improve areas in Chicago, these two factors seem like good starting points for success. I’m excited to explore more of this city on my own and see if this idea holds true. If so, I know how I want to help.
835 Words
