By Lynn Becker
As the great hotels and apartment blocks deteriorated in the 1950s, however, apartments were subdivided, maintenance was deferred, and rents were lowered. Uptown became a refuge for the city’s dispossessed–the poor and elderly, the immigrants, and the mentally ill. Today those residents and gentrifying newcomers share an uneasy cohabitation. Moving down Broadway, Wilson Avenue is like an economic equator: the poor gravitate to the south, the upwardly mobile to the north.
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A lot of buildings in Uptown have a similar story. On Wilson just east of the station is a TGF branch that is but the latest in a series of banks that since 1922 have made their home in what was originally the Standard Vaudeville Theatre, built in 1905. Walk inside and you’ll find a surprisingly large room lined with richly ornamented terra-cotta pilasters and spandrels. That gutted structure on Broadway with the two freestanding doors? That’s Ahlschlager’s 80-year-old Uptown Broadway Building, whose upper floors are encrusted in a riotous, Spanish-baroque-inspired hallucination of polychromatic terra-cotta. It’s in the midst of a $4 million restoration to its original overwrought splendor.
In 1916, Carl Sandburg, who lived in Uptown from 1911 to 1914 in a house at 4646 N. Hermitage that was recently designated a Chicago landmark, wrote a poem called “Graceland.” It includes these lines:
For upkeep and flowers
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages . . .
