Rogers Park is an edgy place. Bordered by the lake and Evanston as well as its sister neighborhood, West Ridge, it has always been influenced and shaped by its juxtapositions between built environment and natural world, between city and suburb.
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Like the city of Chicago itself, the area was settled thanks to a fortuitous combination of geography, railroads, and greed. Irish immigrant Philip Rogers arrived in Chicago in the early 1830s and later bought 1,600 acres of government land on either side of the area’s one road, the prehistoric beach now called Ridge Boulevard. After Rogers’s death, Patrick Touhy—an Irish immigrant and Civil War veteran who’d escaped from Andersonville (the Confederate prisoner of war camp in Georgia, not the Swedish neighborhood on the north side)—married Rogers’s daughter Catherine and continued the lucrative real estate speculation that ran in her family, selling land mostly to German and Luxembourger immigrant families.
The growth pattern is familiar: trains brought businessmen and their families far from the city’s industrial smoke and immigrant crowds; the increasing density required infrastructure. By 1890, 3,500 people called Rogers Park home, and in 1893 Rogers Park and its neighbor West Ridge voted to avail themselves of Chicago’s better services: sewers, water, telephones, street lighting and paving, police and fire protection, and other urban amenities. The few hundred residents of West Ridge, who had incorporated their village a mere three years earlier, received another benefit from annexation: there had been talk of expanding the dry laws of Evanston—from 1900 the home base of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—south into the villages across Howard Street; joining Chicago guaranteed that the beer would continue to flow. For decades a practically unbroken row of saloons faced Evanston from the south side of Howard.
In their turn, the children and grandchildren of these arrivals would flee to the suburbs, to be replaced by immigrants from Africa, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and, especially, Korea, Mexico, India, and Pakistan—the newcomers drawn by the affordable housing and business opportunities. Today the taquerias along Clark Street rival those in Pilsen, and even as it continues to support kosher shops and synagogues, Devon has become the heart of Chicago’s South Asian community.
Viewed from a certain height, the area echoes the diversity of Chicago as a whole, with no one racial or ethnic group a majority. But zoom in a little closer and the neighborhood is as segregated as its city, with different groups occupying their own little strips of homes and businesses. Longtime residents watch the transient college students and other renters come and go. The 800-pound gorilla in a Roman collar, Loyola University, reshapes the neighborhood’s southeast corner with TIF money and political clout, unconcerned about either the long-term home owners or the renters, though both are affected by the vacant lots and empty storefronts it creates.
