In Harold Henderson’s piece about Uptown history [“The High Ground,” March 30]:
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I have spent many hours in the Ravenswood collection at Sulzer Library, but never heard of this pond. Why would there be a nursery in this part of Ravenswood? In all the material about the Sunnyside Inn (which was at approximately 4441 N. Clark) there is never any mention of rowboats.
Ossian Simonds, who was the landscape architect for Graceland Cemetery and for Sheridan Park, lived near Broadway and Montrose, but I haven’t seen anything about a pond near his house. And I have gone over the survey data from pre-Chicago Chicago. The little pond in the southeast corner of Rosehill Cemetery is on the survey, but nothing in the location you describe.
Those who sought a separate community area designation for Edgewater (and I was among them) sought it not in revulsion toward an Uptown that was undergoing some difficult times [“The High Ground,” March 30], but rather as a righting of a wrong that was committed by University of Chicago sociologists in merging Edgewater into Uptown in the 1920s and eliminating its name and identity. The name Edgewater dates to 1885 when it was given that name by John Lewis Cochran to his new development along the lake. The effort was always to obtain official recognition of Edgewater’s identity as a separate community, which it undeniably was and is. Cochran did not favor mansions near the lake and apartments west of Broadway. His vision was for an upper-middle-class community of single-family homes throughout. It was development by others, beginning in 1905, that ended that vision.
Harold Henderson replies:
