More than most neighborhoods, Uptown is a microcosm of Chicago. Like Chicago, it’s a raging mix of elegant and scruffy that ends in a gilded lakefront. Like Chicago, it looks diverse from a distance and balkanized up close. And like Chicago it has not one history but a kaleidoscopeful. It’s home to peregrine falcons, Mr. Leather, the Aquitania, Jesus People USA, Lincoln Towing, the city’s last cage hotel, the American Indian Center, and what may be the world’s ugliest Buddhist temple. “It is hard to believe that such a compact area contains so much variety,” the late David Fremon wrote in 1990.
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When University of Chicago sociologists divided the city into “community areas” in the 1920s, Uptown was community area number three, running along the lakefront from Irving Park to Devon, its jagged western boundary defined, as it ran north, by Clark, Montrose, Ravenswood, and the railroad. As Uptown’s reputation declined after World War II, various components tried to bail out, redefining themselves as, for instance, Sheridan Park or Buena Park. Edgewater–that part of community area number three north of Foster–made a complete break and was named a separate community area in 1980.
“As late as 1870 much of the land south of Wilson Avenue and east of Ravenswood was covered by a large pond,” we’re told by Chicago’s 1938 Local Community Fact Book, “along the shores of which were always a number of row boats for the convenience of those who wanted to reach the opposite shore.” Swedes and Germans worked the land until developers started subdividing for Chicagoans who could afford to move out of the smoky city. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, developer John Lewis Cochran set a fateful pattern for the area by favoring mansions near the lake and apartment houses west of Broadway.
Chicagoan Irna Philips said Bradley’s broadcasts inspired her to create The Guiding Light, a radio serial about a minister who left a light burning in his study and those who came to him for help. The soap opera premiered on NBC in January 1937; perhaps in a nod to Bradley’s iconoclasm, one character had what may have been the first on-air out-of-wedlock baby. The 70-year-old show has long since left behind both Chicago and its ministerial plot device, but CBS TV still airs it every weekday.
What urban renewal did accomplish, as DePaul political scientist Larry Bennett points out, was to politicize a neighborhood previously best known for revelry, setting up an endless and inconclusive battle between those who fear Uptown will become a slum and those who fear it will become a replica of Lincoln Park. (Sometimes these two fears inhabit the same person.) Gentrification’s opponents won a key struggle in the early 1990s–arguably one of the great triumphs of Chicago community organizing–by negotiating a ceiling on rents that kept half a dozen high-rises near the lake affordable to their existing tenants. Some of the landlords agreed to stay in the federal program under which the buildings had been built; others were bought out.
Hard as it is to imagine now, in the 1950s and ’60s Montrose Harbor doubled as a Nike missile base, one of three protecting the lakefront from Soviet bombers. The missiles, now long gone, were surrounded by a hedge that survives today. Now known as the Magic Hedge, it’s a refuge for migrating birds (and also, to the great annoyance of some avid birders, for gay men looking to hook up). In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Joel Greenberg writes about ditching work in the Loop to grab a cab north to spot a brown pelican there.
