- Alison Green
- Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, in front of the three-flat on 17th Street in Pilsen where he lived in 1968 and 1969. “This block was a great microcosm of the city and the country.”
“I’m a neighborhoods guy,” Jesus Garcia said last week on Ken Davis’s show Chicago Newsroom. “I represent the average person in the city of Chicago.”
And Pilsen initially seemed as frigid as the weather had been his first day. The residents of the low-income, blue collar neighborhood were primarily a mix of white and Latino, but many of the Latino kids had grown up in the U.S. and were bilingual. “You see people pointing at you, and you know they’re saying, ‘He doesn’t speak English.’”
After two years on Allport, the family moved to an apartment on 17th Street between Carpenter and Racine. We visited that block Saturday, too, and Garcia was clearly delighted to see his former home. An alley runs alongside the brick three-flat. The wrought-iron fence guarding the stone steps in front is new. “I used to hang out on these steps,” he said. “It was a popular hangout. There was always a radio playing. You could run through the alley over to 18th Street to get carnitas.
In the block parties on 17th, the music was provided by racially-mixed bands comprised of neighborhood youth. Teens and grownups danced in the street and kids frolicked in the spray of an open fire hydrant.
Francesca Gattuso helped research this post.
