#964: The Blip

August 8th, 2018 § permalink

On the Northwest Side, where winding cul de sacs hit the strip malls of Touhy Avenue and the subdivisions bear the name of the natural features they tore down to make the subdivisions, there’s a little blip of Chicago carved out of Niles, Illinois.

Here, look at it. 

There are no markers that say the blip is still Chicago. On the south side of the street and down a touch there’s a small sign that welcomes people to the North Edgebrook subneighborhood of Chicago’s Forest Glen, but on the north side of Touhy the blip is nondual from the suburbs. Same bleating, strip-mall commerce. Same constant assertion everything’s as folksy as Nana’s peach cobbler crumble.

There’s a massive bulwark of storage lockers there, and charming older homes I want to buy. It’s a single subdivision, about 600 feet side-to-side, 1,300 top-to-bottom. It’s Niles to the north, east and west, but it’s legally Chicago. There’s no reason it should be Chicago, or at least not a reason that doesn’t trace to a 1920s land boom and an empire of flowers, but we’ll get to that.

The man in the flip-flops has lived in the blip 25 years. » Read the rest of this entry «

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