Arrivals... There Goes the Neighborhood

As teenagers, many are probably not accustomed to noticing cultural changes in their neighborhood. Your lifelong friends still live in the same house, and the really nice old lady still lives at the corner and passes out the good candy on Halloween, you’ve lived there you’re entire life and you don’t know anything different. But maybe once there was a new kid on the block, not the band, but a new kid. He didn’t have any friends and he didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of your block, and maybe he was so different that you heard a neighbor say “there goes the neighborhood”. Who would think that one family could have such a big effect on a neighborhood? But the reality is: it’s true. Although I never knew who that one family was, I saw my neighborhood slowly begin to change.

I grew up in the Belmont-Cragin area on the Northwest Side of Chicago, which 40 years ago was primarily Italian. When my family first moved into our bungalow on School Street 20 years ago, it was a mix of the older Italians who had been living there for quite some time and your average, middle-class American families. Passing neighbors greeted each other in English, all the kids played together on the block; it was a great place to raise a family.

Chicago has one of the highest populations of Polish immigrants in the nation, and the majority of them live on the Northwest Side. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, more and more Polish immigrants moved to the Belmont-Cragin area. With the migration came Polish delis, book stores, and clothing stores, where the merchants and the customers only spoke Polish. Gradually, our neighborhood became more Polish and less American. Polish became the language of the neighborhood, we couldn’t converse with our neighbors and it was tough to shop because not only did the merchants speak Polish but all the signs were in Polish. It also became commonplace to rent out rooms in cots in basements to their fellow countrymen. It was no longer just families living in a home; it was a family with many illegal borders. We became the minority in the neighborhood.

We continued to be the minority until 5 years ago when there was a gradual influx of Hispanics. Now, not only were the Poles speaking Polish, but the Hispanics were speaking Spanish, and the American families dwindled in numbers. The single family bungalows now housed several families in one building. The schools along with the neighborhood became overcrowded with too many cars on the street, too much garbage in the alleys, and the animosity amongst neighbors of different ethnicities grew. I no longer knew the people who lived on my block.

As my siblings moved away, our bungalow on School Street was too much for just my mom and me, she sold the house and we moved 6 months ago into a two-flat. I no longer call School Street or Belmont-Cragin my neighborhood, and it hasn’t felt like my neighborhood for a long time. The neighborhood continues to change and it was probably a good time for us to move. I now live in Lincoln Square and I understand everything that goes on around me, whether it’s store signs or people asking about the Cubs’ game on the street. I feel like I’m part of a neighborhood again.