This is an ongoing musical memoir. If you are just wandering onto this page and didn’t see the first four chapters of “Blues, Preludes & Feuds,” please read those first:
Prelude
Part 1:
Chapter 1: Middle C is Not
Chapter 2: Prepare to Wing It
Chapter 3: Drugstore at the End of the World
Chapter 4: The Myth of the Electric Organ
Chicago was very territorial in the 1960s, with the boundaries of little nation-states marked by major business boulevards. Cross to the wrong side, and you were asking for trouble. The ethnic tribes on either side’s boundary line—Poles, Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, Ukrainians, African-Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc.—generally didn’t get along.
As Mike Royko said in his 1971 book Boss, “With their tote bags, the immigrants brought along all their old prejudices and immediately picked up some new ones. An Irishman who came here hating only the Englishmen and Irish Protestants soon hated the Poles, Italians, and blacks. A Pole who was free arrived hating only Jews and Russians, but soon learned to hate the Irish, Italians, and the blacks.”
Frozen prejudices had yet to find their way into the melting pot.
We, of course, didn’t know any of this as little kids—knew nothing of the ethnic divisions, rivalries, histories, and so on. We just knew our little world, whose end was the border of their world.
Their world was a vast unknown that would eventually have to be explored. But we would explore with blinders because we knew nothing of the people in that world. We didn’t know that by 1960, Puerto Ricans—who immigrated to Chicago in large numbers beginning in the late 1940s—had established thriving communities in Lakeview and Lincoln Park, our neighborhood. We were ignorant of the fact that by the mid-1960s, they were being displaced from those very neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal, programs that were part of a broader sweep of renewal and displacement taking place along the lakefront.
We could sense the wall of anger and resentment running up Broadway. Its context hidden behind a veil of youthful incomprehension.
➔ Next Chapter: 6. Terrorist Recess