Yeah, the heart of the Italian community in Chicago was Taylor Street. Roughly 2/3 of this neighborhood was wiped out completely in the 1960s, for the new UIC Circle campus. Planners were careful to leave most of Taylor Street itself intact, but most of the surrounding residential blocks were leveled. It's still the symbolic heart of the Italian community, but what's left of the neighborhood is mostly an affluent mix of students and folks who work in the Medical District.
The other Italian area was around Grand and Morgan... again, much of this neighborhood was leveled in the 60s for the Kennedy Expressway although some businesses remain.
Italians generally moved westward, out Grand Ave and North Ave to inner-ring suburbs like Elmwood Park, Melrose Park and Bensenville and later to more far-flung suburbs like Addison and Lombard. If you go any further out, there is no recognizable community of Italians anymore, just suburbanized white folk...
__________________
la forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel...
|