A New Time for Old Town

At the end of World War II, the Old Town area of Chicago was a dilapidated slum that was home to a lot of poor Negroes and Puerto Ricans but a pox on the face of the city. Set on the north side of the city just 20 blocks from the Loop, the neighborhood still had its solid old houses with the high-Victorian flare that had been built in the 1880s. But the solid burghers who built them had long since moved to the suburbs. And decay had left the streets lined with seedy bars and sleeping bums.

Today, Old Town's streets are lined with just about everything else. In a self-generated renaissance, a new batch of Old Towners have made their neighborhood at once one of Chicago's most attractive residential areas and the city's new top entertainment center. "It's like Greenwich Village in New York, only very much better," says one admirer. "Greenwich Village has gotten too garish. Old Town is less jammed together and touristy. I think artists really live there." So do lawyers, doctors, publishers, ad men and all manner of confirmed city dwellers who want a bit of backyard and individuality along with the common comforts of home.

Song to a Scream. The change came from inside--with no help from any government or urban-renewal project. It began in 1948, when a few homeowners formed a neighborhood association and started sprucing themselves up. Others were shamed into following suit. In 1950 the association started an art fair, and the patrons it attracted noticed the neighborhood. There were the sturdy old houses just waiting to be worked on, and the prices were right. One artist, for instance, found a house for $4,000. All that was needed was a lot of energy and some money to put into renovations.

Any kind of renovations. It was not so important what, just so long as something was done. Old toilet bowls moved onto patios and sprouted flowers; louvered windows, coach lamps and marble fireplaces became standard. An enterprising young real estate man bought up some houses, ripped the plaster down to the bare brick, added odds and ends picked up at demolition sites and secondhand stores and resold his properties at profits handsome enough to make him a millionaire.

Individual owners added original touches, too, and a tour of the homes jammed into the triangle of Old Town would turn up hand-carved wooden doors, airy fretwork porticos and everywhere gardens--gardens with roses, gardens with grinning stone cherubs, gardens with piping-satyr fountains.

Last year alone, home-improvement spending in the triangle ran between $600,000 and $800,000, according to federal estimates. In the last ten years the price of real estate has actually quadrupled--from a song to a high-pitched scream of disbelief. Nevertheless, there is still an apparently endless waiting list of people who are anxious to buy.

The Gaudy & Giddy. More recent is Old Town's transformation into the liveliest place in town of an evening. The after-dark activity is centered on twelve blocks of Wells Street, which cuts through the heart of the Old Town triangle (see map). First attracted by the neighborhood, young entrepreneurs in the past four years have built Wells into a concentrated area of shops, nightclubs and restaurants.

They have names like The Bag I'm In, a leather goods store, Snug, a bar which is, and Little Pleasures, an ice cream and sweets parlor. Soup's On is a restaurant offering a big bowl of the stuff, a hunk of French bread and coffee for a buck, while Chances R and its sister restaurant across the street (called Across the Street) push a ton of hamburger and give away half a ton of peanuts every week.

A browser on Wells can find everything from sandals to a potty screen for discreet cats ($8). Top jazzmen pull their gigs at The Plugged Nickel and, a few doors down, the hippest folksters fill up cavernous Mother Blues. At the end of the street is the famed Second City, the satiric improvisational theater. And in the next three months, some 32 new places are firmly scheduled to add themselves to the present 110 establishments.

During this summer season, the best ever, as many as 20,000 people a night have drifted up and down Wells trying to sort the clip joints from the first-rate, the gaudy from the genuinely giddy. In fact, that is Old Town's only problem: how to keep the gold-rush atmosphere under control. The Wells Street Association frowns on neon and flashing signs and is trying to get rid of barkers and sidewalk displays. One sidewalk guy can stay, though. Wells Street and Old Town would hardly be the same without their genuine mustachioed Italian hurdy-gurdy man.

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