I was delighted to see the Reader take on Logan Square in the August 10 issue. I grew up in Logan, attended Darwin School, and have lived, worked, and done research on the near northwest side most of my adult life. There are a million details I wish had been included, but journalists deserve their chance to offer their take on a neighborhood that no one should expect to be summarized in a few articles. I have a lot of personal respect for both Harold Henderson and Ben Joravsky, and all three articles do a good job with other angles on Logan, including the architecture, recent elections, and the early settlement history. But a very crucial piece of the present was treated with cavalier disregard, and its implications are disturbing given the threat gentrification presents to the area.
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Logan Square is a Latino community. When I lived on Sawyer and then Washtenaw in the 70s and 80s I was often the only Irish-American kid on the block. My school pictures from Darwin include a few other white kids, mostly Polish, a few black kids, one or two Middle Easterners, among a majority of Latinos. That majority is declining due to gentrification, but only by a few percentage points, as recent immigration is bringing new Latinos to Logan Square at the same time. In the Henderson piece [“It Started With a Farm”], the last three generations of a majority Latin-American neighborhood deserve more than an addendum at the end of a list of immigrant groups here: “now Latinos.” In fact nowhere in the opening blurb or subsequent three articles does the phrase “Puerto Rican” ever appear, although at its inception this Latino community was majority Puerto Rican, and adjacent to the historic heart of Puerto Rican Chicago in Humboldt Park. The funny-looking pinata on the cover represents the Mexican community here as kitsch, and very little in the articles lets them speak as people. Why a single Cuban former resident now in Miami got the only extensive interview about the current Latino community and its history boggles my mind in a neighborhood with so many outspoken Latino leaders and residents still there. Relying on this expatriate meant mistakes as well: Los 4 Caminos was not there in 1972, and the “Cubans on the east” of Kimball were a fraction of the Puerto Rican and Mexican presence. Joravsky [“End of an Era”] does not actually explain much promised in his subtitle about “how Logan Square got out from under powerful alderman Richard Mell.” There is a much more interesting story behind all this, of long-standing battles between the emergent progressive Puerto Rican leadership and Mell’s decreasing ability to buy off Latinos, who forced him in the late 90s to negotiate. Instead white “independents” become the protagonists of the community in his narrative, rather than a privileged minority largely arguing over issues that revolve mostly around low-income Latinos.
Anthropologist
