From his office window Zygmunt Dyrkacz can see everything that happens at the Polish Triangle. It’s a bleak, brick-paved island at the intersection of Ashland, Division, and Milwaukee, three graffiti-covered bus shelters and a Blue Line entrance sharing space with some honey locusts and a fountain. A Polish emigre, Dyrkacz owns the Chopin Theatre, across from the Triangle on the south side of Division. He lives above the theater with his wife and their two children, and the little plaza is the closest thing they have to a front yard. For the second time now, he’s caught up in a fight over its future.
In the 40s Division was dense with polka clubs and Polish bars from Ashland to Western, and when Dyrkacz moved in 20 years ago the stretch was still called Polish Broadway. There were three Polish-owned banks on the Triangle, he remembers, and a handful of pierogi spots. The Polish daily newspaper Zgoda was his biggest neighbor. Now the theater and the tiny Podhalanka Polksa Restauracja next door are the only Polish holdouts, surrounded by national banks, fast food joints, discount retail, and the La Pasadita taquerias.
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“The Polish will see this as an unresolved issue,” Dyrkacz told Jeff Huebner for a Reader story at the time. “It’d be like going to an Indian reservation and naming it for a white author who wrote about the Indians and not naming it for the Indians themselves.” He got local churches, neighborhood groups, and a hospital on his side, and in the end the plaza was christened the Polish Triangle. A fountain named after Algren was erected in its center.
A year ago, hoping it would lead to support for their dream of an overhauled Triangle, Dyrkacz and his wife Lela Headd got involved with the newly formed Wicker Park & Bucktown Special Service Area. SSAs are city-approved neighborhood groups that can tax residences and businesses along a neighborhood’s commercial corridor. They fund projects like streetscaping, festivals, and graffiti cleanup, trying to draw more (and more desirable) foot traffic to the corridor. Headd is a commissioner on the SSA board, and Dyrkacz attends almost every public meeting. He’s more vocal than some of the board members, loudly snorting disapproval of budgetary proposals and bursting into passionate, long-winded objections.
“I can’t speak for different peoples’ tolerances for different processes,” says Jan Metzger, a staffer at the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the board’s president, “but I work in the field of transportation policy and I’ve seen that it takes years and decades to get things done on this scale.” Metzger calls the Triangle “gritty”–she passes it nearly every day–but she says a stand-alone project for this intersection isn’t on the SSA’s agenda. Three Blue Line stations lie within the SSA’s boundaries, and Metzger says the SSA wants to overhaul all three with a uniform theme, but it’s “nowhere near” the stage of locking down what that will be. She says the master plan will shape the project. “We haven’t moved as fast as some would like,” she says, “but really, we are officially not a year old yet. A lot of this first year has been consumed in . . . understanding what the community wants. We can’t take the ideas of one or two people and spend a significant amount of public funds to please them. We need to make sure we’re doing what’s good for the whole SSA.”
Two weeks ago he and Headd placed four planters around the Nelson Algren Fountain–they wanted them there for the Around the Coyote Festival. They spent less than $300 on the pots, flowers, mulch, and soil. The frugality shows, and there’s no telling how long the flowers will last, but they do help pull the eye from the piles of old rice left for the Triangle’s pigeons.
