Each Chicago neighborhood was a village unto itself, with its fairly intensive ethnic ethos, its own mores and folkways.

 A couple of days ago, I posted Complex systems rarely have mono-causal sources of change discussing urban dynamics demographic flight and gentrification.  Some of the themes mentioned there, echo in A Literary Education and Other Essays by Joseph Epstein.  He captures a much richer tapestry of change, transition and memory.  From page 97, "A Toddlin' Town"

Time was, if you told me your address in Chicago, I could tell your ethnic origins, make a reasonably accurate guess at your family’s household income, know whether your parents ate in the kitchen or in the dining room and whether your father came to table in his undershirt. So balkanized was the Chicago of my youth—the 1940s and ’50s—that each Chicago neighborhood (and there are by current count some 237 of them) was a village unto itself, with its fairly intensive ethnic ethos, its own mores and folkways. And one didn’t often, except to go to work, and not always then, leave the neighborhood; no great need to, for churches, parks, restaurants, movie theaters, taverns, and everything was there, close at hand.

Chicago was then filled with European immigrants—Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Irish, Italians—and very Catholic. Priests in dog collars and nuns in full habit were part of the urban landscape of my boyhood, so much so that, until perhaps the age of 10 or 11, I thought Catholicism and Christianity coterminous. Blacks were chiefly locked away in their own neighborhoods on the city’s South Side, though soon to take over west-side neighborhoods, and “were, in Ralph Ellison’s sense, largely invisible, encountered only doing servile jobs. No homeless people walked the streets panhandling. We had only bums, in those days confined to one of Chicago’s two skid rows, one just south, the other west of the Loop.

That time, of course, isn’t any longer. I now drive through neighborhoods I once knew to be drab working class and find them filled with charmingly refurbished houses lived in by young, college-educated married couples. Neighborhood taverns—the workingman’s country clubs—are largely gone, sometimes replaced by franchise fast-food joints but just as often by coffee bars or small chichi restaurants. The grand Catholic churches, built by the tithing of immigrants, still stand, and the parks remain, but neighborhood life doesn’t seem quite so centered in these institutions as once it did. In former days, if you asked a Chicagoan where he lived, he was likely to answer with the name of his parish (St. Nicholas of Tolentine) or the nearest park (Green Briar), where he grew up playing the 16-inch-ball version of softball played only in Chicago or in whose field house he later went to do business with his Democratic ward committeeman. Catholic culture, if not the religion itself, seems to have all but disappeared; people are not so recognizably Catholic as once they were or so dedicated to sending their kids to what used to be called parochial schools.

Black life, once, once segregated, is largely segregated still, but no longer so strictly. In the bad old days, few were the Chicago restaurants to which one could take a black friend or acquaintance without fear of rebuff. The Hispanic population has grown greatly, demographically, politically, in prominence generally. Devon Avenue, the great Jewish shopping street of West Rogers Park, the neighborhood of my own boyhood, is now dominated by Indians and Pakistanis; on Saturday nights, women in saris and boys in cricket sweaters walk the street.