Timezoneone Blog

One the best things about living and working in Chicago is the summer - although short lived, only June till September, it is spectacular!  Super hot days with long summer nights that don’t cool off, the city is alive with street parties, summer sales, sailing events, outside dining, beach volleyball, fireworks, green tree-lined streets, grilling out, and movies in the park.  But one of my favorite things has to be wandering around our neighborhood, which is called ‘Little Italy’, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Chicago, and seeing snippets of what it must have been like when it was filled with Italian immigrants and ruled by the mob.

The Italians started moving to Chicago in the 1850’s and by the 1930’s there was around 75,000 Italians, with a big number of them, particularly from Sicily, residing in the Little Italy area.  The area boomed, and with it a proliferation of Italian restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores.

The story goes that residents of Chicago’s Little Italy warily observed a poplar tree that stood at the corner of Taylor and Loomis streets (one block from where we now live) and carved into the trunk were the names of neighborhood residents who had refused to submit to the Black Hand’s extortion attempts.

One hundred years later, the “Dead Mans Tree” is gone, but organized crime is once again a hot topic in Chicago, as the most important mob trial in decades continues to unfold at the Dirksen Federal Building in the Loop. The Outfit’s reputation still inspires terror — so much so that the identities of the jurors in the ‘Family Secrets’ trial are shielded to protect them from threats.

But the neighborhood once ruled by the mob has changed, today I watch old men sitting smoking cigars outside the unmarked storefronts of private men’s clubs. Push my way through crowds of people queuing up for one of Marios famous Italian ices late into the night.  Say hello to old Italian women sweeping their steps. Sit sipping a latte under the statue of Joe DiMaggio just off the main street and visit the traditional Italian grocer that imports the most amazing prosciutto, still wrapping it in old fashioned grease proof paper.  But there’s one restaurant I wander by that always sends my imagination racing; Rosebuds, an old Italian Men’s Supper Club once a haunt of Robert DeNiro, Tony Bennett, Carol Burnett, Robert Redford and Frank Sinatra, a gallery of black and white autographed photos lines the walls, they’re so nostalgic that I feel transported in time and can almost hear Frankie belting out ‘My Kind of Town’ across the hot smoke filled rooms.

“A nostalgic Chicagoan” - Raewyn