Chicago Snapshots

The sunflower that ate Chicago



Elston Avenue, at sunset


The first four photographs were filtered using the iPhone application CameraBag. Photos 1-3 are from the Forgotten Chicago tour of west Pilsen and Little Village. These neighborhoods are largely un-gentrified, and remind me of how the north side of Chicago looked when I first moved here, in 1984. Photo number 2 is an old Schlitz "tied" house. Tied houses were possibly the first franchise concept ever: a tavern where everything from the product and interior furnishings, to the building itself, were supplied by one brewer. The prohibition killed these off, and laws afterwards prevented brewers from owning taverns.

A cluster of Schlitz and Stege brewery houses still stand within blocks of each other in the Pilsen/Little Village area. As we took pictures of a former Stege house, a trio of middle-school-aged girls hung out of the windows of an apartment building across the street. "Is this a famous bar?!!" one of them asked, since a crowd of white people with cameras is not exactly a common sight in Little Village. I tried to explain that it was sorta famous, in the context of things. The girls gazed on at the tavern with a new reverence.



"Tied Houses" Forgotten Chicago. [Link]