Dear Editor,
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Wicker Park, as a neighborhood, is not a fixed entity. Rather, it is, like all neighborhoods, a spatial entity produced by the ongoing activities of a number of different people over a number of years. Furthermore, it means different things to different people: to readers of Rolling Stone magazine who live in far-off cities and suburbs it is a music “scene”; to artists and middle-class newcomers it is a cheap place to live and make a home; for longtime residents it is home and an affordable place to live; and for real estate brokers, appraisers, assessors, and investors it is a market. But despite the different meanings they attach to it, these different people end up having a collectively defined sense of where the neighborhood’s boundaries are. For example, Huebner notes that last year’s Around the Coyote arts fair included walking tours that “ranged as far as Division, Halsted, Western, and Fullerton.” In the 1994 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times’ real estate publication Living in Greater Chicago these same streets form the borders of Wicker Park and Bucktown combined, though their eastern border is described as the Kennedy Expressway rather than Halsted. Does this mean there is some great conspiracy going on? No, it just means that people need borders to organize how they think about a neighborhood, and different people with very different interests often use the same borders.
So what can people do about this? Tom Handley’s idea of some sort of special tax zone is one solution. Another is to try to engage in border disruption. At the most simple level such disruption might include ensuring that Wicker Park’s cultural activities physically cross its designated borders. In the longer term residents should get the city to build or rehab publicly subsidized housing and art centers in the area to bring low-income people into the area and give them the chance to live and work in an economically vibrant neighborhood. And finally, and most importantly, Wicker Park residents should reach out, politically, to the neighborhoods around them to create a coalition that can organize itself against concentrated development, i.e., gentrification. The idea is not to discourage economic development but to simply control the rate and direction in which it goes. And this, ironically, can only be done by partially letting go of the idea of Wicker Park as a particular place.
