Humboldt Park

On Monday morning, I ventured out to Humboldt Park with two of my classmates, Lucy and Jake, and made a square through the area. Our task was to observe and try to find a resident to talk with. While we achieved the first task before the bus stopped at Kedzie and Division, the second half did not have quite a conventional answer. That is not to say that we did not speak with or, well, were talked to by anyone.

We made our way through a residential area first and I found myself somewhere seemingly familiar. There are a few kinds of residences in Chicago that I can recognize and Humboldt Park contains a fair amount of them. The first residential neighborhood contained the typical two- or three-story high houses that could be split into apartments or home one family with the typical black fences keeping their two- or three-inch separation a firm one. It was here that we found encountered our first hipster-dressed young adult pacing forward and then turning around and speed-walking her way to North Avenue. This encounter, or lack thereof, played into the game of observer-observed that we found ourselves engaged in throughout our walk.

When one begins down North Ave, it is impossible not to notice who dominates that side of Humboldt Park. Spanish presented itself almost uncontested—there were three Chinese restaurants on North Ave, however. From the markets to the abundant taquerias, to the tantalizing panaderia that I almost stopped for, to fresh-fruit neverias (apparently expanding further than the few in HumboldtPark), the Hispanic influence was clear.

The people who walked the streets, few on this particular Monday morning, did not give off the hurried indifference of the typical Gold Coast fare. Instead, they stared as much as we did and here I noticed that the act of observation is not, as the word may imply, a one-way street. People stared back, though they rarely spoke directly to us. A couple of younger looking men offered us the car that they were currently sitting in for around three hundred dollars, a fair price for a car on its way for repair. When one of us stopped to take a picture of old Coach advertisements being pasted on the side of a building, the past-er asked if we appreciated his artwork and directed us to look out for his work as we went further down North Avenue.

On the other side of town on Chicago, we encountered an enthusiastic rendition of a rap song that included dance moves that seemed appreciated by another man. Further down the same street, we heard the evangelical preaching of approaching doom. Was this better or worse than receiving a pamphlet about the terrors of marijuana that included a threat of hell while standing on the edge of Coe College’s campus? I think it is hard to give such experiences a binary treatment.

Beyond those who spoke to us, we were still noticed. As our eyes followed the turn of brick to store face to windows barred over, the eyes of those around us also noted us. Certainly a triad of white kids walking through the downtown of Humboldt with confused expressions directed at our smart phones and the occasional picture-taking was revealing our level of comfort there. Although I only ended up taking one photo, the sense of being the outsider struck me every time we stopped to check the map or paused for a photo. Moving as a group without purpose or direction felt alienating to me, like I could not quite delve into the experience of the place while observation asked me to take a step outside of the present moment.

The larger community of Humboldt Park seemed equally concerned with time, though perhaps in a different form. The demographic of Humboldt had clearly changed throughout its time as a neighborhood. Fritz Reuter’s statue near the park itself expressed an Easter Europe population, along with the very name Humboldt—from a German botanist. The alternative name of Kildare Ave was the Rose of Sharon. Along this very street a church announced sermons from Pastor Murphy. Though we had not seen any other signs of an Irish community in Humboldt Park, the structure suggested there either still was one, or this church and street remained as a sign of their passing influence.

While these older forms of architecture and naming remained as voices from a time passed, the current community of Humboldt Park also spoke. A church’s mural read ‘para la gente del futuro’, ‘for the people of the future.’ A daycare was also named this. These names suggested the voice of the community who viewed themselves as the people not of only the present, but also the future of the voice of Humboldt Park. Yet, this desire had its complications. The community of Humboldt Park was not only Hispanic or Puerto Rican, but also black. A mural we saw paved this image of the future, in which the Puerto Rican flag and the Pan-African flag faced each other over an image of children playing. The people of the future does not just include the voices of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic part of Humboldt, but also the black community and others that will come to this place. The remnants of the Eastern European immigrant population serve not just as reminders of their presence, but a potential future of the current community in Humboldt.