by PolackTony » Thu May 01, 2025 9:28 am
Patrickgold wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 4:38 am
Aunt+Baby wrote: ↑Wed Apr 30, 2025 11:59 pm
For local Chicagoans, when did taylor street little italy really begin to fall off? Some people say that it was during the 70s/80s, but ive spoken to folks that say it was still legit up until the mid 90s. In particular a restaurant called Rico’s, where all the boys used to hang out. And are there still Italian families living there in present day?
Below is a great article. About 20 years ago, the same people that planned and constructed San Diego’s Little Italy came to Chicago and offered to make Taylor St into what San Diego has become but nobody wanted to work together and put money up. Chicago Italians are notorious for being selfish and not wanting to work together. In the early 90s there were about 20 restaurants on Taylor street. They definitely had the potential to be. I would say in the early 2000s is when it stopped being a legit Little Italy. Not many families still there. There some but not many. There are some old timers still there but mostly it’s finished. The Patio closed down, Rosebud closed down and the old Italian Hardware store just closed down. It’s over down there. That is why Ron Onesti and some others have turned their attention to Harlem Ave and hoping to make that a Little Italy even when many will tell you it is finished over there too. It does have more of an Italian influence on Harlem Ave but a lot of the Italians have left there too.
Great article, thanks for sharing. I’d add that while there has been tremendous decline in the remaining Italian character around Taylor St over the last 20 years, the writing was on the wall long before this. Even if they had implemented something like what San Diego’s Little Italy did, this would only have preserved the active Italian restaurant scene in the area. If successful, Taylor St today would be something like Mulberry St in Manhattan, with a row of restaurants and other businesses remaining on one street; a sort of Italian-American theme park for tourists, if you will. Not that this would have been a bad thing, as it would at least have better preserved the history of the neighborhood in a city that was once one of the pre-eminent Italian cities in the US, of which only fading vestiges remain today. But it wouldn’t have preserved a real Italian “community” in any meaningful sense, as that was already well on its way out 20 years ago as it was.
I spent a lot of time down around Taylor St in the 90s/2000s. There were still many Italian families in the area at this time. In the summer, you’d still see them all sitting out on the stoops in front of their buildings and even busting the fire hydrants open when it was hot out (old inner city habits die hard lol). But the remaining population was mainly elderly, and the younger people you’d see were almost all suburbanites stopping by to visit their relatives and the remaining businesses (not just restaurants but the remaining delis and bakeries). Very few young families with kids were choosing to stay there. This is currently the trend you see now in the East Bronx, as I’ve commented recently
In another thread, and the loss of younger families is the death knell for these old school Italian neighborhoods. Once a tipping point is reached, the demographic change can be rapid and dramatic, as the old people die off and their younger relatives either sell off the properties or rent them out as absentee landlords. Taylor St at least has gained a more affluent population, as the bulk of the newcomers who now dominant that neighborhood are people affiliated with UIC and the Medical Center campus.
And unless you’re old enough to have been around in the 50s/60s, the Taylor St that we knew in the 90s was already a shell, a ghost, of what it had once been, greatly diminished from its historical status as one of the largest Italian communities in the US. Large sections of the neighborhood were gutted for big “urban renewal” projects in the 1950s/1960s, including the construction of the Dan Ryan and
Eisenhower Expressways, the UIC Circle and Medical Center Campuses, and the ABLA projects. This lent an embattled and persecuted tenor to the remaining Italian communityon the Near Westside, as droves of Italians were either forced out by eminent domain seizures or simply packed up and left to flee the skyrocketing crime and disorder that took over inner city Chicago in the 60s and 70s. Many Italians accused the Daley Sr administration of having targeted Taylor St for destruction as part of a plan to break Italian political clout in the City (when in doubt, blame the Irish), and this entire period left a bitter taste in the mouth of the broader Italian community in Chicago, further accelerating the outflux to the suburbs. Thus a began a vicious cycle of decline, as the remaining holdout people remaining in the minority of the original neighborhood that was left structurally intact were increasingly isolated. Not only did younger people move out when they came of age, Taylor St was largely bypassed as a destination for the “second wave” Italian immigrants who came to Chicago in the 60s-80s, apart from a cluster of people from Acerra who subsequently moved out to the burbs anyway. Thus, Taylor St was never “re-Italianized” by later arrivals to the degree that the communities around Harlem Ave and in the western burbs were by these later arrivals who had a major cultural impact on the Chicagoland Italian community as a whole.
The point you make about Italians in Chicago being unable to effectively work together is an old one too. Observers were saying the same thing back in the 1920s even, as historically Italians primarily identified with their home town/regional networks of relatives and compaesani, rather than the overarching national identity of “Italian”. This fractured set of identities greatly limited collective action and solidarity, in line with a general Southern Italian cultural ethos of “amoral familiasm”, which also tended towards a hostile and suspicious attitude to outsiders and strangers. Funny enough, the one episode where Italians in Chicago notably exhibited a strong sense of solidarity and collective action as a group was the grassroots movement to prevent the City from gutting Taylor St in the 1960s, which totally failed even despite heated battles at City Hall (I’ve written about this topic before in more detail around discussions of the Daley Sr era). This movement totally failed in its objectives, however (whether one wants to ascribe this failure to programmatic hostility from the Irish political bloc or simply to an alignment of various structural-historic dynamics in urban America at the time is a different question), and undoubtedly the lesson drawn — whether implicitly or explicitly — by the broader Italian population of Chicago was “it’s pointless to organize or fight these things; better to just look out for me and mine and GTFO Dodge”.
The thriving restaurant scene around Taylor St in the 90s/early 2000s (itself also in large part a byproduct of the gentrification of sections of inner city Chicago in this period, as the City rebounded significantly economically and demographically from decades of decline under the Daley 2 administration) did serve to retain a notable mob presence in the area, of course, though most of those guys by then lived in the burbs and just hung out around Taylor St. I’ve previously mentioned the Lucchese associate from Brooklyn that I met, who lived and worked in Chicago during this period. He specifically referred to the crew that he worked with as the “Taylor St/Cicero crew”. When I asked him if he called it this because of the historical origins of the crew on Taylor St, he said no, he calls it that because a) that’s what they called themselves, and b) a number of the guys affiliated with this crew were mainly active around Taylor St at this time, rather than in the suburbs (these were all associates, as he stressed that made guys in Chicago would not deal with him directly since he was not made). With the decline of the Taylor St Italian business strip in the last 20 years, I think it’s a safe assumption that any remaining mafia presence in that neighborhood has since largely evaporated, apart from some guys who presumably still own property around there.
[quote=Patrickgold post_id=293096 time=1746099522 user_id=6577]
[quote=Aunt+Baby post_id=293090 time=1746082789 user_id=8231]
For local Chicagoans, when did taylor street little italy really begin to fall off? Some people say that it was during the 70s/80s, but ive spoken to folks that say it was still legit up until the mid 90s. In particular a restaurant called Rico’s, where all the boys used to hang out. And are there still Italian families living there in present day?
[/quote]
Below is a great article. About 20 years ago, the same people that planned and constructed San Diego’s Little Italy came to Chicago and offered to make Taylor St into what San Diego has become but nobody wanted to work together and put money up. Chicago Italians are notorious for being selfish and not wanting to work together. In the early 90s there were about 20 restaurants on Taylor street. They definitely had the potential to be. I would say in the early 2000s is when it stopped being a legit Little Italy. Not many families still there. There some but not many. There are some old timers still there but mostly it’s finished. The Patio closed down, Rosebud closed down and the old Italian Hardware store just closed down. It’s over down there. That is why Ron Onesti and some others have turned their attention to Harlem Ave and hoping to make that a Little Italy even when many will tell you it is finished over there too. It does have more of an Italian influence on Harlem Ave but a lot of the Italians have left there too.
[/quote]
Great article, thanks for sharing. I’d add that while there has been tremendous decline in the remaining Italian character around Taylor St over the last 20 years, the writing was on the wall long before this. Even if they had implemented something like what San Diego’s Little Italy did, this would only have preserved the active Italian restaurant scene in the area. If successful, Taylor St today would be something like Mulberry St in Manhattan, with a row of restaurants and other businesses remaining on one street; a sort of Italian-American theme park for tourists, if you will. Not that this would have been a bad thing, as it would at least have better preserved the history of the neighborhood in a city that was once one of the pre-eminent Italian cities in the US, of which only fading vestiges remain today. But it wouldn’t have preserved a real Italian “community” in any meaningful sense, as that was already well on its way out 20 years ago as it was.
I spent a lot of time down around Taylor St in the 90s/2000s. There were still many Italian families in the area at this time. In the summer, you’d still see them all sitting out on the stoops in front of their buildings and even busting the fire hydrants open when it was hot out (old inner city habits die hard lol). But the remaining population was mainly elderly, and the younger people you’d see were almost all suburbanites stopping by to visit their relatives and the remaining businesses (not just restaurants but the remaining delis and bakeries). Very few young families with kids were choosing to stay there. This is currently the trend you see now in the East Bronx, as I’ve commented recently
In another thread, and the loss of younger families is the death knell for these old school Italian neighborhoods. Once a tipping point is reached, the demographic change can be rapid and dramatic, as the old people die off and their younger relatives either sell off the properties or rent them out as absentee landlords. Taylor St at least has gained a more affluent population, as the bulk of the newcomers who now dominant that neighborhood are people affiliated with UIC and the Medical Center campus.
And unless you’re old enough to have been around in the 50s/60s, the Taylor St that we knew in the 90s was already a shell, a ghost, of what it had once been, greatly diminished from its historical status as one of the largest Italian communities in the US. Large sections of the neighborhood were gutted for big “urban renewal” projects in the 1950s/1960s, including the construction of the Dan Ryan and
Eisenhower Expressways, the UIC Circle and Medical Center Campuses, and the ABLA projects. This lent an embattled and persecuted tenor to the remaining Italian communityon the Near Westside, as droves of Italians were either forced out by eminent domain seizures or simply packed up and left to flee the skyrocketing crime and disorder that took over inner city Chicago in the 60s and 70s. Many Italians accused the Daley Sr administration of having targeted Taylor St for destruction as part of a plan to break Italian political clout in the City (when in doubt, blame the Irish), and this entire period left a bitter taste in the mouth of the broader Italian community in Chicago, further accelerating the outflux to the suburbs. Thus a began a vicious cycle of decline, as the remaining holdout people remaining in the minority of the original neighborhood that was left structurally intact were increasingly isolated. Not only did younger people move out when they came of age, Taylor St was largely bypassed as a destination for the “second wave” Italian immigrants who came to Chicago in the 60s-80s, apart from a cluster of people from Acerra who subsequently moved out to the burbs anyway. Thus, Taylor St was never “re-Italianized” by later arrivals to the degree that the communities around Harlem Ave and in the western burbs were by these later arrivals who had a major cultural impact on the Chicagoland Italian community as a whole.
The point you make about Italians in Chicago being unable to effectively work together is an old one too. Observers were saying the same thing back in the 1920s even, as historically Italians primarily identified with their home town/regional networks of relatives and compaesani, rather than the overarching national identity of “Italian”. This fractured set of identities greatly limited collective action and solidarity, in line with a general Southern Italian cultural ethos of “amoral familiasm”, which also tended towards a hostile and suspicious attitude to outsiders and strangers. Funny enough, the one episode where Italians in Chicago notably exhibited a strong sense of solidarity and collective action as a group was the grassroots movement to prevent the City from gutting Taylor St in the 1960s, which totally failed even despite heated battles at City Hall (I’ve written about this topic before in more detail around discussions of the Daley Sr era). This movement totally failed in its objectives, however (whether one wants to ascribe this failure to programmatic hostility from the Irish political bloc or simply to an alignment of various structural-historic dynamics in urban America at the time is a different question), and undoubtedly the lesson drawn — whether implicitly or explicitly — by the broader Italian population of Chicago was “it’s pointless to organize or fight these things; better to just look out for me and mine and GTFO Dodge”.
The thriving restaurant scene around Taylor St in the 90s/early 2000s (itself also in large part a byproduct of the gentrification of sections of inner city Chicago in this period, as the City rebounded significantly economically and demographically from decades of decline under the Daley 2 administration) did serve to retain a notable mob presence in the area, of course, though most of those guys by then lived in the burbs and just hung out around Taylor St. I’ve previously mentioned the Lucchese associate from Brooklyn that I met, who lived and worked in Chicago during this period. He specifically referred to the crew that he worked with as the “Taylor St/Cicero crew”. When I asked him if he called it this because of the historical origins of the crew on Taylor St, he said no, he calls it that because a) that’s what they called themselves, and b) a number of the guys affiliated with this crew were mainly active around Taylor St at this time, rather than in the suburbs (these were all associates, as he stressed that made guys in Chicago would not deal with him directly since he was not made). With the decline of the Taylor St Italian business strip in the last 20 years, I think it’s a safe assumption that any remaining mafia presence in that neighborhood has since largely evaporated, apart from some guys who presumably still own property around there.