Humboldt Park, Chicago

Humboldt Park
—  Community area  —
Community Area 23 - Humboldt Park
Location within the city of Chicago
Country	United States
State	Illinois
County	Cook
City	Chicago
Population	56,323 (2010)
Neighborhoods	List West Humboldt Park Humboldt Park West Town

Humboldt Park is one of 77 officially designated community areas located on the northwest side of Chicago, Illinois. The Humboldt Park neighborhood is widely known for its large Puerto Rican presence. Humboldt Park is also the name of a 207-acre (0.8 km²) park adjacent to the community area.

In conventional use,^{[citation needed]} the neighborhood's borders include Western Avenue to the east, Pulaski Road to the west, Armitage Avenue to the North, and Chicago Avenue to the south. However, the Humboldt Park Community Area, the official demographic entity,^{[citation needed]} is west of that area: its borders are the Belt Railway on the west, just east of Cicero Avenue; the Union Pacific tracks to the south, along Kinzie Street; Bloomingdale Avenue on the north; and Humboldt Boulevard, Humboldt Park, and Sacramento Boulevard on the east. The railyards southeast of Grand and Sacramento are also part of the Community Area.

Early history

The park was named for Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and geographer famed for his five-volume work Cosmos: Draft of a Physical Description of the World. His single visit to the United States did not include Chicago. The creation of Humboldt and several other Westside parks provided beauty, linked together via Chicago's historic boulevard system. The park is flanked by large graystone homes.

Chicago annexed most of the neighborhood in 1869, the year the park was laid out. Because the area lay just beyond the city's fire code jurisdiction, as set out after the 1871 fire, this made low cost construction possible.

Puerto Rican influx

Main article: Puerto Ricans in Chicago

The east end of Paseo Boricua along Division Street, facing west near Western Avenue.

Fiesta Boricua on Paseo Boricua.

As early as the 1950s, Puerto Ricans settled in Humboldt Park. Many came directly from Puerto Rico as migration was averaging over ten thousand Puerto Ricans per year in the 1950s and 1960s, throughout the United States. Others came from the local neighborhoods of Old Town and Lincoln Park where a large prime real estate area of Chicago, near Lake Michigan and downtown, gentrified and Puerto Ricans were displaced. The infamous Division Street Riots resulted in the start of organizations for Puerto Rican rights in 1966. Organizations like the L.AD.O.(Latin American Defense Organization), S.A.C.C.(Spanish Action Committee of Chicago) and the Caballeros de San Juan and Damas de Maria, helped to slow down the riot caused by a police shooting of an unarmed youth. At another smaller riot in 1969, the Young Lords worked with criminal gangs like the Latin Kings, the Spanish Cobras, the Latin Disciples and the above mentioned community organizations to build unity and to redirect youth energies toward empowerment strategies. There were several solidarity marches from Lincoln Park to Humboldt Park and to City Hall; demanding social services, an end to police brutality and an end to neighborhood displacement.

But in 1995, Division Street found new life when city officials and Latino leaders offered a symbolic gesture to recognize the neighborhood and the residents' roots. They christened it "Paseo Boricua" and installed two metal Puerto Rican flags—each weighing 45 tons, measuring 59 feet (18 m) vertically and stretching across the street—at each end of the strip.

Under the flags, the struggling neighborhood transformed into one of the most vibrant Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, uniting the once fragmented Puerto Rican community. Since the community banded, the occupancy rate of the neighborhood rose to about 90 percent, home prices stabilized and Chicago's 115,000 Puerto Ricans have a place they call their own.

Over time, Paseo Boricua became a place where Puerto Ricans could go to learn about their heritage. A culture center was established, and the offices of local Puerto Rican politicians relocated their offices to Division Street. Recently, the City of Chicago has set aside money for Paseo Boricua property owners who want to restore their buildings' facades.

Visitors can hear salsa, reggaeton, bomba, plena, and merengue music pulsating through the streets and smell the mouth-watering carne guisada puertorriqueña. A couple of grocers have set up shop to help buyers find those hard-to-acquire products from home, such as gandules verde, sazón, and naranja agria.

The area is visually stunning, having many colorful and historically important murals as well as two affordable housing buildings with facades and colors mimicking the Spanish colonial styles of Old San Juan.^{[citation needed]} A tile mosaic of Puerto Rican baseball slugger Roberto Clemente greets visitors at one end of the street, near the high school that bears his name.

Several times a year, Paseo Boricua is fashioned in gala to celebrate important Puerto Rican holidays, such as the Three Kings Day, the Puerto Rican People's Parade, Haunted Paseo Boricua, and Fiesta Boricua with an estimated 65,000 attendees.^{[citation needed]}

It is the only officially recognized Puerto Rican neighborhood in the nation.^{[citation needed]} New York, with its vast Puerto Rican population, does not have an officially designated Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Today Paseo Boricua is the first location outside the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to be granted the right to fly an official “Municipal Flag of Puerto Rico.

Institute of Puerto Rican arts and culture

Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture.

The Puerto Rican resurgence is also being viewed as an important step in teaching the next generation of Chicago Puerto Ricans about the area's past.^{[citation needed]} With the support of the community, Puerto Rican leaders in Chicago leased the historic Humboldt Park stables near Paseo Boricua that house the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, its the only musseum in the nation that is completely dedicated to the history of Puerto Rican culture and the Puerto Rican diaspora. About $3.4 million was spent to renovate the exterior of the building and another $3.2 million for the interior.

Other history and trends

Our Lady of the Angels School Fire occurred at the Our Lady of Angels School on December 1, 1958 in the Humboldt Park area. The school, which was operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, lost 92 students and three nuns in five classrooms on the second floor.

The 1970s saw troubled times for Humboldt Park. Gang activity, crime, and violence predominated the area. The neighborhood continues to be economically depressed, with housing values below the city-wide average. Overcrowding remains a serious problem. However, the neighborhood's Puerto Rican population, remains insistent on keeping and expanding a community through many housing, political, social, and economic initiatives like the Paseo Boricua business corridor on Division St between Western and California avenues where two 59 foot steel gateway-like Puerto Rican flags are planted.

Education

Chicago Public Schools serves the area.

Rowe Clark Math & Science Academy, a CPS high school, is in Humboldt Park. "3645 W Chicago Ave

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago Our Lady of the Angels Catholic School was located in Humboldt Park.

Cultural references to the community

Humboldt Park figures prominently in the literary works that chronicled Chicago's blue collar life in the 1950s and 1960s.

• Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March charts the long drifting life of a Jewish Chicagoan and his myriad eccentric acquaintances throughout the early 20th century: growing up in the then Polish neighborhood of Humboldt Park, he ends up cavorting with heiresses on the Gold Coast, studying at the University of Chicago, fleeing union thugs in the Loop, and taking the odd detour to hang out with Trotsky in Mexico while eagle-hunting giant iguanas on horseback.

• John Guzlowski's Lightning and Ashes chronicles the author's experiences growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, in the context of Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish Cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians.

Humboldt Park has also been featured in film.

• The Horn Blows at Midnight, a 1945 film starring Jack Benny, Margaret Dumont, and Alexis Smith, also features Humboldt Park. Benny portrays an angel sent from heaven to blow his horn at an appointed time and destroy the world. However, because the angel hasn't lived on Earth for several centuries, he becomes totally lost in modern Chicago. He floats from one misadventure to the next, including a visit to Humboldt Park during an ethnic German picnic, where he encounters Germans in traditional garb enjoying traditional German food and music. Ultimately the angel refuses to blow his horn, arguing to God that the kindness and goodness displayed by the Chicagoans he met warrants saving the world, not destroying it. God agrees.

• Nothing Like the Holidays, starring Freddy Rodriguez, John Leguizamo, Debra Messing, Alfred Molina, Jay Hernandez, Ramses Jimenez, Luis Guzman, Melonie Diaz, Vanessa Ferlito and Elizabeth Pena, follows three siblings returning to their parents' home in Humboldt Park for the holidays.

External links

• Official City of Chicago Humboldt Park Community Map
• Chicago Park District
• a Latino resource
  • Humboldt Park
• Humboldt Park Arts, Culture, Gentrification, Immigration