Neal Samors opens his book, Chicago’s Far North Side: An Illustrated History of Rogers Park and West Ridge, to page 139. There’s a picture of the Howard Street he knew as a boy. The marquee of the Norshore Theatre advertises Lady and the Tramp. The word “Bowling” rises in neon letters from the front door of the Howard Bowl.
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Big city neighborhoods never let their natives go. Woody Allen has always carried Flatbush around with him; Martin Scorsese is still a child of Little Italy. Samors left Rogers Park in 1976, moving first to Niles, then Buffalo Grove. But he brought his daughter back to the old neighborhood to show her Eugene Field, his elementary school. He drove the streets with a video camera on his shoulder, shooting “a video of growing up.” Through 25 years of suburban exile, he has filled his files with Rogers Park history, intending to write a book someday.
Samors’s book (which is coauthored by Mary Jo Doyle, Martin Lewin, and Michael Williams) begins in the 1830s–a century before his own parents moved to Rogers Park–with the arrival of Philip McGregor Rogers, an Irish immigrant who built a log cabin in the birch forest just west of a deer path known as the Ridge. His settlement grew into two separate villages–Rogers Park and West Ridge–which were divided by the deer path, by then known as Ridge Avenue. Both joined the city of Chicago in 1893, during the annexation frenzy that accompanied the Columbian Exposition. In the 160 pages that follow the construction of that one-room cabin, Samors tells some colorful tales from his neighborhood’s history.
Plenty of famous Jews emerged from that world, including borscht belt comic Shecky Greene (who joked about Sullivan High School in his act), potboiling novelist Sidney Sheldon, New York Times sportswriter Ira Berkow, and congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who was Janice Danoff when she went to Sullivan.
