The photo looks east from the el onto Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park. In the distance, a lone high-rise pokes up into an overcast sky. Below, a guy is crossing the street, which seems too wide and too empty to be Armitage. You can see the Armitage Hardware sign, a little larger and less discreet than it is today, but otherwise the scene is foreign: no cars, no boutiques, no Starbucks, no rehabs. It’s the late 1960s or early ’70s, a moment snapped into suspended animation. It’s a place and a feeling, the romance of Puerto Rican Lincoln Park, that exists only in pictures and in the memories of the people who were there.
He’s a bouncy man in his 50s, stocky and bald, with hands that move around as he speaks. He looks like a prizefighter. And he has seen his share of fights, first as a teenager on the streets of Lincoln Park in the 60s, then as a member of the Young Lords, the revolutionary group devoted to empowering the Puerto Rican community, and later as a campaigner on Mayor Harold Washington’s Latino task force.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Today he lives mostly off his building, a two-flat with a coach house, and occupies himself with a variety of community and cultural pursuits. He was a founding member of the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance and has organized an annual cuatro festival in Chicago since 1998. (A cuatro is a Puerto Rican string instrument much like a guitar.) He produced a documentary film about the 1998 Havana Jazz Festival. He interviews older Puerto Ricans in a sort of ad hoc oral history project. He has exhibited his photos at the Old Town School of Folk Music, at Malcolm X College, and in an old horse stable in Humboldt Park, where the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance hopes to establish a museum. He is building a Web site at www.puertoricanchicago.com. For three years in the mid-90s he ran Project Kalinda at Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research, a program that explored the connections between Latin, Caribbean, and African-American music. He plays the vibraphone and is an occasional contributor to WBEZ.
A little boy of five or six holds a Puerto Rican flag. The Chicago Puerto Rican Day Parade is going by, but he can’t see it. He’s standing behind tall adults who line the street and looking back at the photographer. He’s dressed like a little man, in a crisp white shirt and vest. He’s the perfect picture of Puerto Ricanness–free, playful, and holding on to his flag.
There was a kid at Saint Michael’s who always got picked on. One day Flores was having a little fun with him, and a rival gang member interceded. “I’m going to see you when we go out for lunch tomorrow,” Flores told him. The other kid threatened to blow Flores’s head off. That night, Flores told his friends in the Continentals, and the next day 15 or 20 guys showed up hungry for a fight.
Heading east on Armitage, he passes Clifton, where he snapped the photo of the “Our Gang” kids. He passes Consign Design antiques at 1128 W. Armitage, which used to be his parents’ home. It’s the same building, but it’s been rehabbed and has a deck on the top floor. He passes Adams Park, which has a water slide; in Flores’s day it was just a lot with a baseball diamond. He passes what used to be La Bodega de Luis; now it’s the Fortunate Discoveries clothing store.
