Chicago is a dizzying array of neighborhoods. While the city’s 77 official community areas offer a marker of geographic definition, it’s the hundreds of smaller neighborhoods, many formed out of communities that span just a few city blocks that make it a challenging place to navigate.
It’s a daunting task to capture the city in its fullness; tellingly, one of Chicago’s greatest spokesman, Studs Terkel, managed to portray the city’s richness in his weekly radio show and books by interviewing Chicagoans from all walks of life. It’s that same spirit of open mindedness and eclecticism that animates The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook, a collection of 45 essays, poems, and photographs from Belt Publishing, where contributors from all corners of the city share space, each individual neighborhood weaving together into an evocative tapestry.
Just as it’s hard to understand Chicago without recognizing the divergent concerns animating its residents’ lives—whether it’s an Englewood mother who’s fought to keep a single corner free from gun violence, or the intense dedication to Halloween in Edgewater Glen—the Guidebook serves as a potent reminder of an overarching connection we still share, bound to a city leaden with stories.
The Guidebook highlights the voices and communities left out in conversations about the city. When publications like the New York Times praise the city’s complexity, while only recommending cultural experiences in wealthier communities, it strikes a familiar beat: pay lip service to the city’s diverse experiences, but ultimately focusing on areas that are already most familiar.
For book editor and longtime journalist Martha Bayne, highlighting communities on the South and West Sides that often fail to receive favorable media coverage and allowing residents to describe their own experiences was a way of rebalancing the narrative inequity that exists between Chicago neighborhoods. Calling it a “guidebook” reminds readers that the city is animated by the daily experiences of its full-time residents and resists the oversimplification that traditional tourist guidebooks perpetuate.
“Most people in the U.S. probably have an idea about Chicago, and how sophisticated it is depends on where they’re coming from,” Bayne says. “You have to dig a little deeper to try and find stories who are saying something that might spark you to look at the city in a different way.”
The book’s first essay, “Austin and Division,” written by Dominican University English student and third-generation Chicagoan Shaina Warfield, helps to ground the book in an awareness of how the city’s geography shapes our understanding of where we call home.
As Warfield writes: “People are geography too; where they live and don’t live, where they gather, where they work and play and buy their food. It all begins to draw a line, a color line you can see the moment you’ve learned your colors.” It’s a gentle observation of a painful truth: Chicago is one of the most segregated cities and has a terrible history of redlining, disinvestment, and police brutality.
“The relationship between people and place is how I understand the definition of community,” Warfield says. “It becomes obvious when personal experiences are shared experiences that my life is not happenstance, but by design.”
Warfield writes about the weight of being kept inside all summer as a child, the toll of gunshots heard in the distance, and seeing a different, wealthier world just a few blocks away in Oak Park.
Meanwhile, in Andersonville, Sarah Steimer’s “The Precarious Equilibrium” frets with concern about the delicate balance that’s kept the neighborhood just affordable enough to maintain a lively community, and the magic of a modest century-old apartment building whose “U-shape hugs a vine-filled courtyard, embracing the residents within its red brick walls.”
In both instances, it’s the intimate observations of their homes that animate larger concerns about city and neighborhood change, addressing these topics while still being defined by the way they play out in people’s real lives.
“I didn’t want it to be a book about race or segregation or gentrification or any of these big-picture themes of urban change,” Bayne says. “But you get a lot of people on the South and West Sides writing very explicitly about their experiences with racism and segregation, and you get people on the North Side writing about their fears of gentrification. That is the city right now.”
For urban planner Vitaliy Vladimirov, contributor of an essay on Uptown called “A Trip to the Argyle Museum of Memories,” which document’s Vladimirov’s efforts to help memorialize the legacy of Asian immigration into the North Side community, the book is a reminder that Chicagoans are frequently strangers in their own city, unable to recognize the qualities that others enjoy about their own neighborhoods.
“We hem ourselves into these boxes of neighborhoods that are good versus bad, and that’s where a lot of the issues start to happen,” Vladimirov says. “The trick is trying to convince an outsider of a neighborhood’s quality, [because] people have all these preconceived notions that are shaped by these boxes we put ourselves into.”
Individual pieces tackle different time periods in their works, on occasion within the same community. In West Ridge, Sara Nasser’s “Rebel Girl” documents growing up pushing against the limitations imposed upon her as a Muslim girl, while Stuti Sharma’s “Paan Stains and Discount Vegetables” captures the community’s contemporary ethnic diversity through photography.
The most explicitly forward-looking piece comes with the epilogue, “The Last Days of Rezkoville” a piece by author Ryan Smith that illustrates the rich legacy land south of the Loop that’s set to become The 78 megadevelopment that hopes to define its own community area on the make.
By ending the book looking into the city’s future, it’s a reminder that Chicago is a city that’s “openly anxious about its soul,” as author Arnold Bennett observed in 1912.
It also marks a moment of possibility, as Bayne describes it, a time capsule of a pivotal instance in the city’s unfinished journey.
“The best thing readers can take away from the book is a reminder to listen and privilege stories that challenge or just ignore altogether the standard channels of money and power in the city, and do what they can to amplify them,” Bayne says. “It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s pleasurable and, I think, a surprisingly effective tonic for despair.”