Mapping the Territory

A few months ago, I floated some speculations about Bridgeport’s real estate market, hoping to follow up with people who make their living in it, to hear what they thought.

So far, the follow up part has been slow going. (It turns out people don’t want me to profile their real estate holdings on my blog!) I’m not out to embarrass anybody, but I’m still optimistic persistence will pay off.

Lately, I’ve been working up some maps. I’ve been hoping to find patterns that would provide context, and maybe people who don’t want to broadcast their own business will be willing to theorize about cumulative effects (especially good ones).

Also I did a project like this before, and it still shapes how I think of Bridgeport now. That was 9 years ago this summer, I was editing an Affordable Housing Fact Book for the Chicago Rehab Network, a community development advocate, after the 2000 Census had come out.

You may recall, the 2000 Census was a triumphant one for Chicago. The population had grown for the first time in 40 years! The median income had grown significantly faster than inflation, and significantly faster than rents.

People were richer but housing was still cheap – that was a big improvement on CRN’s previous Affordable Housing Fact Book, which found that real incomes had dropped over the 1980s, and rents had doubled.

Even so, not all neighborhoods experienced the 1990s in the same way. That summer, I was trying to tease out variations the big picture obscured by mapping changes in population, incomes and housing costs across the city’s 77 community areas. When the Fact Book came out, it showed trends moving across clusters of neighborhoods in a few persistent patterns.

A large cluster of neighborhoods extending northward across the lakefront were booming: with a burst of new housing construction and growing numbers of high income households (and shrinking numbers of low income ones), they were at the center of an expanding ring of rising rents and home values.



At the same time, large swaths of the south and west side were still thinning out. Their populations were dropping, their housing stock was shrinking, and vacancy rates were still high.

Bridgeport and its neighbors, especially those hugging the I&M Canal on the way out to Garfield Heights, fell in a cluster that was virtually bursting.

Their populations were exploding, especially low income households displaced from the booming and thinning communities, or arriving as new immigrants. But the housing stock was not keeping pace, giving rise to various kinds of housing stress – from overcrowding to high housing-cost-burden, a measure of the portion of its income a household spends to keep a roof over its head.



At the time, I thought these were dangerous signs. From what I’d read, the “thinning” communities had been bursting ones, before a combination of housing stress and politics condemned them to the urban renewal ploughs.

But Jack Markowski, who was Housing Commissioner at the time, saw something different in our bursting cluster. He observed that overcrowding was a relative term – it’s often measured as more than 1 person per room, yet our Mayor at the time had grown up in a Bridgeport bungalow with 7 kids. He described the neighborhoods in the bursting cluster as vibrant, dynamic, even exciting places to be.

Now that I live here, of course, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. My view of the cluster has also expanded, and the questions I’m inclined to ask have changed.




New City shared qualities with “thinning” communities in 2000. But it shares historic ties with Bridgeport. The Lower West Side, which includes Pilsen south of 18th Street, was a bursting community that’s been historically separate from territories below the South Branch, but it’s tied to Bridgeport by patterns of hipster-migration, and shares other characteristics with the Greater Bridgeport area.

The neighbors might not think of themselves as part of Greater Bridgeport, but they would probably recognize we share some broad similarities, especially when compared with the city as a whole.

Our populations include large numbers of the foreign born, and, historically, miniscule numbers of African Americans. Our housing stock is older than that of the city as a whole, and a relatively large portion of it is comprised of small apartment buildings, but very little of it is in buildings with more than 10 units.



Though there are variations within the area too: the Lower West Side and Armour Square outpace everybody in drawing immigrants; Armour Square (whose census tracts extend to State Street) and New City (which includes both Canaryville and Back of the Yards) include respectable numbers of blacks.

In 2000, Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Brighton Park were more similar to each other than the rest of the cluster by almost every measure. Their median incomes were identical for instance, and just below the city median. By comparison the Lower West Side, Armour Square and New City looked like poor relations – more modest in income but sharing a family resemblance.

Communities across the area were built to house workers in Chicago’s manufacturing sectors. And by 2000 it was still true that workers employed by manufacturing industries, or in occupations in Production, Transport and Material Moving, maintained a strong foothold in Greater Bridgeport, even as they lose ground everywhere else.

And that may make Greater Bridgeport a good vantage on Chicago’s ongoing transformation from a manufacturing and logistics hub to whatever has come next – a service economy, a global city, maybe a magnet for the creative class.

Manufacturing jobs once brought masses of Chicagoans to the middle class. What has come next is often said to be have drawn the workforce into 2 tiers: those who provide professional services to corporations -- whose skills and long hours are compensated with high wages -- and the larger mass of those who provide consumer services – who do the housework of life the professionals no longer have time for – at a much lower rate of pay.

After 2000, the bursting cluster looked to me like the line of exodus low wage workers were following out to the inner ring suburbs as the higher wage ones priced them out.

Now, Greater Bridgeport strikes me as a point of confluence, where old and new, high wage and low wage, coexist. It’s not clear if it will last, or if it is just a moment in transition. But in the maps that follow, I hope to make a snapshot of what that looks like now, on a local level.

A Quick Complaint About the Census:
Before I launch in, though, I should acknowledge some limits on what these maps can say for certain about what’s happened since 2000.

It turns out that the detailed information once available through the long form of the decennial census won’t be covered by the census anymore, but by the American Community Survey. The Survey will be updated every year. (And it is still available through the legacy American Factfinder! Up until the 2010 ACS is added, when it will be migrated to the new, less-usable format.)

But the sample is smaller, and the margin of error is greater, especially for smaller geographies like census tracts. Plus, the data available now averages the years between 2005-2009, 4 of the most volatile years in the Chicago housing market.

So the observations that follow will sometimes start with 2000 data, which is more accurate but out of date, and use the 2005-09 figures as general indications of the kind of thing that has probably been going on since then.

After 2000: Some General Indications of What’s Probably Been Going On
To start with, some of the pressure that made Greater Bridgeport seem ready to burst in 2000 has lifted.

Chicago’s population stopped growing and dropped a little over the course of the decade, but its development engines kept running. The city’s housing stock grew by 70,000 units between 2000 and the survey of 2005-09. When the decade started, 10% of Chicago households were overcrowded, and only 6% of rental units were vacant. Now, less than 5% of households are overcrowded, and 9% of rental housing units are vacant.



In the 1990s, Greater Bridgeport’s population grew at rates that surged ahead of the city as a whole, and crowding was more intense here. In the 2000s, population dropped faster in some Greater Bridgeport neighborhoods, though it held steady, or grew, in others. Crowding fell from 2000 highs, like it did for the city as a whole, but it is still higher than the city’s 2000 peak in area neighborhoods, except Bridgeport proper and Armour Square.



The post-war urban-development engine has been more sluggish in Greater Bridgeport than in the city as a whole. The census counts existing housing units by the year they were built, giving some indication of development activity in the past – though some units built in earlier decades will have been demolished by a later census.

In fact, the median year built for housing units in Chicago dropped 3 years between the 2000 census, when it was 1948, and 2009, when it was 1945 (give or take a 1 year margin). The change probably reflects the demolition of thousands of units of postwar high-rise housing, and their replacement with low-density development. But Chicago’s housing stock is still weighted toward the post-war years.



The median year built for housing in Greater Bridgeport is uniformly “pre-1940” (a single category in the census). The area has lower portions of housing units built in each of the post-war decades than Chicago at large. And what units were built in the 1940s, 50s and 60s are weighted toward the southwest. McKinley and Brighton Park are sometimes described as communities of “second settlement” – that is, places the working class moved as they became more established. In the decades after the war, they were still filling in.



That pattern shifted as the decades passed, advancing eastward up the Archer corridor. New structures built in the 1970s and 80s accumulated in Bridgeport’s south and east quadrants. Structures built in the 1990s and 2000s clearly favored Bridgeport and Chinatown.

[And the South Loop, which I originally included in the maps as a point of contrast. But through 2009, the Near South Side was comprised of just 4 census tracts – Bridgeport is divided into 16 – which makes all counts seem exceptionally large there.]



The 1990s and 2000s were boom years for Chicago as a whole, but new development added fewer housing units than in past decades, which probably reflects a preference for single family houses over big multi-unit buildings. In Bridgeport at least, a blooming of big houses built on multiple lots is visible from the street.



A Neighborhood of Owners and Renters
I had thought of Bridgeport as a neighborhood populated by bungalows and worker’s cottages and the homeowners who inhabit them. That is more true of McKinley Park and Brighton Park; it is less true of Armour Square, New City or the Lower West Side. On average, Bridgeport tracts have owner occupancy rates on par with the city as a whole.



On a census tract level, high rates of owner occupancy trace 2 distinct corridors through Greater Bridgeport: one includes Bridgeport’s northwest quadrant, and follows the Archer and I&M Canal. A second extends from Bridgeport’s southeast quadrant through Canaryville.



The Lower West Side, Armour Square and Back of the Yards are all renter-occupied at rates higher than Chicago overall. In many tracts, 60-80% of households live in apartments. But almost all of them are in small apartment buildings, and many of those small apartment buildings are owner occupied.

Small landlords have sometimes been assumed to be the keepers of an aging, dilapidated housing stock, and to lack access to capital to maintain it. There is a whole literature on the “small landlord problem.” It dates back to the decades of urban flight, when many small landlords probably really were left holding properties they didn’t want, but couldn’t sell, in neighborhoods that seemed to spiral into decline.

But scholars were still opining on the topic as recently as 2006, when Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies published a paper on how small landlords might be bought out by small-property-REITs, which could better leverage them to reinvest. Since then, bundled ownership and more leverage doesn’t necessarily sound like an ideal thing.

In fact, the literature has also consistently acknowledged that small landlords who were also owner occupants are exceptions to the “problem.” Owner occupancy has been the best indicator of good management among the small apartment stock.

Chicago’s population of small apartment buildings has been steadily decimated over decades. But Greater Bridgeport has managed to maintain a dense supply.

Owner occupied small apartment buildings are densest in the vicinity of Lower West Side and Back of the Yards, but Bridgeport also has large numbers in certain tracts, especially the blocks west of Halsted between 32nd and 35th Street. Bridgeport’s small landlord district might prove a good base for maintaining the neighborhood’s income balance in decades to come.




A Solid, Middle-Income Working-Class
Ownership is often associated with stability and prosperity, so it is striking to be reminded it’s not always associated with higher incomes.

Overall, median incomes in Greater Bridgeport are close to, but slightly below, the city median. In 2000, Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Brighton Park had median incomes that were markedly higher than their neighbors in Lower West Side, New City and Armour Square.



On a census tract level, most tracts were just below the city median in 2000, with the exception of Back of the Yards, where median incomes are significantly lower than that.

A few tracts along the Archer / I&M corridor surpass the city median, but the most regular path of higher incomes extends through east Bridgeport and Canaryville.





By 2005-09, those patterns were shifting. Citywide, incomes didn’t keep up with inflation, but in most parts of Greater Bridgeport they did. Most census tracts still show incomes below the city median, however. And the Archer / I&M Corridor is less solidly high income than it was; Brighton Park’s fortunes have fallen in line with the poorer relations in New City and the Lower West Side.



Higher incomes seem to match tracts with new construction, more than high ownership, with a solid corridor of higher income tracts following Normal Avenue corridor into Canaryville.

These tracts also marked the transformation of Greater Bridgeport’s employment base. A transformation most visible by comparing maps of workers employed in Production, Transport and Material Moving occupations with workers in Management and Professional ones.



Citywide, workers employed in Production, Transportation and Movement of Materials are a shrinking crowd – almost twice as many workers are employed in Professional and Managerial occupations. But they are still well represented in Greater Bridgeport, especially in the area’s southern and western parts.



Workers in Management and Professional occupations are represented at lower rates, relative to the city, in most tracts; they are best represented in a visible cluster in Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Canaryville.



Occupations traditionally associated with the region, like Public Administration and Protective Services, show largest portions of workforce on the east corridor. So, surprisingly does Finance Insurance and Real Estate – a sector I’ve never associated with Canaryville before.







Artists are often talked about as an engine of the new economy. The Lower West Side, or Pilsen, shows high rates of workers employed in the arts and entertainment, as you might expect. And those occupations are visibly spreading into Bridgeport.



Artists are also sometimes described as the advance troops of gentrification. And it does appear that in some parts of Greater Bridgeport, home values are more visibly associated with artists than with other factors, like income, or professional employment.

But the scale on these maps is set to show rates higher and lower than those in the city as a whole. The actual rates of workers employed in arts, entertainment and media are significantly lower than those highlighted on the maps of production, or professional workers for instance. So it is hard to draw conclusions with confidence.

The Cost of Housing
Overall, home values in Greater Bridgeport were lower than for the city as a whole. Tracts in lower Pilsen make a notable exception, since the Lower West Side is otherwise a low income, high immigrant, neighborhood of renters.






Bridgeport also stands out for its high home values. Home values are highest around Normal Avenue and north Canaryville, where incomes are also high, and where large portions of the housing stock were built on old industrial land in the last 20 years.

Median rents are highest around Normal Avenue too, along with an improbable stretch of Garfield Boulevard on the northern border of Englewood. (Do these rents reflect section 8 contracts, or just large apartments?)

Rents are low in significant quadrants of Bridgeport proper, even where home values are high. The small landlord section appears to be charging affordable rents. So does the northeast quadrant, which has received some of the new immigrants spreading out from Chinatown.





Looking Back at Vacancy and Crowding
After 2000, the southwest bursting cluster was defined by crowding, even as it was surrounded by neighborhoods that were thinning out.

Since then, Bridgeport’s population has dropped, and its housing stock grew. It has low rates of crowding, and higher rates of vacancy.

But crowding is still relatively common in New City and the Lower West Side. So are vacancies. In fact, the maps of crowding and vacancy are almost the same.





We had heard about rising vacancies in neighborhoods with high rates of crowding after the 2000 census. We wondered if it showed that families were doubling up to pay rent. Rents are not high in these tracts, relative to others. It might also reflect substandard housing that renters won’t occupy, or neighborhoods in transition. Owner occupant landlords might prefer to keep units vacant than to rent to people they do not know.

If I were an affordable housing advocate, these are the areas I’d be focusing my attention now, to better preserve a stock of housing that has given generations of workers a sound foothold in Chicago.

As a citizen of Greater Bridgeport, though, I’ll be most interested to see what happens in 2 very different sections of Bridgeport itself: the Normal Avenue/Canaryville corridor, and the small landlord section west of Halsted. I hope they are both representative of Bridgeport’s future.


(If you have an observation, comment or critique, I am looking for feedback! You can reach me by e-mail at TheHardscrabbler@gmail.com.)

Filbert's Real Glass Bottled Soda Pop

The north wall of Filbert's Root Beer at 3430 S. Ashland is lined with the beer can collection Ronald Filbert began in high school, and still improves with occasional flea market acquisitions. It includes cans for a couple flavors of champagne, and for Genesee Cream Ale, named for the river that flows through the town where I grew up. It also includes a few glass bottles with tap dispensers.

Otherwise, the collection is only tangentially related to what Filbert's does today as a bottler of soda pop, though Filbert's did distribute beer when Ron's grandfather Charles ran the business. Filbert's was formally established as a producer of barreled root beer in 1926.

The 20s and 30s were the glory days of root beer, before cola overtook it. Ron says Filbert's root beer was available on draft at most Chicago bars – they brewed and barreled root beer for Berghoff's for over 50 years, until 1988 when Berghoff wanted it bottled. Filbert's wasn't a bottler back then.

But if you're curious what Berghoff's original root beer tasted like, you can still pour a draft of Filbert's. They take walk in customers at the Ashland plant, and they sell root beer by the half and quarter barrel. Now they also sell it by the bottle, along with 16 flavors of fruit soda – everything from black cherry to blue raspberry to grapefruit. “Not their biggest seller,” as one taster observes “but very true to grapefruit flavor.”


Ronald Filbert with some extract samples for a new flavor he's working on

Originally, Filbert's operated out of 2 buildings at 2996 and 3033 S. Archer – one suffered a fire and the other was a tight space to run the business. Their current building on South Ashland belonged to Newport Beverage Company. When Filbert's first began to sell bottled soda, they hired Newport to bottle it, then when 2 of the Newport partners were ready to retire in 1998, Ron Filbert bought the plant, along with its bottling equipment, and their line of fruit soda flavors. Dennis Antkowiak, Newport's 3rd partner stayed on with Filbert's.

Now, Filbert's is one of 3 glass bottling companies left in Chicago. They also rent space to Bridgeport Coffee Shop, who roast their beans upstairs.

Dennis has been in the bottling business for 40 years. He says it used to be that virtually every neighborhood had a bottling company – it was one of those businesses people went into when they came back from the war, they'd open a restaurant, a tavern or a bottling company. Filbert's lineage matches the gradual distillation of the bottling business.

Dennis says the company that became Newport Beverage was founded as a German Austrian brewery in 1907. The original Mutual Brewing building still stands at Cermak and Spaulding – they became Mutual Bottling during prohibition, and were eventually acquired by Mr. Newport. Newport Beverage bought the Ashland Plant in 1952.

When Dennis started working there in 1971, the Chicago bottling business had boiled down to a dozen companies. In the mid-1980s, most of them went out of business in the span of a few years. Dennis recalls the big soft drinks launched aggressive retail promotions the smaller companies couldn't match. Ron Filbert says that's also roughly when the big bottlers switched from glass to plastic.

Today, Ron can name just 3 companies nationally that produce glass bottles at all. And there are just 4 bottling companies in Chicago. Including Pepsi, which bottles Pepsi's own brands; and Clover Club, which bottles private label product for other people. Goose Island brewery also bottles a Goose Island root beer and orange cream soda.

Ron says glass bottles retain a significant advantage: they hold carbonation and flavor better than their plastic counterparts, which “leak like a balloon.” Soda in plastic bottles has to carry a “best by” date; you don't need a “best by” date for a bubbly beverage bottled in glass.

Ron says he receives a truck of 4,000 cases of bottles about once a month. He says Filbert's has over 200 accounts in the Chicago region; he used to say they have 300. The recession has been hard on their business, not because people stop drinking soda pop, but because it's put mom and pop stores, bars and restaurants that carry Filbert's out of business.

So a couple months ago, Ron Hazucka joined Filbert's to build up the customer base. He's an old high school friend of Ron Filbert's; he used to drive delivery trucks for Filbert's when they were both still in school. Hazucka says even in good times, they might expect to lose accounts to attrition, but they're a small operation and Ron Filbert's too busy making and distributing soda pop to pursue new accounts.



The bottle washing portion of the assembly line

You can get a good idea how he makes it from a video Chicago Revealed posted on YouTube. He mixes the soda syrups upstairs, where he keeps cupboards of extracts in plastic jugs. He'll mix the extracts with a sugar solution in agitating tanks, then the syrup's fed through a plastic hose to the bottling line downstairs. A conveyor caries a long line of bottles to be rinsed, dosed with syrup, filled with carbonated water, capped, mixed by shaking, and affixed with a paper label, before Filbert's personnel pull them off the line and pack them in a box.


Stations for adding syrup, seltzer, and bottle caps

Ron Hazucka is enthusiastic about capitalizing on Filbert's heritage – people remember the product, it's been made the same way for 85 years, crisp and clean with real cane sugar, unadulterated by vanilla or other novel supplements. Eighty-five years, he says, how many other local companies can make claims like that?

When he first Googled the brand, he was astonished to see pages of results even though they didn't have a web-site yet. There were strangers from as far away as Washington State selling Filbert's root beer on Amazon for $25 a case. There were people doing taste tests on You-Tube – even the reviewer who taste-tested the Filbert's pineapple soda while eating green apple jelly beans said she couldn't put the soda down.

Meanwhile, the soda pop world seems to be sprouting small companies again, boutique label soft drinks with medicinal herbs, or an extra spicy bite, or an old-time appearance. Analysts say a lot of that proliferation is “pseudo-diversity,” a multitude of choices that can be traced back to a handful of owners. Philip Howard, a professor at Michigan State, surveyed 94 retailers across Michigan and found they carried 993 varieties of soft drink across 195 brands. But 41% of them are owned by the big three that dominate the soft drink market – Coke, Pepsi and the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group.

On the other hand, almost 60% of them aren't. And if you're blending your own flavor of soda pop, you're going to need someone to bottle it for you, because bottling equipment is big – “It isn't something you can set up in your kitchen,” Ron says.

In addition to the flavors they bottle under their own label, Filbert's bottles soda they mix for other private labels, like Gale's Rootbeer, Route 66, Druther's, and Starr's Original Ginseng. And Ron's in the process of mixing a new ginger beer for Maria's Community Liquors, who are realizing the advantage of having one of Chicago's last bottling companies in their own backyard.

Reinvention Brewing at Donovan Park

Back when the housing boom was cresting, the area around Donovan Park looked primed for a residential reinvention. It fell outside the planned manufacturing district between Morgan and Racine, its industrial buildings were coming down, one by one. Whole blocks of land were available for new construction, and the city was willing to make zoning changes.

But the crest broke before the reinvention really happened. Regionally, new home sales peaked in the 2nd quarter of 2005, then started a long decline. They’re still declining. New home sales were down 20% in the 1st quarter of 2011 compared to 1st quarter 2010 – they’re down more than 90% from 2005.

In April 2007, two years into the decline, Lexington Homes acquired a block of parcels on the Sangamon side of Donovan Park and announced plans for Lexington Square, a collection of 39 townhomes with prices starting at $440,000. The timing was optimistic, and prices have bobbed a bit – they were down to mid-$300s in 2009 – but the units have been selling. Today prices start at $380,000 and $419,000 for townhomes of 2,200 to 2,560 square feet.



And Lexington Homes wants to keep building. Founder Jeff Benach says Lexington is in talks with owners of two other parcels around the park. “A few years ago, we would have both properties under contract by now,” Benach told me when I spoke to him in mid-May. “We’re going to have to get started soon – we’ve sold 30 units, we may sell another tonight.”

Lexington Homes isn’t just one of the last homebuilders still building, they’re also one of the few family owned companies still standing. Local builders dominated the Chicago market in new homes for decades. The balance began to shift as national builders bought local companies over the past decade or so. And the shift accelerated as some of the biggest local builders went out of business in the bust. Now, Lexington Homes stands out as an exception in the field.

Founded by father and son Ron and Jeff Benach, Lexington Homes is Ron’s 4th homebuilding company in 4 decades. The previous 3 were each sold to other builders – most recently, Concord Homes was purchased by national homebuilder Lennar in 2002.

“We survived, not because we’re so smart,” Jeff Benach says now. “We sold Concord at the right time.” And when the long draught hit the housing market, the new company was still small. “We weren’t sitting there with 20 subdivisions under development.”

Ten years ago, the Benach’s were among the first of the suburban homebuilders to move from cornfield development, where whole subdivisions are built from the ground on undeveloped land, to urban infill, a landscape many homebuilders still avoid.

“It takes a different skill set,” Benach says. The property starts out with vestiges of earlier developments, whether it’s a structure on top, or remains underground. But more than that, he says the urban environment is more heavily regulated. Municipalities have their zoning codes, and neighbors are often vocal about their preferences. Often, Jeff says, that preference is for open space.

“It’s a negotiation process,” he says. “It takes longer. And sometimes you get far into it, spend money, and something comes up and you realize it’s not going to work.”

Lexington Homes launched 2 suburban developments at the same time it announced Lexington Square in Bridgeport – one in Wheeling and one in Des Plaines. The suburban projects have sold faster -- the Wheeling development is sold out.

Regina Castle, who manages sales for Lexington Square says they anticipated a slower sales schedule for the city properties from the outset. The suburban units are almost half the price of the city units, and they are still considered urban infill, in close proximity to Metra commuter trains to downtown.

But city living has its appeal, and she points out that Lexington Square is both close to urban excitement, but still conducive to a quiet lifestyle. She says dog owners are attracted to the park, and the rooftop views of downtown, and of the fireworks from Sox Park, are spectacular.

She describes buyers who grew up in Bridgeport, went to school and are coming back to raise their families here. Others are professional couples who bought condos downtown, or in more bustling neighborhoods like University Village. Now they want a more suburban lifestyle that is still in the city. And they don’t have time to do renovations on an older single family home.

The absence of other new construction in an urban environment, where much of the surrounding stock is more than 80 years old, is apparently one of the advantages to selling urban infill. Before the bust, other developers had been attracted to the surplus industrial land surrounding Bridgeport’s protected manufacturing district, but their projects have mostly fallen through.

In fact, Lexington Homes acquired their parcels on Sangamon from another developer who sold them as his troubles began to mount. There is a trailer advertising “Donovan Park Place,” a new construction condominium project, on the parking lot alongside Lexington Square. The Jameson Sotheby’s International Agent who represents it says Donovan Park Place isn’t going forward, they just haven’t removed the trailer yet. She says the Bridgeport Collection, the Jameson Sothby’s project on 37th Place at Normal is “on hold.



Builders began making hopeful predictions that new home sales hit bottom and were about to revive back in 2009, only to watch sales register new lows. But a recent uptick in suburban land sales may be evidence that the revival has finally arrived. Suburban land is selling because prices have dropped from highs around $40 a square foot to prices closer to $10. But as Lexington Homes looks to keep building, it’s not clear the landowners around Donovan Park are ready to lower their sights yet.

Jerry Olsen of Newmark Knight Frank represents the large parcel on 37th Street between Sangamon and Lituanica – the one with the fence swathed in banners for Lexington Homes. He says the owners of the 37th street block had turned down an offer for over $3 million before the downturn, and that makes it harder to compromise now.

The land had been the site of Acme Barrel, which cleaned metal barrels from chemical companies, and the detergents seeped into the soil. It took them 3 years to get their NFR letter from the Illinois EPA, by the time they had it, the market had crashed.

He says the city has expressed interest in acquiring the parcel to extend Donovan Park, but they don't have any money right now either.

That leaves the sellers stuck coming to terms with the difference between the what the market value was, and what it is now. Olsen says he anticipates it will take 2-5 years, conservatively, for prices to recover, particularly considering the weakness of the job market.

Meanwhile, Donovon Park is surrounded by owners who appear to be settling in to wait. Fontanini’s has demolished their old plant on 38th Street, Olsen says that will make their real estate taxes lower if they have to hold on to it for awhile.

Rowena Cheng of Selective Realty Service represents the owner of the block across from the park on Lituanica. It was formerly a food warehouse. As new homes drew closer, the owner had begun to receive complaints about the trucks, so when it suffered a fire, he decided to tear it down.

Cheng says Lexington Homes approached them about the property. It would be enough land for 14 homes, and the owner wants $1.5 million, a sum Lexington Homes thought was too much to build homes for the market as it is today. But Cheng says the owner is in no hurry to sell.

“He knows what the property is worth.”

Calabruzzi's Cafe Adds a New Reason to Visit Halsted Street

Calabruzzi’s Café is a family owned and operated restaurant of Italian American cuisine, but it also marks the return to Bridgeport’s Halsted strip of a restaurant that had disappeared for awhile. At least it reminds me of a youthful version of the kind of place my parents might have gone on a date – a place you go for a nice dinner that starts with a fancy cocktail, something like what I imagine the Governor’s Table and the Coral Key used to be.

Saturday, I went in for dinner with the friend who is my source of information about those other establishments. He hesitates at the comparison, he remembers them being more formal – the menu more surf and turf, the bartender dressed in a jacket and tie. “We wouldn’t walk into Coral Key dressed like this,” he says. Though he agrees the dress code was partly a factor of the era.

It was an era before the arrival of intentional food, cable cooking programs and the widespread use of the term “foodie” to describe the amateur food critic. When a good restaurant was a place that served a meal with roots in home cooking, except with richer ingredients, cooked skillfully by somebody else – which is what our dinner at Calabaruzzi’s was like.



Owner Rosanna Mandile comes from a cooking family, and family is strongly represented at Calabruzzi’s. Her father, Angelo, was a cook at Papa Milano’s (also of that other era) when he first came to the States from Italy in the 1970s. Later he became a mason to better support his family, but the Mandile family always cooked. In the winter, when construction trades were slow, they started cooking mid-afternoon. They cured sopresatta and made wine, they jarred eggplant and tomatoes, and mushrooms her father gathered from the woods. They bought rabbits from a farm in Michigan, her father and uncle skinned their own.

Rosanna got her first restaurant job at 15 – she worked at Maggiolini’s, a pizzeria one of her uncles owned in Gage Park, until she married at 22. Pizza is a central part of the menu at Calabruzzi’s. She says it’s the water that makes Chicago pizza superior. Her aunts mix dough with Evian -- she can’t do that at the restaurant, but even Chicago tap water makes pizza here taste better than what they make with the water in New York and LA.

When she married, she moved back to Bridgeport with her husband. Her father-in-law was in the flea-market business and she worked for him for a few years. But she had cooking at the back of her mind. She traveled to Italy shortly after her marriage, learning recipes from her Italian aunts as she travelled the south and central regions.

She began planning to open her own restaurant in earnest 4 years ago. The family owned the building at 3304 S. Halsted, but first they had to clear it out. It had been vacant since the 1980s, her father in law had gradually filled it with furniture, it was part of a network of storefronts he used to warehouse merchandise for his flea market enterprise. They sent a semi-load of donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and shuffled the rest to other facilities.

Then they rebuilt the storefront from the floor to the ceiling. Angelo poured the concrete floor and built the bar out of masonry. They restored the tin ceiling with a copper finish in honor of the coppersmiths of her mother’s hometown. Her cousin, Nicholas De Crescenso, painted a large mural of Rome’s Trevi Fountain for the north wall at Rosanna’s request. The south wall is hung with maps of Calabrria and Abruzzo painted on towels. Rosanna says the family name, Mandile, means towel; her father came from Calabria her mother from Abruzzo; Calabruzzi’s is a conjunction of the names. The staff, 5 of whom are cousins, all wear Italian soccer jersey’s and puma track shoes – in honor of another cousin who is a 2012 Olympic hopeful in women’s steeplechase.



After years of research and a lifetime of cooking, Rosanna had developed a menu that was 10 pages long. “Everyone said ‘You’re crazy,’” a 10 page menu would put her out of business. So she pared it down to the basics, “what people are used to around here,” and the rest of it will cycle through the specials list. There will be several preparations of rabbit; cardi soup, made with real cardoons, not American celery, for the New Year; and a pescara pizza with shrimp, clams, mussles and calamari for Lent. Meanwhile, the regular menu includes family specialties, like pizza made with their own sopresata mix, her father’s special pescara salad, and a cannoli she makes from a pizzelle cookie.

Calabruzzi’s opened for business quietly 3 weeks ago, 3 days before the Sox Home Opener, to be precise. “I wanted to give my staff time to get their bearings for a few days,” Rosanna says.

Its arrival rounds out a trio of new restaurants on Halsted Street that cover the culinary bases: Buffalo Wings and Rings is the Sports-Bar; Nana has the cutting edge organic cuisine; Calabruzzi’s is traditional Italian-American, served in a dining room with warm décor that makes you want to sit down and eat-in. And the owners of all three establishments have known each other for years; now they can lend each other mutual support.

The owner of Nana came to Calabruzzi’s to eat the first day it opened, and left a glowing comment on the restaurant’s facebook page. Rosanna says the partners at Buffalo Wings and Rings have been generous with advice and have sent her patrons when they’ve had an overflow crowd. Between the three of them, they’ve multiplied the reasons to stop in on Halsted Street.