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.

Notes from the Bar: Labor History Night at Maria's

It was Future of Bridgeport think-tank night at Maria’s Community Bar – that happens most Sundays from 6-8pm. A few weeks ago, there was a special lecture on some incidents of 19th century labor strife in anticipation of the 125th Anniversary of the Haymarket massacre.

Afterwards, I had a chat with an older couple who’d stopped in by chance and stayed for the lecture. I liked them, they were very decent people. We disagreed about almost everything. They’d listen thoughtfully to every point I’d offer up. Then they’d vigorously make the opposite point.

They don’t live in Bridgeport themselves, and they are technically Republicans. At least he holds office in suburban county government as a Republican. She works for county government too. She grew up here, around 33rd and Morgan. He says when he first came to see her there the neighbors slashed all his tires – they didn’t like him because he was Italian. He was from Taylor Street.

He was 22 when they met, just out of the army. She was 16. She was one of the first girls to attend Tilden High School, the year it became co-ed. Sometimes Tilden sounds like it was tougher back then than they say it is today. She says she lasted half a day at Tilden, and never went back.

They got married because she got pregnant. Now they’ve been married for 40-something years, they’ve raised 3 sons.

They moved to the suburbs shortly after they married, but they bought a condo in the former hospital where he was born, and they like to drive around to different neighborhoods and stop in places, just to see what’s going on.

He still serves as a precinct captain for Danny Solis. He says he’s not particularly Democrat or Republican, he supports good people. His father was a precinct captain, his sons have been precinct captains too.

His father used to take him around with him to turn out the vote – they had some of the black precincts. He said the women were the voters there, the men didn’t vote. He said a couple things he might not have, if he knew I was going to go home and type it up on my blog.

“I’m not racist,” he says – though people tend to say that after they’ve described ways they think blacks act differently from other groups of people. He also tends to lament that people and politics are all different now. The people aren’t as responsible, the politics are more corrupt.

But he thinks the problem with the people is that they have forgotten that the way to live is to look out for each other. “It can’t be all about yourself,” he says, having raised 3 sons, and standing in the company of the woman he married over 40 years ago, when she was still a girl. It sounds like things might not have looked entirely promising for them when they first started out.

About politics, he says “Sure it was corrupt then,” but you always had somebody you could go to for help when you needed it. You’d go to the precinct captain if you needed a garbage can, or if you needed to get your son off of death row. Well, he couldn’t necessarily get your son off death row. But back then elected officials served the people who voted them into office; now they serve the lobbyists who pay for their campaigns.

They don’t have much sympathy for government workers now. Even though they both work for government themselves. They think Scott Walker was right to bring the unions to heel in Wisconsin. She describes negotiating with the unions here for weeks before they thought they’d reached a workable compromise -- then the union reps announced they couldn’t commit, they had to take it back to their membership and start over again.

He claims Wisconsin government workers pay a miniscule fraction toward their own health care. We’re in the same situation in Illinois -- only our budget is worse. He says he stands in line in the pharmacy behind elderly people who fork over hundreds of dollars in cash to pay for their meds, and then he gets to the counter and pays almost nothing. “It’s not sustainable!” he says.

That’s why I liked them, even when we didn't agree, they didn’t seem to be making harsh judgments on some distant group of other people.

There is a classic study of the Taylor Street area done back in the early 60s, when he was there as a young man. It’s called The Social Order of the Slum. The author challenges the prevailing view that slums were defined by their lack of social organization, and by deviance from moral order. The deviance was assumed to be self-evident in the high rates of delinquency, teen pregnancy, divorce and crime.

The author of the study doesn’t challenge that, but he uses the neighborhood around Taylor Street to argue that the slum is not disorganized so much as organized around different principles, principles designed to preserve the safety of its inhabitants in an unstable environment, rattled by forces beyond their control.

The guy at Maria’s remembers what people said about his old neighborhood. He was a tough kid himself. Though he qualifies “We’d go fight under the viaduct. We’d fight with our fists. Now they use guns and shoot people in front of schools.”

He had nearly a dozen half-brothers and sisters. He says most of them got into trouble, they got into drugs, or into crime, or went into jail. He was starting to get involved in some questionable dealings himself for awhile, up on the Gold Coast. But then he decided he didn’t want to get embroiled in all that. So he quit that life. He got himself a factory job.

He says he thinks at the end of the day, it came out for the best that they cleared part of his old neighborhood to build the campus for the University of Illinois. Look at that neighborhood now. Though he seems to hesitate a little when I am surprised to hear him say that.

He says there’s a difference between how things were back then, and how they are now. Back then, you could conceivably get yourself a factory job, and support your family, lead a decent life. Now you need a college degree, even a graduate degree to get a foothold. And the good life, or at least a life in which you can provide for your family in “organized society,” is harder to grasp if you don’t start out with one.

“Keep thinking,” he encourages me amiably before they leave Maria’s Community Bar for the night. “I haven’t figured it all out yet.”

Suggestions for the Future of Bridgeport Food

Griffith Laboratories - a tank of savory flavor?


I attended a trade show in mid-March and I’ve been muddling around trying to write about it ever since. There is no direct Bridgeport connection in it. Though it is about the food sector, and Bridgeport has one, and about reinventing the local economy, and if a blog is partly a way to nudge the world in the direction you think it ought to go by acts of selective description, take this as a suggestion for how Bridgeport Food might evolve.

The conference was the Farm to Fork Expo. Family Farmed, a local non-profit, launched the event 8 years ago to match up buyers and sellers of local and sustainably produced foods. It’s grown in dimension over the years.

There is a consumer trade show -- this year there were over 150 vendors showing off their local food products, and a lecture tract with workshops on how to make your own cheese, or be a conscientious carnivore by consuming the whole carcass.

But the meat of the conference is aimed toward lifting the local foods industry beyond its current scope. That includes building demand among big buyers -- both the Chicago Public Schools and the State of Illinois have set local food procurement goals and Family Farmed helps them source product.

And it includes building an infrastructure in finance, distribution and realistic regulation to bring local foods “to scale” -- which is to say, something between the scale of mass distribution that dominates the food industry now, and the volume small farmers can distribute themselves by making deliveries, or selling their own produce at farmers markets.

Illinois used to have a mid-sized local-foods infrastructure – it wasn’t until after World War II that the state’s farmers gave up growing vegetables for local markets, and for themselves for that matter, and focused almost exclusively on commodity grains for export. Today some estimate Illinois produces just 4% of the food consumed in the state.

The measure is imprecise. Cash receipts reported by Illinois farmers for crops that might be counted as human food add up to about $2 billion (as of the 2007 agricultural census), which is just 4% of the estimated $48 billion Illinois residents spend on food each year – though that $48 billion includes premiums from every station on the food chain that brings it to the table. On the other hand, a good portion of the human food grown in Illinois probably follows the food chain out of state.

The net result is that Illinois is both the nation’s second largest exporter of corn and soy products, and a net importer of food. As little as 0.2% of Illinois farm sales are sold directly for human consumption, and the average food item consumed in the Midwest is said to travel 1,500 miles before it reaches the table.

I got the last statistics from the preamble of the Illinois Food Farm and Jobs Act of 2007. It is part of a movement to remake the state economy by recapturing trillions in Illinois food dollars. The Act commissioned a plan to expand the state’s infrastructure for processing, storing and distributing locally grown foods.

Or as Ann Wright of the USDA described it at the Farm to Fork Expo, to build a companion economy to production agriculture, one that keeps wealth in farm communities.

The State’s plan set local food procurement goal of seeing 10% of Illinois food dollars spent on products grown and processed in Illinois by 2020, and 20% by 2030. State run cafeterias are charged with reaching a 20% local food procurement goal by 2020. Twenty percent is roughly the market share that organic foods have now.

Jim Slamma, the founder and director of Family Farmed, spoke enthusiastically about how the state’s local food goals would reverberate through the economy. He says food spending has an economic multiplier of 3 to 5 times. Illinois’ 12.5 million consumers spend almost $50 billion on food; if 20% of that food were produced locally, the local food industry would be worth $10 billion, and its impact would echo through the economy to $30 billion, or more.


Ed Miniat still makes cooking oil from tallow just east of the CMD


My own interest in all this is less about the kind of food I want to eat, than the kind of economy I want to live in. I gravitate toward any evidence an artisanal economy is making gains on the big-business old-industrial one.

Because I think an economy where things are made by skilled craftsmen with some independence, with control over their process, and pride in their product, seems inherently more wholesome than one where things are made by workers who occupy one station on an assembly line, who sell their time in increments, and accept the tedium of their jobs in exchange for a paycheck they’ll spend fueling the machine that employs them by buying more stuff.

I also recognize that big business and old-industry have real virtues. The number of people who can choose to pay extra for distinctive products is limited, and the great majority of consumers may be best served by a mass production machine -- by economies of scale in manufacturing, and distribution by giants whose size gives them leverage to urge their suppliers toward the lowest possible price.

In fact, food is a good illustration of both points. Because everyone has to eat it, and as world population grows by leaps and bounds there is a real ethical obligation to maximize production, and make it cheaply available to everybody.

But in this country, food is relatively affordable for a lot of people, and the pool of people who can afford to be choosy is much broader than the pool who can commission a house full of custom furniture, for instance. Demand for artisanal food reaches beyond the bobo class.


Clearing the former Fontanini sausage facility for something new.


One reason the Farm to Fork Conference is so interesting is that participants like Bob Scaman, President of Goodness Greeness, an organic produce wholesaler in the Englewood neighborhood, sit on panels and testify that the biggest brake on their ability to move local-organic product is a shortage of supply.

In fact, Scaman is concerned enough about generating more supply that he actively works with local farmers to build their capacity, and he’s helped Family Farmed develop a technical manual on post- harvest handling to encourage more of them to sell to wholesalers.

He says Goodness Greeness’ business is growing fastest in minority and ethnic markets; for instance, he points out one of the biggest growth segments in organic foods nationally is among Hispanic mothers who want to feed their babies organic milk.

But even beyond proving and building demand, there are moments when the Food to Fork conference challenges the big-business mass-production model where it seems to be strongest – in its claim to be the most efficient way to produce and distribute food.


The last of the Swift buildings: one prospective buyer reports this building contains an old fashioned laboratory that was left untouched after a small explosion.

Bridgeport food got its foothold on the border of the Union Stockyards, where the meat packing industry once pioneered those claims. As William Cronon describes it in Nature’s Metropolis, the innovations in the stockyards were as much organizational as technological, starting on the disassembly line – live animals varied in their body shape as individuals, and human eyes and hands could slice them up better than machines could, but by breaking down each process to the simplest component the human assembly line achieved the efficiency of a machine.

The packers bought efficiencies with huge capital investments. They built slaughterhouses, refrigerated cars, and a network of cold store facilities to penetrate provincial markets. The capital investment increased their capacity, and their incentive, to grow.

Both farmers and butchers complained bitterly about the big packers. Ranchers had fewer places to sell their herds, and the price fluctuations on distant urban exchanges seemed like conspiracy. On the other end, as the packers entered new markets they put smaller butchers out of business, they were willing to sell below cost if they had to, they needed volume to pay for their plants.

And yet the big packers’ ability to compete on price seems to prove their efficiency claims. They could sell meat for less than the cattle cost them, because they found ways to make money off of the refuse. Bone, bristle, blood and offal could be made into buttons, brushes, fertilizer and tallow when they were collected in volume; the average independent butcher didn’t collect enough material to open a sideline businesses in glue.

The ranchers benefited too, despite their complaints, because the big packer’s investment in infrastructure and especially in cold store facilities guaranteed a more stable, year round market for cattle, while providing more affordable meat, in some cases more safely, to the consumer. It was the small middlemen who suffered and went out of business. Once they did, the 4 big packers had near monopoly powers. Though they still had to compete with each other, Cronon observes.

The meat packing industry is still dominated by 4 big packers today. And over decades, a similar process of consolidation has been repeated on the farm, with mid-sized farms disappearing into much larger ones. But that’s not necessarily because the big farms are more efficient.

Last year’s Farm to Fork conference included a presentation by Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center. Meter has done extensive study of the Minnesota food industry, including a survey of research on economies of size.

He concludes most of it shows that economies of size are not the main driver of consolidation among farms and other rural firms, and he’s found little proof that size translates into efficiency per unit of production, though it may translate into bigger cumulative profits. As a group, though, it’s not clear most farms are actually profitable.

Meter found that Minnesota farmers spend more per year producing crops than they earn selling them. Over 10 years, he calculated productions costs exceeded cash receipts by an average of $465 million per year. He found Minnesota farmers depend on up to $1 billion in federal subsidies, and other kinds of “farm related income" to pay the bills.

Something similar is true in Illinois. The 2007 agricultural census shows Illinois farmers produced crops and livestock with a “market value” of $13.3 billion (comparable to the $13.2 billion market value of Minnesota product), and spent $9 billion in production expenses (vs $10.3 billion in Minnesota) – appearing to generate a $4.3 billion surplus. But that “market value” includes produce placed in the Commodity Credit Corporation loan program, a federal program for supporting prices for agricultural goods. Cash receipts from actual sales were $8.6 billion, or $400 million short of expenses.

Meter argues continued farm expansion has been fueled by federal incentives, the availability of capital, and the scale of infrastructure and other food business, not by actual efficiencies of production. Larger farms seemed better in the decades after World War II, when a global population surge sparked fears that global food production would fall short. Internationally, the Green Revolution applied first world farm technologies, like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, to ramp up third world production. Domestically, the US encouraged its farmers to expand for export to global markets. As meat packers had found before them, expansion was expensive. Loans taken out to fuel expansion in the 70s fueled the farm debt crisis of the 80s.

Looking at the imbalance between production costs and cash receipts of US farms today, Meter suggests the main beneficiaries of the US farm subsidy system are producers of inputs, like seeds and equipment, and the finance industry. He says nationally, farmers have spent $600 billion more paying interest to lenders than they have received in subsidies.

Even where consolidation has appeared to increase profits, it’s not clear that it has reduced the retail price of food, so much as it has redirected where food dollars go. The USDA dissects consumer food spending into portions captured by industry. In 1950, about 40 cents of each consumer food dollar paid the farmer who harvested the food. Today, the farmer’s portion is roughly 16 cents, if the measure includes food consumed away from home. Though it is closer to 24 cents for food consumed at home.

Meter says research has consistently shown that consolidation of power in the manufacturing and distribution sectors actually appears to increase the retail price of food. It’s an observation confirmed by USDA food dollar data. Adjusting for inflation, the USDA shows that dollars earned by farmers have remained relatively steady since 1950 even as their portion of the food bill shrank – fluctuating between $150 and $200 billion a year. It’s the marketing bill that multiplied, from roughly $250 billion in 1950 (in inflation adjusted dollars) to about $600 billion in 2004.

Back in 1976, Russell Parker, a former FTC official, came to some of the conclusions as farm expansion was taking off. He concluded that expansion did very little to create new efficiencies, he believed expansion was fueled mainly by the availability of capital, and he pointed out further that higher food prices were helping to feed a new surge in inflation – he found over half the increase in the US consumer price index in 1973 traced back to the higher price of food.

The food economy as it operates now may be the most efficient means for extracting profits for those firms who best consolidate their buying power. And that could be good news for the future of local, sustainably produced foods. It suggests there in room in the food bill to rearrange where the profits go.

Today, small producers charge a premium and a limited market of conscientious consumers are willing pay it. But adjustments in the marketing dollar may also make room to sustain small producers even as the local food economy is brought to scale, and prices for artisanally-produced product come down.

And as Illinois reorganizes its economy toward local food production, what place is better poised to participate than Bridgeport, with its central location, and its legacy of industrial food? That legacy includes disused plants that might be remade as the infrastructure for new production. But it also includes the traditional food businesses that are still prospering here.

In a study of the “artisanal economy” emerging in the business sector, Intuit-IFTF describes the context as a “barbell economy” in which a few very large firms are balanced by a proliferation of small upstarts at the opposite end of the scale. Intuit calls them artisanal because they use skilled labor to assemble complete products.

The mid sized firms have been squeezed out by the larger ones. But the firms at the extremes of the scale have a symbiotic relationship. The large firms outsource tasks, and especially innovation, to the smaller, nimbler ones. Maybe something similar could evolve between new and old food businesses in Bridgeport.


Schulze and Burch Biscuit Company's 35th Street Plant

Schulze and Burch Biscuit Company has been innovating since they were founded in 1923. They had a hand in inventing the modern saltine cracker, the toaster pastry, the granola bar, and the dual textured cookie (chewy inside, crispy outside). They are sometimes approached by small food producers asking to hire out the mixing equipment and ovens at their 35th Street plant, because USDA approved bakery space is expensive to build and rentable space is in short supply.

Griffiths Laboratories opened shop as food chemists in 1919. Today they’re a 3rd generation, family owned enterprise employing 2500 people around the globe. They produce taste and texture components for food processors and restaurants; they produce savory flavorings under the brand name Innova at their 38th Street plant, which is surrounded by tanks and the aroma of meat.

One investor at last year’s Farm to Fork Conference raised innovations in ingredients -- extracts of healthful berries for superfoods, for instance -- as a potential growth segment for artisanal food producers, as local meat and produce becomes more common and prices, and profits, potentially drop.

Two former meat packing plants in the Bridgeport vicinity have already been repurposed for a new era of food. Last year, Barkaat Foods reopened Chicago’s last slaughterhouse to process halal meat for the Muslim market. Though there is wider demand for small slaughter-services.

Panelists at the Farm to Fork Expo report the demand for sustainably raised meat is strong and growing, but their growth is slowed by a bottleneck on the processing end. Big slaughterhouses do kills of 2,500 animals a day, it’s not worth their while to get the plant running and wash it all down again to accommodate kills of a couple hundred animals.

Meanwhile, the former Peer Foods building in the stockyards is being reinvented as The Plant. Developer John Edel gets the most press for his plans to build an actual “vertical farm” in an indoor, multi-story environment. But he is subdividing the rest of the building as a small business incubator – much like the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center he redeveloped on 37th Street -- except it will focus on food and beverage producers. When it’s finished, it will help incubate a new food industry in the footprint of the old one.


The Peer Foods building in its first youth as a meat packing plant.

Some Speculations on Real Estate

In most Chicago neighborhoods, the real estate market is still in trouble. House prices are still dropping – according to Case-Shiller, a national home price index, Chicago home prices had dipped to 2002 levels by the end of 2010 – and foreclosures are still on the rise. The Woodstock Institute, a local community lending advocate, reports the tide has slowed a bit in the most troubled neighborhoods, but is rising fastest in affluent suburbs and neighborhoods like Lincoln Park.

By comparison, things in Bridgeport look pretty good. Foreclosures are growing here too – there were 128 foreclosure filings in 2010, up from 115 in 2009 – but that’s still a fraction of the filings in other neighborhoods. There were 257 filings in Lincoln Park, for instance, and 501 in Logan Square. Closer to home, Armour Square, the neighborhood just east of Bridgeport, that also includes Chinatown, increased from 8 to 25.

Bridgeport may have other features that make it more like Chinatown than Logan Square – that is, features that made it resistant to the kind of speculative inflation that fed disaster in other neighborhoods, and that might make it more stable during the next round of excess. Time will tell if that’s true when the city’s real estate market revives. But over the next 6 months, I hope to get an advance idea by asking people who know Bridgeport well what’s going on in its real estate market now, and what they expect to happen in the future. (And hopefully they’ll tell me.)

To start with, Chinatown makes for an interesting point of comparison.

Five years ago, when economists were still wondering if there was a home price bubble or not, researchers at Loyola published a paper studying gentrification in Chicago neighborhoods. They mentioned Chinatown as a counter-example, and suggested that the neighborhood’s vibrant retail district, and especially its success at drawing tourist dollars, had lent it ballast against ethnic displacement.

Bridgeport doesn’t have a destination retail district (though it has other distinctive sources of revenue), and retail alone doesn’t make a stable neighborhood. Think of Halsted Street in Greektown, or Argyle Street in Uptown: their restaurants remain vital even as the ethnic populations they first opened to serve disperse.

When I went around asking about it after the Loyola study came out, people told me that Chinatown had something else: a civic network with its own channels for raising capital, and reinvesting it, combined with a real estate market that has remained partly opaque to outsiders.

The civic and investment network emerged partly as an adaptation in a less friendly society. Nineteenth century Chinese moved to Chicago to escape racial violence on the West Coast. They settled at Van Buren and Wells, but were displaced after 1905, when their landlords coordinated rent increases against them. The On Leong Tong hired a non-Asian intermediary to negotiate 50 new leases at Wentworth and Cermak, and a large part of the Chinese community relocated en masse to start fresh.

In the 20 years after China’s Communist Revolution, Chicago’s Chinese population doubled, while the construction of the Dan Ryan and Stevenson Expressways sliced Chinatown’s housing stock in half, leaving weird scraps of real estate in the interstices that have remained relatively unattractive to outside investors. (Think of the triangle between Archer and the Stevenson Expressway, for instance, where new residences have been blooming alongside the Chinese food wholesalers.)



Chicago bankers steered clear of Chinatown up through the 1980s. A high savings rate should have made for an attractive deposit base, but language and cultural barriers, such as the absence of credit or employment histories among recent immigrants, scared most of them off (with the notable exception of Lakeside Bank). In the 1980s and 90s, Chinese investors opened their own banks to fill the credit gap. New Asia Bank and Pacific Global opened in Chinatown proper; International Bank of Chicago and American Metro Bank opened first in Uptown’s North Chinatown, where they are still headquartered, adding branches in South Chinatown later on.

In 1984, a group of businessmen formed the Chinese American Development Corporation, purchased former railway land, and launched a commercial and residential expansion that would double the geographic area of Chinatown. Built in phases over the last 20years, the project was initially financed with a bond issue that raised $1.3 million in $1 shares.

Meanwhile, property sales in and around Chinatown are dominated by Chinese language realtors who don’t advertise through mainstream channels. One effect, as an observer described it 5 years ago, is that outsiders provide commercial revenue, but they’re effectively closed out of the real estate market. “Anyone can do a search on MLS,” he claimed. “Calling up a Chinese language realtor is something else.”

An opaque real estate market and a conservative investment circuit helped insulate Chinatown when the credit crisis hit. Real estate prices never peaked, or crashed, as they did in the neighboring South Loop, for instance. Foreclosures never overtook new home sales, and banks never stopped making loans.

"We never got the boom,” See Wong, President of Wabash Realty told me last year, “and we didn’t get the bust either.”

At the time, he was finishing up a 60 unit condo development at 23rd and Canal. He had presold most of the units before the credit crisis hit. Then, after it hit and buyers who’d pre-purchased units declined to close, he sold them again. “I’m very proud of that,” he told me at the time. He said he discounted prices 5% to incent sales, and was competing for buyers with big South Loop projects that were auctioning off condos for a fraction of the value of their outstanding mortgages.

Across the Chicago region, the popping of the home price bubble was marked by a sustained drop in residential loan activity of all kinds – from home purchase to home improvement to refinancing. According to bank reports made under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, residential loans in the Chicago metropolitan area dropped by 46% between 2005 and 2009; home purchase loans dropped by 75%.

In Pilsen there were 74% fewer residential loans in 2009 than in 2005; in McKinley Park there were 67% fewer. In the South Loop, the number of residential loans dropped by only 3%, but that was because a 50% drop in home purchase loans was offset by a 100% increase in refinancings.

In Armour Square, which includes Chinatown at its north end, and the old Italian neighborhood on its south end, residential loans dropped just 33%. In fact, in some Chinatown census tracts there were more loans made in 2008 and 2009 than in 2005 – between 67 – 75% more.

It’s not that the crisis didn’t impact Chinatown at all, but a closed real estate market reinforced by a more risk averse culture (Wong says even modest income buyers regularly come in with down payments as high as 50% because they’re psychologically averse to taking on big loans) helped insulate it.

Something similar may be true in Bridgeport. It is true, for instance, that residential lending trends resembled Chinatown more than the city as a whole. Loan originations dropped 34% between 2005 and 2009 in Bridgeport overall, and they increased in 2 of the neighborhood’s 16 census tracts.

And it may be true for similar reasons. Bridgeport may have its own circuit for reinvesting neighborhood income into real estate, a circuit that is partly opaque to outsiders. The income may derive more from public employment, union pensions and favorable city contracts than from retail revenues at the moment. And at this point, my evidence is more anecdotal then quantitative:

I’ve heard that an unusual number of properties here are exchanged as dollar transfers, rather than sold on the market, for instance. An acquaintance who bought a house in a row of new homes on Parnell fondly recalls how the developer made inquiries about him –not about his credit or employment history so much as about who he was and where he came from – before he’d show him a house.

There are obvious negative aspects to a real estate market closed to outsiders, but there are positive ones to. A lot of them are embodied in a certain kind of Bridgeport landlord, I think of him as a composite of my own landlord and other guys I’ve heard my landlord describe.

He resembles the lord of a small estate more than the manager of a portfolio. He’s accumulated his properties gradually, over decades, or his family has, one 6 flat at a time. He is very hands on. He’s at the property daily, or weekly at the least. If something breaks, he fixes it right away; if something needs tuckpointing, painting, replacing or replumbing, he anticipates it before anything really bad happens. He may collect some rents in cash, he carries a wad of bills with him and pays for things literally from out of his pocket.

When he has a vacant unit, he doesn’t advertise widely for the highest rent he can get, he’s more interested in finding someone who will rent quietly for years, so he advertises in the Bridgeport News, or he doesn’t advertise, he asks around through his chain of acquaintance for a reliable candidate.

Of course, landlords like that aren’t unique to Bridgeport. Maybe all neighborhoods are managed by small estate landlords, until the point speculative interest catches up to them and they aren’t anymore. Bridgeport’s famous insularity seems to have helped him hold on longer here. So has its housing stock.

Compared to the city as a whole, Bridgeport has a larger portion of apartments in small buildings, and a smaller portion in large ones. As of the 2000 census (2010 figures aren’t available yet) 72% of Bridgeport’s housing stock was in 2-9 unit buildings, compared to 43% for the city as a whole; only 2% of it was in buildings with more than 10 units, compared to 30% for the city overall. There are no big apartment blocks ripe for condo conversion in Bridgeport -- when change arrives, it will have to move-in piecemeal, one 6-flat at a time.

On the other hand, housing stock alone doesn’t account for Bridgeport’s stability. McKinley Park, Brighton Park and Pilsen all share roughly similar distributions of small and large apartment buildings, and single family homes. During the crash, loan originations dropped off between 67-83% in those neighborhoods. Foreclosure filings in Pilsen have been similar to those in Bridgeport, but Brighton Park had 336filings in 2010; McKinley Park had 92, about 30% less than Bridgeport, but in a neighborhood with a third the total housing units.



At the end of the housing boom, condo developers began to pick up former warehouses on the edge of Bridgeport’s PMD, a protected manufacturing district. When it resumes, swaths of former industrial land to the east of the PMD, in the blocks around Donovan Park, will be cleared and ready for new construction. Bridgeport will benefit from that kind of investment too.

But it will be interesting to see what the old landlords will do then. Will they sell off their holdings, cash in for some less labor intensive investment? If they do, we’ll all miss the benefits of their tenure. They provide safe, affordable housing that makes Bridgeport an entry point for immigrants, and also for start-up galleries and bike-frame builders -- people whose presence provides a non-monetary stimulus that’s greater than their rents.

Homeowners and other property owners benefit from the stabilizing influence of the landlord with modest ambitions too. That influence seems to have translated into fewer foreclosures, more loans, prices that didn’t totally deflate. We didn’t get the boom some other neighborhoods saw a few years ago, but we didn’t get the bust either.