Notes from the Barbershop: Vince & Gino's Hair Design

The first time I got highlights in my hair I came out a little too Bridgeport blond. My landlord, who has turned out to be a source of sound advice on a surprising range of topics, suggested I try Vince and Gino’s Hair Design at 28th and Wallace instead.

I’d seen the shop before – I thought it was a barber shop. It is. But they do women’s hair too. Not only did they fix my hair, but from my perch in the ladies’ salon I could watch them barber the men, which is worth a visit in itself.

They’d finish a haircut that was less than an inch long, then apply product and blow it dry – the whole operation accompanied by lively conversation. “A lot of it’s the pampering,” Gino says of the barber’s service, but it’s also the finishing. “Barbering is all about the details.”

They use clippers for very short hair (clippers aren’t less traditional than a comb and scissors - most men probably know this, but I didn’t – there were manual clippers before there were electric ones, and their relative merits are a function of how short the cut will be).

But clippers are often the first step at Vince and Gino’s – they’ll go back over the cut with scissors to make the hair lie right; or they’ll use the clippers to shave the neck and shape around the ears, and then lather is up and perfect it with a straight razor.

Gino’s father Vince Ballone learned the barber’s trade in Italy, where training entailed a 4 year apprenticeship. You’d start out sweeping the floors and move up to applying lather before they’d let you hold a razor – a respectful pace for an art that entails applying a sharp blade across someone’s throat. Vince came to Chicago and opened the shop at 2845 South Wallace in 1960.

In the US, Gino’s path was different. He went to beautician’s school, and got recruited into an assistant-ship at an Oak Street salon. They didn’t call him an assistant, they were charging hundreds of dollars when he colored people’s hair, so they called him a color specialist and told the clients he was from Milan.

If all went well, he could expect to work his way up to his own chair in a few years. That seemed like a long time. And he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the atmosphere. “I like the people,” he says “the personal interactions.” The personal interactions were strange at the Oak Street salon.

Part of his education was to stand and observe as the master stylists performed. One afternoon, a client sat down and told her stylist “You know, I think you left this side a just little bit longer than the other last time you cut my hair...”

The stylist bit her head off. “I am an artist! You’re just a canvas!” He stormed off, leaving Gino, stunned, with the client. The client started to cry in the chair. Eventually the stylist cooled off, came back and apologized. The client apologized too.

That will never happen to you at Vince and Gino’s. Most of their clients have been coming back to them for years, some of them for 3 generations. For much of that time, Vince Ballone’s barber shop was a 2 chair operation. Gino left Oak Street and set up a 3rd chair for doing women’s hair in 1992.

John Caliscibetta joined the business eight years ago. He knew Vince from the Italian American Club. He’d been cutting hair downtown in the Loop since the 1960s. Businessmen got their hair trimmed every week, and they had people in the chair for a shave every day.

John recalls during the Civil Rights era, they’d get calls from African American men asking if they cut black hair. He’d tell them he didn’t have much experience with black hair, but he’d try. Often, they’d decide to go elsewhere, figuring he wouldn’t do the best job. “But they wanted to know if we’d turn them away.”

Today, barbers and fade shops may be more prevalent in African American neighborhoods – there are still a couple barber colleges in Chicago today. But if you google “traditional barber” you get a list of shops in distant cities with names like “Good Fellas” and “Quintessential Gentleman” – names that suggest the old-world barbershop has come near enough to extinction that it could be subject to a retro-cool revival.

But if the old-world art is going to persist uninterrupted, it makes sense that it’s doing that here. Gino says there are 2 other traditional barbershops in the vicinity – Joe’s on 26th Street and another shop on Taylor – though Vince and Gino’s is the only one that still does a hot facial shave.

Shaves aren’t as common anymore, but they’re still in demand. Vince and John used to get clients who didn’t shave themselves, they’d only get shaved at the barber shop. They would have their own razor in a mug at the shop.

A straight razor shave lasted twice as long as a DIY version, mainly because the quality of disposable razors was very bad. Gino says disposable razors improved dramatically in the last 20 years. In fact the straight razors they use at the shop are disposable, just to guarantee against any potential for spread of infection. Though a barber can still shave you closer with a straight blade. And people still appreciate the pampering.

My informal poll of male acquaintances showed significant interest in the procedure, though most respondents had never had it done. One had heard a straight blade shave would chafe his face.

Gino says some people are sensitive to the straight razor, especially if they haven’t been shaved with one before. But the barber can see that as he’s shaving, and he’ll avoid making a second pass against the grain.

The details do a lot to smooth the operation. Hot towels soften the skin; a pre-shave lotion raises the beard; the lather is applied warm. Some clients opt for a mud mask to clean their pores after the shave itself.

Five years ago, Vince and Gino expanded the shop, adding new staff and salon services. Victoria Marina does manicures, pedicures, facials and massage. She says about half the manicures she does are for women, the other half are for men. Christina Lebato joined the shop out of beautician’s school about 2 years ago – she does my hair and I come out of there looking like a much cuter version of my former self.

Paige is the newest employee, she’s trained in hair, but also in make-up. Most of her clients who want make-up done are primping for homecomings, weddings or other formal events, but she’s also been trained in theatrical make-up, which you might keep in mind for other occasions. If you’re attending an Edward Gorey Halloween party for instance. [Which I was, at the time I wrote this. Now I realize it might suggest it's her preferred style (not so). Also, the photo of the pretty ladies shows Paige, at left, and Christina. I do come out looking cuter, but not that cute.]

Now that elaborate whiskers have made a comeback, there should be a new market for traditional barber services. Another respondent in my acquaintance poll wears his hair down over his brow, and has an old world mustache. He goes to a salon to have his hair cut, because when he’s gone to a barber shop, his hair doesn’t lie right.

But the woman who does his hair won’t touch his face. She sees an imaginary line that marks the end of her expertise, somewhere in the middle of his sideburns. If that sounds familiar, you might take my landlord’s advice and go to Vince and Gino’s. They’ll shape your mustache, and make sure your hair lies just the way you want it, too.

The Bluesman and the Bar

Rockin’ Johnny Burgin and his band will be playing at Bernice’s this Saturday, Sept 24th. You should go and hear them, they’re a fresh blues band with traditional roots. And you should show up before the music starts to get a feel for Bernice’s, it's a thinking man's drinking bar.

I walked in and saw Johnny playing there last year – I couldn’t believe it. The last time I saw him play was in the 90s, we were both in our 20s, and he was probably playing at the old Checkerboard Lounge – a respectable venue at 43rd and Vincennes.

People used to say he was really going somewhere with that guitar. He’d learned blues at clubs that don’t exist anymore, playing with older black guys, many of whom have died. He built his own following at Smoke Daddy’s as Wicker Park’s “urban hipster experience” was taking off. “All the blues musicians came out,” Johnny says. “People who didn’t like blues liked our band.”

Then sometime around 2001 he dropped off the face of the earth. Or he seemed to – he’d settled down into a quiet suburban lifestyle for awhile.

Now he’s back. He’s got a band with as much “classic upbringing” as he had, and they’ve been accumulating great reviews. They play all over Chicago and the Midwest, from BluesFest to Berwyn, with occasional European tours.

But it seems most appropriate to see them at Bernice’s. Johnny says a lot of people from his Smoke Daddy days have turned up there. They have things in common, the bar and the bluesman. The most literal one being that they’re both making comebacks.




The Bar:
There’s been a bar at 3238 S. Halsted since Prohibition. It was called Adam’s Place, until John Badauskas bought it in 1965. He named it after the woman who would be his wife. There’s a painting on the wall of a black haired beauty they say is the spitting image of young Bernice – it was already there behind the bar when John bought it.

Halsted was a different street back then. It was filled with stores and bustling with traffic. You could go outside and hail a cab, John’s son Steve recalls. That was significant, because the bar was also situated in a different drinking culture.

Steve Bedauskas grew up in his father’s bar. He recalls 9 other bars between Bernice’s and the 4 corners of 31st Street. He can name at least another 7 to the south. And Bernice’s opened at 10 in the morning: patrons would come in on their lunch break, or they’d come in to drink before work.

There weren’t a lot more people in Bridgeport then, they just spent more of their time drinking in bars. And maybe no one would argue the neighborhood was better off when half the population patronized taverns every day, starting at 10 in the morning.

But the culture where people came out regularly to rub shoulders, not to preen and pose the same way you might at a Saturday night club, but to shoot-the-shit and build tavern-style camaraderie, seems good for the civic cement.



Steve took over Bernice’s 12 years ago, after his father died, with help from his brother Mike, who mans the bar 2 nights a week. By then, the regular crowd had dwindled down to 1 or 2 guys. “It was depressing,” Steve admits, recalling long lonely evenings behind the bar.

Before he was a full-time barman, Steve was a machinist -- he specialized in equipment for binding books -- he’s good with his hands. He took up painting around the time he took over the bar. He’d paint on the cardboard the beer came in.

Paintings on cardboard were a genre for a series of art shows, “Bridgeport Primitive,” as Steve put it once. Some of his early works are on the wall of his bar.

Meanwhile, he set about building a new base of regulars. He started an open mic night right away, drawing on his musician friends. More recently he launched Stingo on Wednesdays – that’s Bingo, MC’d by Steve. It turned out to be wildly popular.

Now Steve doesn’t have time to paint. He jokes that he still runs the bar basically as a non-profit. But he has created a bar that draws one of the best assemblies of character in Bridgeport.

I was just there last week. I spent an evening talking to Chopper, a union carpenter with impressive mustaches who favors the vehicle his name implies, and to Carl Segvich, Bridgeport’s most persistent Republican candidate, and to John Salhus, an artist, who pays the bills with a job doing fine art restoration for a company on Cermak Road.

I first walked into Bernice’s 5 years ago. I’d walked by it for a year before I went in. It looked dark through the window, and the door is locked, you have to ring a bell to get buzzed in. But that night I had conversations I can still repeat to you now.

One of them was about Bridgeport’s racist reputation. I was still new in the neighborhood. I can’t remember how I brought it up, or why I thought it was a good idea. But my fellow conversationalist wasn’t perturbed. He thought a second, then he said “A lot of that reputation’s deserved.”

He grew up in Canaryville, which isn’t known for racial tolerance either. He described chasing black kids out of his neighborhood with his friends, but then he described getting beat up himself by the kids at Armour Park, and knowing while it was happening that it was basically the same thing.

He also had happy memories – of hunting rats in the ruins of the stockyards. “That was our wilderness!” he told me warmly. And touching present concerns. His 16 year old daughter wanted to get her face pierced. He was against it; she thought he was a tyrant.

“What do you think about that?” he asked, as if I might have some insight into the custom. I thought he should hold her off as long as he could – who ever regrets that they didn’t get pierced sooner? But I don’t know how it turned out.

And that’s still one of the best examples I can think of what Bernice’s is like. It isn’t the "hippest" bar in Bridgeport. It’s probably not the most authentically “Bridgeport” of bars. But it’s like the pumpkin patch where Linus might finally have been justified, it’s the most sincere.




The Bluesman:
As a kid learning guitar in South Carolina, Johnny Burgin didn’t know a career in music was possible. Then, as a college student in Chicago, someone brought him to a west side blues club and he heard Taildragger play. “It changed my whole direction,” Johnny says.

Soon, he was playing with Taildragger at his west side gigs; then he was touring the country with Howlin’ Wolf drummer Sam Lay. He describes it as a “tried and true career path,” learning by playing with the older guys who’d mastered the form.

“It’s a conservative style of music,” Johnny says, describing the blues. “It’s not incredibly hard to understand. A lot of people can play it. It’s how you choose to execute a simple set of rules.”

That’s where the musician’s individuality comes in, “to play with style, with feeling,” that’s what the west side audiences loved. “You listen to records, and there’ll be a riff, and you think ‘The audience must have been going crazy when he did that!’”

Blues music doesn’t play on popular radio anymore, it hasn’t for a long time. But when Smoke Daddy’s opened in Wicker Park in the mid-90s, Rockin’ Johnny (a nickname he acquired as a college radio host) got a regular gig there Monday nights, just as Wicker Park was booming. He built a following, introducing an unlikely crowd to a traditional form.

Ten years later, Johnny emphasizes the ways the scene is the same. When he began playing shows on the road, he says fans showed up with CDs he’d made in the 90s. And there’s a new crop of exciting young musicians out there.

But he admits some of the clubs have closed. Some of the musicians he knew have died. Or more alarming, they’ve gotten old. “I have a vision of them, playing strong like a bull!” he says.

Maybe Johnny is reluctant to focus on what’s changed because blues aficionados have been mourning the blues for decades. In the 60s and 70s, some fans fetishized the pre-war players; in the 90s, some fetishized the guys who’d been around to play with Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.

It’s a sentiment that’s easy to ridicule. And when I first saw Rockin’ Johnny at the Checkerboard, I ridiculed it. I’d just ducked out of divinity school, I was looking for an article to write. I thought the “real feeling” that was supposed to animate the blues sounded like a gnostic concept, something rarefied, and recognizable only to the select. Which seemed wrong, if blues really got its power from being a working man’s music.

Since then I’ve seen the same sentiments better treated in books: sociologists parsing the Chicago blues “scene,” and historians tracing the white man’s re-definition of a popular black form. I wouldn’t argue that they’re wrong about social dynamics.

But I’m more sympathetic to the experience of the person who loves the sound. I can imagine the same critiques applied to the sphere of Bernice’s – it would discern social posturing in the conversation I just described, or in my claims to know sincerity when I see it. But that critique always brackets the feeling of the buzz from the beer, and the impact of the conversation itself.

Johnny admits the “classic upbringing” he enjoyed, touring as a sidemen with the masters, is less available today. “But it’s not all over now, just because Honeyboy Edwards (the last guy who could claim to know Robert Johnson) is dead.” There is still a new crowd picking up on the form.

His west side heritage still helps him. When he flies into Europe for instance, having a leading guitarist from Chicago is a big addition to a club’s line-up -- a link to the style of Howlin’ Wolf.

But his own favorite guitar player is Django Reinhardt, an ethnic gypsy who recorded in the 30s and 40s. He brings it up as an example of how older forms persist, they get picked up and absorbed by younger players. If the old clubs close, new fans find it on YouTube.

If anything, Johnny is optimistic there’s more opportunity now. Recording technology is cheap, and social media puts marketing power in the musician’s hands. “My last CD cost $3,000, and they played it on XRT. So it was engineered well enough to play on a major radio station.”

His next album will be produced by Delmark, a Chicago label that’s home to Junior Wells and Magic Sam, to bring a traditional form to a new audience. “Every 10 years, a new group of musicians discovers the blues,” Johnny says with confidence.

It’s true, he admits, some people think of it as another generation’s genre. “In the 90s I proved that was wrong,” he says. “I’m going to do it again in the 10s.”

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.