Notes From a Pawnshop
Apr 13, 2019
4 minutes
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
Photograph by DS SHIN
IN RECENT YEARS, I’VE GOTTEN INTO THE HABIT OF PERIODICALLY stopping by Chicago Pawners & Jewelers, a small pawnshop on the Near West Side, a neighborhood that has changed considerably over the years. Not long ago, Rockwell Gardens, a forbidding public housing complex, sat a few blocks away, and for its residents Chicago Pawners was like their local bank. It was the only place they could get a loan. Those high-rises have since been razed.
And the neighborhood, while not quite gentrifying, has morphed into a community of some diversity, if not in race then at least in income, the desperately poor living
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