YOU NEVER LEAVE THE NABE,” A FELLOW ROGERS Parker once told me.
“Why should I?” I responded. “I can buy my groceries here, I can go to the tavern, I can go to church. If I go somewhere else, I’ll have to pay for parking.”
Neighborhood life is the essence of the Chicago experience. The city is designed to discourage us from leaving the few blocks around our home. As Mike Royko wrote in Boss, “In every neighborhood could be found all the ingredients of the small town: the local tavern, the funeral parlor, the bakery, the vegetable store, the butcher shop, the drugstore. … With everything right there, why go anywhere else?” Royko was writing about Chicago in the 1950s, but even in the 2020s, plenty of neighborhoods still contain all those ingredients.
A few years ago, I decided to burst out of my
