Hey, Curiosity intern Linnea Dominic here.

Well, we're entering another week of Curious City scavenger hunt,

and hopefully you've been unlocking lots of clues and seeing a new side of the city.

You've probably noticed that Chicago's community areas have a deep history,

and many have changed a lot over the years.

So for the duration of the scavenger hunt,

we're going to rerun some of our favorite

neighborhood-specific episodes. If you listen to last week's episode about foods that started in

Chicago, you heard Monica mention a restaurant in Lakeview that served something called the Akatagawa.

It's an omelet-like dish with hamburger patty, green pepper, onion, and bean sprouts.

And it developed in Lakeview when it was home to a working-class Japanese neighborhood.

But when was that? And what happened to that community?

Reporter Catherine Nagasawa has more.

When Irene Brown was a kid in the 90s, her family used to take trips to Chicago's Japan

town. At least, that's what her mom used to call it. It was a cluster of Japanese restaurants

and businesses on the north side in the Lakeview neighborhood near Belmont and Clark

Streets. Now, Irene's family isn't Japanese, but her family

like to drive in from the suburbs to shop for ingredients for the Japanese recipes they like to try

out. If you wanted to buy rice noodles, you couldn't just go into any store or order it on Amazon.

You had to actually go to the Japanese neighborhood. The shops and restaurants Irene remembers were actually the remnants of a small but thriving

Japanese-American neighborhood.

At its peak in the 70s, there were around 150 Japanese-American-owned establishments in the area.

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