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Curious City

From Stockyards To Speakeasies: A Chicago Historian Tackles 5 Questions About The City’s History

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8642 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2018

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dominic Pacyga shares his encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago history and answers questions about everything from “gin joints” to stockyards.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

0:14.0

Hi, I'm Alexandra Solomon, editor of Curious City.

0:18.5

Curia City gets a lot of questions about Chicago's neighborhoods. Their history,

0:23.6

the ethnicities that shaped them, the kinds of industries that existed and how they've changed

0:28.7

over the years. Now, normally, we answer one question at a time. But today, we're doing something

0:34.6

different. We're going to knock out a bunch of your questions.

0:40.3

And we invited somebody to our studio who can help with that.

0:42.2

Historian Dominic Pesiga.

0:48.6

He's kind of like a walking encyclopedia of the city's history, particularly when it comes to the neighborhoods.

0:54.0

And you'll hear him take calls and questions from listeners with neighborhood-specific questions. Professor Pasega,

0:55.7

thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Okay, professor, here we go with our first question

1:01.2

about Chicago neighborhoods. We've got Ernesto on the line. Hi, my question is, when I first moved to

1:07.7

Chicago, I lived in Humbold Park, and that was at that point, mostly a Puerto Rican neighborhood.

1:12.7

That's changing a little bit.

1:14.5

And there's other neighborhoods like a Ukrainian village, which obviously get their name from that ethnicity.

1:20.3

And that got me thinking, how often do neighborhoods change ethnic population?

1:26.1

This is a common occurrence. Does it happen frequently or less

1:30.3

frequently? Where do you live now? I'm in Edgewater now. You're in Edgewater. Okay, and that's a

1:35.0

neighborhood has gone through a lot of change also, and gentrification and so forth. The measuring

1:40.2

ethnicity is kind of difficult. Each group has its different history and it's, you know,

1:44.2

different prejudices against them as far as moving in and out goes. Probably the longest group

1:50.7

that has maintained its ethnicity is Bronzeville and the Black Belt on the south side, which really

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