Word 49: West Ridge, Chicago

Thursday, December 6, 2007

West Ridge, Chicago

West Ridge, Chicago

West Ridge or West Rogers Park is one of 77 well-defined Chicago, Illinois community areas. It is a middle to upper middle class neighborhood located on the far north side of Chicago. It is located in the 50th Ward. It is bordered on the north by Howard Street, on the east by Ridge Boulevard, Western Avenue, and Ravenswood Avenue, the south by Bryn Mawr Avenue and Peterson Avenue, and on the west by Kedzie Avenue and the North Shore channel of the Chicago River. At one time joined with neighboring Rogers Park, it separated in the 1890's over a conflict concerning park districts (known as the Cabbage War.)

Today West Ridge is one of Chicago's better off communities, filled with thriving multi-ethnic culture lining Devon Avenue, historic mansions lining Ridge and Lunt Avenues, cultural institutions such as St. Scholastica Acadaemy and one of the highest per capita incomes on the Northside of Chicago. It is represented in City Council by Alderman Bernard Stone.
It is home to the Midwest's largest Hasidic community, as well as other Jewish, Irish-American, German-American, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Assyrian, and Korean immigrant communities.

Golden Ghetto

Golden Ghetto is an informal name for a neighborhood north and south of Devon Avenue on the North Side of Chicago stretching from about 2200 West to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal at about 3200 West.

The Golden Ghetto is bounded on the north by Warren Park and Pratt Avenue and on the south by Peterson Avenue. It acquired its name from the thriving Jewish community there from about 1930 to the mid-1970s. That community began to drift into the suburbs in the 1960s, and the neighborhood began to be home to South Asians and Russian Jews from about that time.
The heyday of the area is the topic of Adam Langer's Crossing California, told from the perspective of the second-generation residents during their middle school and teenage years.

Schools