This is a personal memoir of good times in Chicago back in the days when candy bars and White Castles cost a mere 5 cents. Chicago is a "city of neighborhoods," whether you are talking about Chinatown, Canaryville, Bridgeport, Beverly, South Chicago, Bronzeville, Hyde Park, Woodlawn or Englewood. This story takes place in the old South Shore neighborhood nestled on Lake Michigan between Jackson Park to the north and the booming steel mills to the south. My cousin, Dr. Bruce Hannon of the University of Illinois, used to say, "Good people make a good place good" and South Shore was one of those places...
This portrait of Chicago’s South Shore and its people is “a thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition” (Kirkus Reviews). An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. It is houses and stores and streets, but it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there. “Unlike any work of contemporary urban studies that I know. It combines elements of journalism, archival research, ethnography, and memoir in a study of South Shore—the South Side, Chicago, neighborhood in which Carlo grew up, in the 1970s. It’s at times lyrical, at times analytic, and always engaging.” —Eric Klinenberg, Public Books
This manuscript is a collection of short stories that were originally prepared as part of a radio program that began in the early 1980's as a summer informational and educational program for Tahoe area residents and visitors. Between 1982 and 1985, the author presented over a hundred live radio features about Tahoe's history and the environment over Tahoe radio station KTHO. Lane returned to the radio airways in 1995, this time with Tahoe radio station KOWL-AM-1490, and has since broadcast over 3000 radio tales: "Don Lanes Tales of Tahoe." The book is a distinctive collection of short stories about the colorful people, the characters, the dreamers and schemers that lived and worked in and around Lake Tahoe and the Sierras during the pioneer days of the Gold Rush and during the Comstock Years...people like Mark Twain, Joaquin Murrieta, and Lola Montez. It is also a collection of true stories about the unheralded pioneer men and women that were in their own simple way, inspiring. There are also tales about historic events in our region's diverse history and off-beat tales about ghosts, bandits and even about true love. The collection of tales weaves serious history with light-hearted stories without editorializing or fictionalizing by the author, as the emphasis has been on historical integrity and authenticity. The stories have been gathered from historical journals, diaries, museum collections, archives and history records. The stories are both entertaining and educational, and hopefully will provide insight into a time long past, and provide a greater awareness and appreciation for the people that have been forgotten over the years as time has passed by.
