When I was a very young child, I lived in an old brick, Chicago six-flat apartment building overflowing with my father’s Polish Catholic family. My grandparents lived just below us in the first-floor front apartment, while the other four flats all housed aunts and uncles and cousins. It was a wonderful way for a pre-schooler to be let loose to explore. From the staircase in the middle of the building, I could visit everyone in my whole family without ever going outside. Back doors led into the kitchens of the front three flats, while front doors opened into the living rooms of the rear three flats. If I knocked on the door across the hall, my Aunt Annette might invite me in to sample some exotic food I’d never seen before. She had come to Chicago from Alsace after World War II to marry my Uncle Frank and she spoke with a distinct French accent. I couldn’t understand why her cabbage was red while ours was always white. I could go upstairs to hang out with my older cousins Therese and Marlene, who, at five years my senior, often tolerated my presence so they could practice “mothering” me. Or if I concentrated really hard and could remember “Daj mi ciastko, prosze” I could always wheedle a cookie out of my Polish-speaking busia downstairs.
On warm summer evenings the adults would sit on the front “stoop” – a few limestone steps crammed between the sidewalk and our front door – to catch neighbors strolling by for a chat. Our building was separated from those on either side by a narrow gangway with access to the middle entrance and then the back porch and a tiny back yard. The passage was barely wide enough for my mother to hold my hand and walk beside me. The yard itself was barren – without trees or grass -- and I don’t remember ever playing there, not even once. Reaching out an open window from the enclosed frame back porch, my Auntie Joy would hang her laundry to dry. Wooden clothespins clipped the clothes along a rope that stretched all the way to the garage at the rear alley. Pulleys at either ends of the rope let her move the whole line towards her until it was full. Standing in the yard below was like being at the bottom of a tall closet with waving underwear. The only other place we kids could possibly play near our apartment was on the front sidewalk where we might ride a tricycle up and down the block. But we were warned never to go under the railroad viaduct at the north end, where unnamed evil men lurked, ready to snatch little children.
So my mother would take us every day to the park. I say “us” because by the time I was almost three I was joined by a baby brother, who was a nuisance in my opinion. All he seemed to do all day was produce smelly (cloth) diapers that I had to put in the equally smelly diaper pail. The park was not close, but the walk was full of exciting places to see. We went past a fire station, a corner tavern, and a long stretch of frame and brick 2-3 flats, then turned right onto a busy commercial street lined with storefronts and doctors’ offices. Then after two more blocks we crossed a major intersection before arriving at Humboldt Park. The park was an enormous world of its own. Standing sentinel at the entrance was a giant statue of a Polish revolutionary war hero on horseback, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who was brandishing his sword high above his head. The playground was not far, and we always went there first. Past the playground were broad lawns surrounding a large lagoon edged with tall grasses. At the boathouse you could rent a rowboat in summer or warm up after ice skating in winter, as my dad and his younger brother Frank often did.
My favorite place was the sandbox, where I could spend lots of time building a little town with streets and houses for toy cars and tiny baby dolls to populate. It was hard to get my mother interested in my town planning efforts since she was mostly paying attention to my brother. At almost two, he delighted in being pushed in the rigid wooden baby swing. Whenever I looked up from my work, I would usually see them at the swings.
One day, after having been long-absorbed in my fantasy creation, I looked up and couldn’t see my mother or brother anywhere. I looked at the swings, I looked at the teeter-totter, I looked at the slide, I got up, walked around that playground, and looked everywhere. And it slowly became obvious to my four-year-old mind that my impatient little brother must have gotten tired of everything, so my mother took him home and forgot to bring me with them. I would just have to meet them back home myself. I picked up my sand bucket and little people, and confidently approached the traffic lights at North Avenue and California. The walk home was so familiar to me that I had no trouble at all finding my way. When I got home, our own back door was locked so I just went upstairs to Auntie Joy’s to see if my mother was there. When my aunt opened the door and saw me, she exclaimed, “Where’s your mother??” “She left me at the park, so I walked home by myself,” I calmly replied. Alarm rose immediately in my aunt’s voice as she realized what must have happened. Within an instant she grabbed my small hand in hers and we flew down the stairs, racing back along those same streets to the park.
When we spotted my mother, she was frantic. She was pacing back and forth, retracing her steps everywhere. My brother had quietly fallen asleep in his stroller. As she saw us approaching from the park entrance, she ran towards us with tears in her eyes. “Vicki, where have you been?! I’ve been sick with worry for you!” I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. To me, it was all quite simple. “I didn’t see you, so I thought you went home without me.” My mother’s hugs almost squeezed the breath out of me. The two sisters-in-law hugged fiercely. As for me, I was a bit mystified by all the fuss. I knew the way home, I was finished playing, and it seemed pretty logical to walk home by myself. Surely, I was a big enough girl to be able to do that?
My mother told and retold this story to me throughout my growing up years – her fears, her relief. She usually told it when some new streak of my rebellious independence would surface – when I insisted on doing something myself, or refused to accept help from her or anyone else, or pushed to be allowed some adventure she thought beyond my age or experience. She told it as if to say, “Vicki has been an independent little girl since the age of four, with a mind of her own. Any show of independence since then can never surprise me as much as the day she walked home from the park alone.”
1712 N. Washtenaw was completely gutted in 2017 and converted to “Luxury condos.” But not before I snuck in one day, mid-demolition, to wander those old rooms exactly as I remembered from when I last saw them at age six. The scary Bloomingdale Line viaduct is now part of the 606 Trail, brimming with bikers, skateboarders, walkers, and dogs. In my historic preservation career, I learned that those lawns and lagoons were part of 200-acre Humboldt Park, first planned in 1869 by William Le Baron Jenney and completed by Chief Landscape Architect Jens Jensen in 1907 based on Prairie Style principles. The Boathouse Pavilion was the site of an impassioned speech by Polish pianist and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski May 30, 1915, pleading for an independent Poland and raising relief funds for Poland, being devastated by World War I. The entire park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Kosciuszko was moved to what is now Solidarity Drive in 1978. But for me, I will forever hear the talk and the laughter of a big extended family echoing throughout that venerable six-flat on Washtenaw.
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