Voices of change: five residents say Bucktown and Wicker Park are growing but still eclectic

The Flat Iron Arts building, at 1579 N. Milwaukee is a hub for Wicker Park's art scene. Photo by Jon Randolph

The dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in the white dress twirls her wrists and snaps her castanets, her skirt swiveling with the movement of her hips, her feet beating a staccato rhythm on the pavement. Some passersby stop to watch, others move on to the booths where vendors are hawking ceramic rice bowls or oil paintings or gold bracelets in the shape of slinkies at the Bucktown Arts Fest, which features the work of nearly 200 artists.

The event is packed, and the late August afternoon is warm, creating a sort of human stew in which the main ingredients of Bucktown and Wicker Park, its neighbor to the south, seem to be simmering: a mix of Latino culture, independent artists and hordes of well-heeled shoppers. That combination echoes the neighborhoods’ recent history: the influx of Puerto Rican and other Latino immigrants that peaked in the ’60s and ’70s, followed by a wave of artists looking for cheap studio space in the ’80s, giving way during the last decade or so to young, affluent professionals.

These broad trends are composed of individual lives, each a thread in the larger fabric of neighborhood growth. We talked with five residents of Wicker Park and Bucktown, seeking out stories of neighborhood change writ small. Some, like the artist Caroline Picard, are relative newcomers. Others, like Brian Culliton and Ruth Vandemark, came just before the recent wave of gentrification. Others, like Miriam and Gerardo Cerdas, have been there for decades.

Gerardo and Miriam Cerdas. Photo by Kate Hawley.

Gerardo and Miriam Cerdas
Gerardo and Miriam Cerdas have lived for almost 30 years in Bucktown, in a house they bought in the late ’70s for $18,000. The neighborhood was rough, with gangs running the streets and hookers staking out corners. But, Gerardo says, “I needed a house for my family.” The price was right.

They’d lived there about a decade, raising three children, Miriam working in food service and Gerardo working at a typewriter repair shop and then as a CTA bus driver, when Miriam decided it was time to open a restaurant. “I love cooking,” she says. “I love to have my own place.”

Crust, at 2056 W. Division St, is Chicago's first certified organic restaurant. Photo by Jon Randolph.

She had her eye on a rundown shack at the northeast corner of Milwaukee and Oakley avenues, which had been occupied by a string of failed restaurants. “The place was terrible,” Miriam says – it had a burned roof, coolers full of maggots and an empty lot in back strewn with old tires and hypodermic needles from the methadone clinic across the street.

But Miriam was undeterred. After buying new equipment and enlisting the extended family to help with cleaning and repairs, they opened Irazu, named after a volcano in their native Costa Rica, in 1990.

At first, their customers came mostly from the factories and warehouses that lined Milwaukee. But gradually that began to change. “They started building condominiums everywhere around here,” says their son, Henry, 34, now Irazu’s manager. In 1997, the year the warehouse across the street converted to condos, they expanded the building with a new dining room decorated with a colorful mural of their homeland.

A young shopper peruses the goods at Psychobaby, 1630 N. Damen. Photo by Jon Randolph

It soon filled with a new batch of regulars – a white-collar crowd that discovered that Costa Rican food was healthy (its main ingredients include white rice, black beans, cabbage and sauces made from lemon, vinegar and salt). Miriam added vegetarian platters and soy shakes to the menu.

Still, some neighborhood newcomers were hesitant to set foot in Irazu, which despite its improvements is still a humble structure, with small, oddly shaped parking lot in front, cars wedged in at all angles. “Sometimes the ladies go like this,” Miriam says, sticking her nose in the air. “Then they eat the food.”

“People like rice and black beans,” says Gerardo, slapping the table in front of him.

They have no plans to leave the neighborhood, he says. It’s the safest, cleanest and most prosperous it’s been since they moved in.

“I’m not going to sell my home, never,” he says. “I like the area. We love this house. It’s a family house.”

Brian Culliton. Photo by Jon Randolph

Brian Culliton
Brian Culliton is not one to make little plans. A decade ago, the 35-year-old landscape architect bought a condo on North Avenue, on the border between Bucktown and Wicker Park. Then, he says, the neighborhood was run down, with a visible homeless population, or, as he says, “a lot of shopping cart traffic.”

But gentrification was well underway. In 2003, amidst a hot real estate market in the area, he leapt into the game, buying a dilapidated Victorian graystone at 1555 N. Hoyne Ave. along with two partners, Michael Duggan and Stu Henrichs.

Their first idea was to rehab the building’s apartments. “Then the rental market went to hell,” he says. The next plan was to convert it to condos, but they scrapped that too, deciding that the highest and best use for the property would be as one five-bedroom, 5,600-square-foot single-family home.

Since the house is in the Wicker Park Historic District, they had to follow the Commission on Chicago Landmarks’ guidelines for the restoration. Their improvements included cleaning the stone on the front and sides of the building, so dirty it was black in places, and re-framing the historic coach house in the rear, which was covered in grimy tar paper. The house’s interior, which had been broken up into apartments, was gutted down to the brick. Space Architects & Planners designed the restored interiors, aiming for as much historical accuracy as possible, Culliton says.

Rob Giddens and Phoebe Hopper check their phones under the CTA tracks near Damen and North Avenue. Photo by Jon Randolph

It was a big job, especially since he was also working full time with his firm, Culliton Quinn Landscape Architecture Workshop. “Me and my business partners call it four years of education – going to college for four years,” he says, bracing himself against the granite countertops in the gleaming white-and-stainless-steel kitchen. His wife, Amy Pilewski, laughs in agreement.

The house is stocked with high-end features, including crown moldings, carved walnut banisters, three working fireplaces and a basement paneled in knotty alder. The coach house is now a pristine white frame structure with reclaimed antique brick pavers on the ground floor.

The work earned Culliton’s team a Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation, which Culliton says was surprising and hugely gratifying, given the painstaking labor that went into the project. They received the nod from the Commission on Landmarks in September, along with 21 other Chicago restoration projects.

The question now is what to do with the house. The eventual goal is to sell it (they’ll likely list it for $2.7 to $2.8 million, he says). But that may not happen right away. “We’re not really into selling it in a down market,” Culliton says. “We’d like some return on our investment.” In the meantime, he’s contemplating moving in for a year or so. “It’s a labor of love. Partly you just want to enjoy it for a while,” he says.

Ruth Vandemark. Photo by Kate Hawley.

Ruth Vandemark
Around the corner from Culliton’s magnum opus, on Pierce Avenue, is a vintage redstone with a Human Rights Campaign sticker affixed to the front door. The tiny, silver-haired figure of Ruth Vandemark steps out, offering a glimpse of gleaming hardwood floors and rooms flooded with light. She and her husband, Leland Wilkinson, bought the house in 1999, when the block had so many vacant lots that she says she could see the Sears Tower from her front porch.

It was a far cry from Evanston, where they’d raised two daughters and pursued their careers, Vandemark as an appellate attorney with the Chicago firm Wildman Harrold and later in private practice. They thought they’d never leave, she says. That was before they she got the call from Wicker Park Lutheran Church.

A couple steals a kiss at Wicker Park, at 1425 N. Damen. Photo by Jon Randolph.

Vandemark, who did a stint at Harvard Divinity School in the ’60s, went back to school part time in 1992 for a divinity degree. Wicker Park Lutheran was her first church, and when she took over as pastor in 1999, she inherited a crumbling building with only 25 members.

She got the church involved with the community – opening the building for AA meetings, growing earthworms for a community garden – and began the process of renovating the building. In the sanctuary, which smells pleasantly of beeswax and dust, she points out the refurbished organ and restored stained glass windows.

Heather Stumpf peers through a sculpture in the Caro d'Offay Gallery, at 2204 W. North Ave. Photo by Jon Randolph.

At the beginning of her tenure, the membership of the church was mostly older African Americans that lived in nearby Section 8 housing, but that core group has expanded, she says. “It’s a young congregation,” she says. “It’s growing, too.” There are now more than 60 members – not a bumper crop, but given the shrinking populations of many mainline Protestant churches, a notable increase.

The church has forged connections between these newcomers. “We have had one romance,” she says, breaking into a smile. And weddings are more and more common; in anticipation of one ceremony, gauzy white banners hang over the pews. She gets scores of requests from the neighborhood at large, so many that she has had to turn people away. “If I wanted to, I could do nothing but weddings,” she says.

That’s perhaps the inevitable result of a younger population looking to put down roots in a hip, thriving part of the city. But Vandemark says Wicker Park is hanging onto its diversity. “The sense of neighborhood is so strong,” she says.

Caroline Picard. Photo by Kate Hawley.

Caroline Picard
Behind an anonymous door at 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave., narrow green stairs lead to Caroline Picard’s gallery, a spare, open space with a red tin ceiling, wood floors painted gray, and walls that are white except for one section of exposed brick printed with the words “Bitters best stimulant and tonic” in fading letters – an advertisement from a bygone era.

When Picard moved in two and a half years ago, she was tempted to call the space Bitters, she says, but instead chose the name Green Lantern, after the offbeat superhero, which seemed a fitting title for an exhibition space for emerging, experimental artists. She holds nine shows a year, along with short films, performances and events.

On an afternoon late in August, the front room was filled with the work of Daniel Anhorn, a Canadian artist exploring human intervention on natural landscapes; watercolor maps showed land masses with phrases like “I love you” and “What the hell” carved into the earth, and a sculpture represented an avalanche crashing over a snow-bound highway. A stand by the door was stuffed with zines and hand-bound novels from Picard’s Green Lantern Press.

Picard, 26, lives in the back of the gallery, in a walled-off space containing her bedroom, a second bedroom jammed full of wood scraps and art supplies, a bathroom and a tidy, book-lined kitchen. The space projects a certain bohemian resourcefulness; one bookshelf is made from a kitchen sink turned on its side.

Milk & Honey Cafe, at 1920 W. Division St, is a popular brunch spot. Photo by Jon Randolph

The gallery is open to the public during the day on weekends and by appointment during the week. “I’d sort of always had a fantasy of doing something like this, even in college,” she says, looking out the gallery windows across Milwaukee Avenue at the el train rattling past.

Green Lantern, which she’s running while working toward her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of many local art spaces, including Heaven Gallery, Allrise Gallery, Fraction Workspace and Around the Coyote Gallery, which is affiliated with Around the Coyote, the interdisciplinary arts festival begun in 1990 to draw attention to Wicker Park’s artists. That’s when rents were cheap and studio space plentiful. Those days are gone, but the art scene hangs on, grittier and more vital here than in the art hubs of River North and the West Loop, according to some.

A family suits up at Holstein Park, at Oakley Ave and Lyndale St. Photo by Jon Randolph.

“It’s a very vibrant art neighborhood,” says Allison Stites, executive director of Around the Coyote Gallery, of Wicker Park. “It’s much more of a sort of community environment here. It’s not a major for-profit industry here. It’s more about the art.”

Picard agrees: there may not be big studios to rent, or big commissions to earn, but there are still relatively cheap apartments and a supportive culture. “I don’t think I could do this anywhere else, right now,” she says. “So I think that’s really essential. I mean I think I got really lucky finding the amount of space that I found.”

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