The headline question is posed at Bucktown – Wicker Park Patch:
The boundaries between Chicago’s neighborhoods can be difficult to define, and the nebulous nature of these dividing lines is particularly contested in the Bucktown-Wicker Park area.
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Patch asked local leaders and longtime residents how they view the Bucktown and Wicker Park neighborhoods. Where does one end and the other begin? How do they define the neighborhoods in which they live and serve?
Head over to Patch for a variety of answers.
YoChicago has its own view of the boundaries of Bucktown and Wicker Park, and they don’t correspond neatly with any of the answers given at Patch. They do match up, however, with how the great majority of businesses, residents and the media think of the boundaries: the Bloomingdale wall had a great fall, and Bucktown begins at North Avenue.
Back in the 1980s a real estate broker told me that he and a group of other brokers met over breakfast one day and decided to begin calling the part of Wicker Park south of Bloomingdale Bucktown. The reason: “We’ve been telling people for 10 years that Wicker Park is the next hot neighborhood, and everybody’s sick of hearing it, because it isn’t happening. We’ll take a shot at hyping Bucktown and see what happens.” Given the passage of time, that’s an approximate rather than exact quote, but it accurately reflects what was said.