Burglars wish Bucktowners a Merry Christmas

So we got home to our little three-flat in the Wicker Park / Bucktown neighborhood last night to discover that burglars had broken in and made off with all kinds of goodies on Christmas night. They didn’t make it to the top floor, where I live, but they cleaned out the two units below me. The thief or thieves smashed a window of the garden apartment, then once inside, walked up the stairs of the common area and smashed the back inside window of the tenants on the second floor, and used a wrench to pry a flat-screen TV off the wall. The tenant of the garden apartment encountered a man carrying a box down the side of the house and was suspicious, but when he greeted her with “Merry Christmas” she assumed that he was a friend of one of the other tenants. This woman has lived in the apartment for 12 years and never had any problems; as the neighborhood has gentrified it has perhaps become more vulnerable to crime.

We spent last night in a daze, exchanging phone numbers with other residents of the building and meeting their boyfriends so that we would know what they looked like if we saw them around the place. The landlord is going to install bars on the garden apartment windows. The cops had already been and dusted for prints and apparently told our neighbors that several other houses on the street were also hit. Then my drycleaner told me that the owner of a boutique on Damen Avenue recently decided to shut shop after she was the victim of an armed robbery. Anyone else been the victim of a crime recently in Wicker Park / Bucktown?

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