Over the past 20 years I’ve chipped away at building a definitive list of Chicago neighborhoods – real and imagined – and their boundaries. I recently created, at Google Knol, a work in progress titled The ultimate list of Chicago neighborhoods. Add your comments on the Google Knol if you see anything questionable, or missing.
In the course of researching that list I’ve spent far too much time at Wikipedia, and found it to be a frequently unreliable source of sometimes bizarre misinformation. See, for example, the write-up on “Cross Ashland,” a neighborhood I encountered for the first and only time in the Wikipedia entry on University Village. A sample quote:
Cross Ashland also extended east all the way to Halsted.Before the ABLA homes were constructed.Many Blacks worked at the various railyard companies at Fifteenth street before the companies all moved to foreign lands and the suburbs.They were proud to leave the oppressive south and work arduous hours to feed families and attend barbecues. In 2005 this community of roughly 10,000 in the fifties and 5,000 in the nineties was completely destroyed overnight in a mass scale fire sale for land developers hungry to devour the last vestige of black community east of Western avenue.
Have you ever heard of Cross Ashland before this?