Two histories of Albany Park

By sheer coincidence I’ve received links to two wildly different depictions of old-school Albany Park in less than 12 hours. Between them, you can get a good sense of the changes that the neighborhood underwent over a 40-year period.

Last night, Joe Zekas reminded me of above clip on Albany Park’s Latin Kings, taken from a 1989 documentary titled “The Heart Broken in Half.” The second half can be seen here.

This morning, Frances Archer (whose memories of Hollywood Park we shared last November) sent me a link to her latest post at her Me & My Shadow blog: an interview with photographer Jerry Pritikin, who grew up on Troy Street in Albany Park during the ’40s and ’50s.