Does Royko's Chicago still exist anywhere? (elementary school, transit, demographics)

[Clark&Addison]

Originally Posted by BRU67

I'm not referring to diversity in the neighborhoods which have gentrified. I'm talking about affirmative moves of affluent liberals to the City's most challenged areas. People like those described here...

Chicago Activists Are Creating A Future Without Police

I personally think that those who believe we live in an unjust society should do something tangible about that. And the best way would be to physically live in these areas - like Englewood, West Garfield Park, and Austin. Make these neighborhoods their home by "being present, being helpful, being generous, and being transformed as liberatory principles" (**no, I seriously did not make that up, it's in the article). That would of course include sending their kids into the troubled schools which serve these neighborhoods.

Kind of irrelevant to the point I was originally making then but yea, I agree with you that white families aren't actively moving to challenged neighborhoods, not to mention sending their kids to school there.

[BRU67]

Originally Posted by Clark&Addison

Kind of irrelevant to the point I was originally making then but yea, I agree with you that white families aren't actively moving to challenged neighborhoods, not to mention sending their kids to school there.

Yea, they're not putting their money where their mouth is, as they say. It certainly explains why the broader CPS demographic numbers haven't changed much, despite the developments at the schools you speak of.

[jonnynonos]

Without getting into it that much, I don't think you can always trust the reported demographic reports on high schools.

There have been instances when I was looking at the breakdowns at certain schools in Detroit, for instance, that I would be utterly shocked if they were accurate.

At the end of the day they are going off of what kids mark on a sheet of paper. There are likely often a number of jokesters and confused kids among them.

[Clark&Addison]

Originally Posted by jonnynonos

Without getting into it that much, I don't think you can always trust the reported demographic reports on high schools.

There have been instances when I was looking at the breakdowns at certain schools in Detroit, for instance, that I would be utterly shocked if they were accurate.

At the end of the day they are going off of what kids mark on a sheet of paper. There are likely often a number of jokesters and confused kids among them.

Come on man, jokesters and confused kids? You think they are asking children to fill out surveys for demographic reports? CPS gets race data when the kid is enrolled, not on some form being passed around to 3rd graders. Obviously no demographic info is foolproof but CPS isn't relying on mischievous pranksters and kids who don't know what "Hispanic" mean to collect their enrollment info.

[jonnynonos]

Originally Posted by Clark&Addison

Come on man, jokesters and confused kids? You think they are asking children to fill out surveys for demographic reports? CPS gets race data when the kid is enrolled, not on some form being passed around to 3rd graders. Obviously no demographic info is foolproof but CPS isn't relying on mischievous pranksters and kids who don't know what "Hispanic" mean to collect their enrollment info.

I don't know, but I have seen high schools in Detroit tagged 3-5% white that I can tell you are not 3-5% white. They're just not. They may have kids who choose to identify that way for whatever reason or there might be some glitch in the system but there are not like 30 random white kids at these schools.

Conversely, if someone -- parent or otherwise -- chooses to self-ID as white for whatever reason, do you really think some bespectacled beaurocrat is going to correct them?

Highly doubtful.

[Clark&Addison]

Originally Posted by jonnynonos

I don't know, but I have seen high schools in Detroit tagged 3-5% white that I can tell you are not 3-5% white. They're just not. They may have kids who choose to identify that way for whatever reason or there might be some glitch in the system but there are not like 30 random white kids at these schools.

I'm not familiar with Detroit at all so I can't comment on what goes on in their schools. Of all of the schools I am familiar with in the city, the only ones that have lead me to question their reported demographics are private schools that usually seem suspiciously less diverse in real life than they do on paper.

[emathias]

I should preface my response by saying I grew up in a tiny (pop. 560), rural town an hour outside of Portland, Oregon. But almost every day my dad would bring home a copy of the once-great newspaper, The Oregonian, home at the time of legendary, Pulitzer-prize-winning political cartoonist Jack Ohman, and also carrying Royko's syndicated columns. I grew up loving reading Royko, even though I was 2,000 miles from him and found even the relatively small city of Portland to be intimidatingly huge. I was fascinated by the descriptions of Chicago and the people in it, of people living where you didn't need a car and came from around the world. I didn't really need a car in my town of 560 people - there was a market and I could walk to school and walk to the market and the post office, and would ride my bike 7 miles to the next-largest town to play soccer on the weekends if my parents couldn't give me a ride. For whatever reason, while I like cars, I'm not passionate about having to own one and haven't owned one since 1999 despite being financially capable of doing so.

So anyway:

Originally Posted by eating while walking

...
Penny pitching

I've never actually seen penny pitching played, not in Chicago, not anywhere.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Streetcars

There are no streetcars left in Chicago, they've 100% been converted to buses. In fact, by the time Royko published BOSS, there hadn't been streetcars in Chicago in over a decade. After pretty rapid growth in the use of public transit between 1990 and about 2010, bus ridership has been in steady decline even as rail transit (the 'L' elevated train) continues to grow strongly, and is projected to actually exceed capacity in some parts of the system as early as next fall. There are plans to expand capacity in some areas by enabling more frequent trains and longer trains (one line has already expanded stations to handle longer trains), and a few proposals to add actual new track. The chances of there being streetcars again are pretty slim because streetcars are simply not a very efficient means of transit, often slower than buses and less flexible. So we might see some bus-related improvements, and we will see some elevated rail or subway improvements, but not streetcars.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Hot dog carts

Food carts were actually mostly banned for a number of years in Chicago, so hot dogs were mostly bought in hole-in-the-wall restaurants and not from carts. That ban has been softened some, but you still really need to go to New York if you want to see actual hot dog carts with any regularity.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Guys like "Slats Grobnik"

These guys are fewer and further between, but you will still occasionally run across good ol' Slats, especially on the Northwest and Southwest sides and the near-in working-class suburbs like Cicero and Berwyn. But the modern, growing population of Chicago is college-educated, professional, global, not provincial, lightly educated and chauvinistic.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Taverns on every corner

This part does still exist in large parts of the city. Maybe not *every* corner, but enough that one can easily have "your" tavern. And these days, in some neighborhoods, that tavern might be a hipster tiki bar, or a fancy whiskey bar and not a hard-scrabble place to get drunk for cheap, but the idea is largely the same under the surface. But if you want the hard-scrabble dive bar, you can still find plenty of those, too, though some have more hipsters than Slats.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Bars and dives filled with gruff newspapermen

Given the collapse of the news industry in general, and the relocation of operations for both the Sun-Times and the Tribune away from their long-time homes near Michigan Avenue and the River specifically, this isn't found so much anymore. There are fewer and fewer downtown dive bars catering to newsmen. Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Avenue, long one prototypical such bar, is now mostly tourists. There may still be a few spots with the remaining "name" journalists sitting at the bar after a long day, but it's not what it once was.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

Still-functioning factories, and everyone who works there lives within 1 - 2 blocks

This hasn't existed in a very long time, probably 40 years.

Originally Posted by eating while walking

White ethnic neighborhoods with youth gangs jumping each other as soon as they cross neighborhood lines
...

This isn't really existent anymore, either. There are a few modern gangs still have their roots as neighborhood organizations, but, for the most part, they're not ethnic whites and even if they *started* as neighborhood organizations they've become drug-pushing profit centers.

---

So, no, Royko's Chicago is now largely a historic artifact, much like Nelson Algren's Chicago is a historic artifact. And in a lot of ways, that's a good thing. The needs of those eras were different than the needs of this one and the tolerable problems of those eras are mostly considered intolerable violations of human rights today. You can catch glimpses of Royko's Chicago by chance or if you happen to know where to look, but it's no longer an place or time that most Chicagoans can even identify with, let alone consider to define them.

You do see somewhat modern takes on that sort of Chicago in media still. The episodes of "Better Call Saul" that are set in Cicero harken back to a similar, if not quite the same, era, for example. And if you haven't seen Starz "BOSS" with Kelsey Grammar, you probably ought to. It's a nice meld of Royko and actual contemporary Chicago eras.

[jonnynonos]

Originally Posted by Clark&Addison

I'm not familiar with Detroit at all so I can't comment on what goes on in their schools. Of all of the schools I am familiar with in the city, the only ones that have lead me to question their reported demographics are private schools that usually seem suspiciously less diverse in real life than they do on paper.

Well, your original thesis may be a micro trend, no one has any way of knowing, but overall white student population has declined in hard numbers at Amundsen along with plummeting overall enrollment over the last five years. It's only very moderately increased proportionally.

Unless you worked there or knew most of them I'm not sure how you would begin to characterize the motivation of the remaining Caucasian students.

[Clark&Addison]

Originally Posted by jonnynonos

Well, your original thesis may be a micro trend, no one has any way of knowing, but overall white student population has declined in hard numbers at Amundsen along with plummeting overall enrollment over the last five years. It's only very moderately increased proportionally.

Unless you worked there or knew most of them I'm not sure how you would begin to characterize the motivation of the remaining Caucasian students.

This is probably a topic for another thread entirely but anyway... as I have said, I certainly agree with you that white CPS enrollment has declined across the board, the numbers speak for themselves (unless it's attributable to fewer pranksters and confused parents misidentifying themselves...). Schurz, Foreman, Taft, Roosevelt, etc, were once almost entirely white (decades ago) and slowly the white student population dropped to essentially zero as those areas became increasingly Latino.

The attendance areas of LP, Lake View, and Amundsen have experienced something totally different. These areas are all overwhelmingly white and increasingly so. But 15-20 years ago the schools, including elementary (with the exception of maybe Lincoln and Mayer) did not reflect the neighborhood demographics. Until the gentrification reached a "critical mass" if you will, parents avoided sending there kids to neighborhood schools. Then we saw these schools get "flipped", a term that I hate but a phenomenon that has been publicized a lot lately with schools like Blaine, Nettlehorst, Coonley, etc. Now people are clamoring to move into these attendance boundaries and the schools are almost all neighborhood enrollment whereas in the past there had been empty seats or school choice kids coming in.

As for the high schools, they still do not reflect the neighborhood demographics. Only about 1/4 to 1/3 of kids at Amundsen and LV are from within the boundary. But the combination of improvements at the schools (IB at Amundsen, STEM at LV), initiatives by Pawar and Tunney, and in some cases lack of any other option are making it SLIGHTLY but INCREASINGLY more common and more attractive to stay. The "motivation of remaining Caucasian students" is fairly irrelevant. A kid (Caucasian or not) might love Amundsen or Lakeview but his parents say no way, or he might hate it but his parents have no choice. More likely it's somewhere in between. I would encourage you to read some recent reviews on either school. The one family I know with a kid at Amundsen is very happy.

I am not a teacher at one of the schools nor do I know most of the kids there, but I do know teachers in several of the elementary schools that feed into Amundsen/LV, and lots of families that live in both boundaries, some with kids that will soon be going to HS. Lincoln Park, individual opinions about the school aside, is the best neighborhood public HS in the city. I'm very confident the other North of North Ave/E of River/S of Rosehill high schools will come to resemble LP and reflect their neighborhood demos to a much greater extent over time (maybe 10-15 years), as the elementary schools have, and ironically, as the rest of the cities high schools have (the cause for the drop in white enrollment).

Sorry for being long-winded and I don't want us to start going in circles here, but it is an interesting conversation.

[jonnynonos]

Yeah, well, I certainly wouldn't argue the elementary schools or Lake View. I would also agree that it is likely, though not a certainty, the transplants will end up sending their kids to some CPS schools in light of larger demographic transitions.

My only point of contention is that if you really looked at the roughly 140 Caucasian kids currently at Amundson, I think it is an unknown quantity which are leftover eastern Euros, other rando kids from the neighborhood whose parents never moved out for whatever reason, and which are transplant progeny sent to the school in the spirit of some new paradigm.

It is also worth noting that Arabic people are counted as Caucasians on the census. Probably not hugely relevant to Amundson but it is at other schools and in looking at the "Caucasian" demographics of many neighborhoods throughout the country.