Neighborhood of the week: Polish Hill

[aw_now_what]

Originally Posted by eschaton

That's really not true. Allegheny West definitely had a "bad" period where most of the houses were chopped up into apartments in the mid 20th century. It didn't ever have white flight to speak of, and not many houses were lost to blight, but it was at one point dominated by poor renters (and had about ten times its current population).

Yeah, there was a period of rejuvenation that started maybe in the 70s (although one restorer/old house nuts couple actually bought a house and moved there around 1960) and is arguably still ongoing: people are still restoring houses. And Allegheny West, including Beech Avenue, was predominantly rooming houses between, say, the 1920s and 1970s.

p.s. regarding the Polish Hill name, I suppose both those accounts could be true.

[RogersParkTransplant]

Originally Posted by eschaton

That's really not true. Allegheny West definitely had a "bad" period where most of the houses were chopped up into apartments in the mid 20th century. It didn't ever have white flight to speak of, and not many houses were lost to blight, but it was at one point dominated by poor renters (and had about ten times its current population).

Originally Posted by aw_now_what

Yeah, there was a period of rejuvenation that started maybe in the 70s (although one restorer/old house nuts couple actually bought a house and moved there around 1960) and is arguably still ongoing: people are still restoring houses. And Allegheny West, including Beech Avenue, was predominantly rooming houses between, say, the 1920s and 1970s.

p.s. regarding the Polish Hill name, I suppose both those accounts could be true.

OK, fair enough. It's just that the history as a whole doesn't seem nearly as drastic as the rest of the Northside, and I have met a fair number of families that have been there for decades -- much more so than Deutschtown, for example. Anyway I don't have time to pull up a bunch of listings right now, but last time I was poking around the prices seemed much higher than what SCR has listed above for Polish Hill.