Experts say every corner of the city is awash in defunct names and neighborhoods that disappeared. Some were communities built on commuter transit lines; others were the creations of real estate agents eager to create branding for new housing construction.
“They disappear because people who use them disappear,” said Peter Alter, chief historian with the Chicago History Museum, who has worked with Samuelson. “Industries to which they’re connected disappear. Obviously, there’s no longer a steel industry on the Southeast Side.”
Retired antique map dealer George Ritzlin said a decade ago he and his wife — members of the Chicago Map Society — sold a century-old broadside advertisement with a map of Grayland, a large area between the Portage Park and Old Irving neighborhoods in the 1870s. It was the creation of real estate developer and Cook County sheriff John Gray, who owned hundreds of acres on the North Side and believed his community’s proximity to Chicago and the three railroads would be attractive to newcomers.
The community became a haven for middle-class African Americans in the 1960s. “It’s kind of like a little bedroom community,” said JoAnn Kenner, longtime president of the London Towne Homes, where she arrived as a 21-year-old newlywed in 1967. Other communities simply vanished in the growing city. Untold numbers of homes and businesses were bulldozed to make way for the area’s expressway circuit.
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