Garfield Ridge, Clearing

Garfield Ridge, Clearing continued...

Michael Weber's grandfather, fresh from Germany, opened that family's bakery in the Brighton Park neighborhood in 1930 and moved it to Marquette Park seven years later. Michael's father moved it to Garfield Ridge in 1979, and today's Weber's Bakery belongs to Michael. Before just about any holiday, it's not unusual for a line of customers to wind out of the store and into the parking lot.

Midway International Airport, once known as Chicago Municipal Airport, occupies areas of both Clearing and Garfield Ridge. The airport and the businesses on its fringe have provided livings here for generations.

The airport is, obviously, the main destination for visitors to this part of the city. The neighborhood around O'Hare also has convention space, corporate headquarters and big hotels. Garfield Ridge-Clearing doesn't.

It has Julie Wertelka

She was 2 years old when the airport opened in 1927. She was born in Clearing, the neighborhood that borders Garfield Ridge to the south -- on 63rd Street and Mason Avenue.

"I was born upstairs, in the back bedroom," Wertelka she says. "My mother had a midwife. She didn't have a doctor.

"I have lived in this building all my life."

Her birthday was May 26, 1925. In 1933, after the end of Prohibition, the building would become her father's saloon.

"I call it my father's place," she begins, then pauses as a Midway-bound jet roars overhead -- the way she has probably paused, by reflex, several zillion times in her life. Then she finishes. "People like that."

The working-class neighborhood around Midway has block after block of modest single-family homes, plus churches, a few nice parks -- and places like Pticek & Son and Weber's and Joe & Frank's and Soukal Floral (since 1916) and Chester's Polish Sausage (20-plus years on Archer) and Vince's Pizza (since 1956) . . .

. . . and Julie Wertelka's Tavern on 63rd Street (which, here, is "Honorary Julie Wertelka Street"). The attraction at Wertelka's Tavern, along with reasonably priced beverages and the mix of neighborhood folks who frequent the joint, is Wertelka.

A World War II story:

"What is now Ford City [a mall in the West Lawn neighborhood, next door] was the Dodge Chicago division of Chrysler," she says. She worked there. "We built the B-29 engine that went into the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima."

After the war, the plant was taken over by Preston Thomas Tucker, who built his "dream" cars there in 1948.

"They came by here," she says. "Did you see the movie?" (In case you haven’t, it’s "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," directed by Francis Ford Coppola , starring Jeff Bridges and nominated for three Academy Awards in 1988.)


There are other bars on and around 63rd Street in Clearing. The Karolinka Club, on Central Avenue, deserves a mention here. Parisi's Drive-In, on 63rd Street near Hale Park, has been a Clearing favorite for Italian beef (a Chicago favorite) for more half a century.

Archer Avenue, which forms the geographical and commercial spine of Garfield Ridge, also has its places to grab a bite and a refreshment, including outlets of Home Run Inn (pizza), Bobak's (Polish) and Lindy's Chili, all venerable Chicago originals -- and all neighborhood places.

For more information about Garfield Ridge, Clearing, please contact the Garfield Ridge Chamber of Commerce (773.767.0014) or the 
United Business Association of Midway (773.767.3336)