Little Italy, UIC

LIttle Italy/UIC continued...

To some people, today's Little Italy may only be a restaurant pocket within a redevelopment zone that's come to be called University Village.

They're wrong.

"There's still a lot of Italian Americans in this neighborhood," Randazzo says. Several of them are named Fontano.

Fontano's began in the early 1960s as a grocery store tucked back in the neighborhood, away from the Taylor Street traffic, on Polk and Carpenter Streets. After UIC opened a couple of blocks east of the store, occasionally students would come in and ask for sandwiches.

"My dad would send them to other stores," says Mary Fontano. "Then my dad started thinking, 'Why am I sending them somewhere else?' That's when he started the sub shop."

Her parents, Aniello and Gilda, still work in the combination grocery store-sub shop, still turning mortadella, cotta salami, provolone, giardiniera and other good things into legendary sandwiches.

Mary Fontano was born, in 1961, in a bedroom above the store. "Seven of us lived in a three-bedroom apartment upstairs." She still lives in the neighborhood, down the block. So do her parents.

Yes, there has been change.

"A lot of the old Italians, which I miss . . . ," Mary Fontano begins. Stories come, of neighbors with names like Calabrese watching over her and her brothers, feeding them, walking them to school . . .

But change doesn't mean it's gone.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii (1924), on Lexington and Lytle Streets, was the neighborhood's first Italian Catholic church, built for a parish formed in 1910. Its statuary and, especially, its stained glass are remarkable. (Visitors are welcome.) It remains an active church, with Italian used in masses.

A Christopher Columbus statue, commissioned for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, shares a plaza with a bubbly fountain at Arrigo Park on Loomis Street.

Randazzo, founder of the Italian American Sports Hall of Fame, moved his collection to Taylor Street in 2000 after a 23-year suburban sojourn. It's a beauty, filled with memorabilia (championship belts owned by Rocky Marciano and Rocky Graziano, Alan Ameche's Heisman Trophy, baseball and football uniforms, Olympic medals and more). "One of the reasons we came here was to be an anchor in the community, to keep the heritage of Taylor Street," he says. "I think we've done that."

A Joe DiMaggio statue has its own piazza facing the museum, just up the block from Conte Di Savoia, which provides the deli basics.

And, yes, there are the restaurants.

A newer generation of Italian restaurants -- Tuscany, RoSal's, The Rosebud (the first of what would become a Chicagoland empire), Francesca's on Taylor and others, all post-1970s -- has joined such old-timers as Pompei (founded in 1909 as a simple pizzeria) and Tufano's Vernon Park Tap, which began as a bakery in 1930 and even 40 years ago was still basically a neighborhood bar with a few tables in the back.

Al's No. 1 Italian Beef is always rated among the city's best spots for that Chicago original, while across Taylor Street, the venerable Mario's Italian Lemonade, open only in the warmer months, continues to provide the perfect antidote for garlic-overload.

That Taylor Street now has an Irish pub and Japanese, Thai, Indian and Mexican restaurants -- and one restaurant, Chez Joel, that's French with a hint of Morocco -- doesn't matter. Diversity happens in Chicago, especially when there's a major university in play.

Today, UIC boasts 25,000 students, sports teams that compete at the highest intercollegiate level and the nation's largest medical school.

It also has a firm commitment to addressing the realities of city life, fitting for a school that has, on its campus, the original Hull House, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams in1889 that, for decades, served waves on immigrants (including Italians) through language and vocational classes as well as providing day-to-day help. The house is a museum now, open to the public; at other Hull House locations in the city the work goes on.

The university brought with it large-scale residential and economic redevelopment. Little Italy was most affected, but it wasn't alone. A notable casualty was the original Maxwell Street Market, south of Roosevelt Road, born in the early 1900s as a push-cart and discount-retail district, birthplace of Vienna Hot Dogs, that continued to function even as the demographics changed and the buildings deteriorated.

"Blues Brothers" fans will remember Aretha Franklin singing "Think" in Nate's Deli on Maxwell Street. It's gone. Really, it's all gone. Some facades were preserved, the fully gentrified district has some statues and markers, and Jim's Original sandwich stand (hot dogs and pork chop sandwiches since 1939) was relocated a block east of its Halsted-Maxwell moorings. But.

(A "Maxwell Street Market" continues as a Sunday flea market on Desplaines Street near Roosevelt Road, a few blocks from the original.)

So Maxwell Street, the original one, is history. But Little Italy, like Greektown (Greek, of course) to its north, hangs on.

For all that: Grazie.

For more information about Little Italy/UIC, please contact the University Village Association at 312.243.3773.