From Walter Santi: Taylor St. is Chicago's old, old "Little Italy" or what is left of it after the University of Illinois gobbled up most of it.

That which remains is becoming a tourist attraction, and homes that one would not touch with a ten foot pole are becoming renovated and pricey, because of their proximity to downtown Chicago. And everybody now wants to live in Little Italy regardless of their background, and many businesses that "grandpas" started are alive and well.

Chicago Sun-Times
By Tom McNamee
June 21, 2004

The teenagers and the dad sit on somebody's front stoop, up the block from Mario's Italian Lemonade stand on Taylor Street.

The teenagers are watching two cops talk to a biker wearing a T-shirt that says "Sick Boy." The teenagers can't tell whether the cops are hassling Sick Boy or admiring his Harley.

The dad says "probably both," but he's not paying much attention. Any minute now, he's thinking, some old lady is going to push open a window and yell at them in Italian to get off the stoop.

Would this be so bad? Not at all. The dad thinks this might be kind of great.

When the dad was a kid growing up on the Southwest Side, people were always telling him to get off the grass or get off the steps or get off the car. Telling kids to get off stuff is a charming urban tradition, like following them around in stores.

If an old lady chased him off the stoop now, the dad thinks, he might feel like a kid again and, better yet, Taylor Street might feel like Taylor Street again.

"Do you eat the lemon peal?" the younger teen asks, picking with a plastic spoon at his Italian ice.

He is only 14 and has never encountered a chocolate slush with lemon in it. But all ices from Mario's include lemon, no matter what the flavor. Mario is smart that way.

"Only if you want to," the dad says.

It is a summer evening turning into a summer night and somewhere up there, above the street lights, there must be stars, like in the country. But the dad says, "Feel the rain?"

He thinks he can see clouds rushing in from the west -- over Berwyn and Austin and the boarded-up ABLA homes and right down Taylor Street. On a muggy night like this, he thinks he can hold the very air in his hands.

Taylor Street is getting busy. Restaurants are filling up. The parking lot at Al's #1 Italian Beef looks like a tailgate party. A small crowd, diverse enough for a jury, jams up against Mario's lemonade stand. Students from the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago stand next to truck drivers who stand next to lawyers.

Cars double park and the cops have to tear themselves from Sick Boy.

"I can move as soon as my wife gets the lemonade," a man in a van tells one cop.

"You can move now," the cop says.In the early 1970s, the dad was a commuter student at UIC, then called "Circle."

"Isn't it sad that I never walked around here?" the dad says now. "I thought if I took a step off campus, I'd get mugged."

"That is sad," says the older teenager, who is 18 and going to UIC herself this fall.

But Taylor Street was different then, the dad explains. The neighborhood seemed a little angry, a little shell-shocked, and it probably was.

Most of Little Italy, as the neighborhood was called, had been bulldozed into oblivion just a few years earlier to make way for the university, and nobody who survived exactly adored the college punks who started coming around.

When one college kid kept parking his car illegally in an empty lot next to an Italian-American social club, a member of the club finally grabbed a trowel and built a brick wall around the car.

The dad and the teenagers get up from the stoop and wander down the sidewalk. They walk by a dozen reminders that Taylor Street is no longer the intensely Italian village it used to be, including a Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant and a sushi bar.

They read the names on the mailboxes: Bertucci and Ragozzino are hanging in there, but now their neighbors are Ahmed, Cruz and Farley.

The dad and the teenagers turn up a side street and walk a couple of blocks to another Italian ice stand, Carm's. This is good: time for a taste test.

They order the same flavors they had at Mario's: Lemon again for the dad, chocolate and pina colada for the son and daughter.

"Hmmm," says the daughter, "the chocolate tastes like Haagen Dazs."

Carm's beats Mario's.

"But the pina colada's just sugar," she adds.

Mario's beats Carm's.

"I can't find any fruit in the lemon one," says the dad.

Mario's wins the tie-breaker.Mario's stands right on busy Taylor Street, which makes a visit seem like a party. Carm's is tucked away on a side street, across the street from a sandwich shop.

The dad and the teenagers sit at a green plastic table outside Carm's and eavesdrop on the five or six old people at the next table.

They're talking about somebody's wedding and laughing easily.

A counter guy at Carm's steps outside and sits with the dad and the teenagers, uninvited but more than welcomed.

"You like the ice?" he asks.

Absolutely.

"Yeah, that's because nobody touches the machines but me," he says.

The dad asks the counter guy if Taylor Street is still Italian.

A woman at the other table hears the question and answers first: "Half and half."

And this is good or bad?

The woman shrugs. The counterman shrugs.

"Depends," he says.

A little African American girl walks out of Carm's and immediately drops her Italian ice on the sidewalk. She's going to cry. Somebody stop her. A second counterman says, "get another one, honey," and takes her hand and leads her back inside.

The dad just loves this -- the whole thing. Maybe he can write about it for the paper.

He loves Italian ice and Taylor Street at night and the way old people sound when they laugh in the dark. He loves how it's all so temporary, how Taylor Street is changing and a storm is coming and the children he adores are growing up and leaving home.

But he doesn't say that. He can't say that.

He says, "You guys getting tired of this? You ready to go home?"

The daughter and the son shake their heads.

"This is nice," says the daughter.

Italian ice on Taylor Street, the way it used to be
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