BossLurker on Nostr: CHICAGO (AP) Henry Machocki says you couldn't pay him to stay in the Polish ...
CHICAGO (AP)
Henry Machocki says you couldn't pay him to stay in the Polish neighborhood where he grew up. Machocki, 28 and just out of the service, was offered a five room apartment for only $50 a month by an immigrant landlord in a near Northwest Side neighborhood, one that used to be called Chicago's Warsaw by the Poles who settled there. "How could I pass it up?" says Machocki, one of eight children of immigrant parents. "I didn't want to live there. The neighborhood was dying." Instead, he moved farther north, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan beaches where his new bride found a job as a bank-teller while he studied for a master's degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology. By itself, Machocki's decision means little. But in Chicago, New York and other large cities, it is a decision being made more and more often. And that, in simple terms, is why the urban white ethnic neighborhood - part of what President Ford recently called the nation's "ethnic treasure" and presidential aspirant Jimmy Carter called "ethnic purity”- is losing more and more of its character. Next to New York, Chicago is perhaps the nation's biggest “ethnic kettle” and academicians, sociologists and influential leaders in the city generally agree that the time of the traditional, white, European ethnic neighborhood is passing.
Immigration from Europe has slowed to a trickle. Children, when grown, have generally "moved up" and onward. One expert, Msgr. Geno Baroni, president of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Studies, says that unless an energetic national neighborhood policy is pursued, the neighborhoods will die and the nation will "face a new era of American apartheid - cities that are black, brown and broke and ringed by hostile and isolated suburbs.”
Henry Machocki says you couldn't pay him to stay in the Polish neighborhood where he grew up. Machocki, 28 and just out of the service, was offered a five room apartment for only $50 a month by an immigrant landlord in a near Northwest Side neighborhood, one that used to be called Chicago's Warsaw by the Poles who settled there. "How could I pass it up?" says Machocki, one of eight children of immigrant parents. "I didn't want to live there. The neighborhood was dying." Instead, he moved farther north, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan beaches where his new bride found a job as a bank-teller while he studied for a master's degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology. By itself, Machocki's decision means little. But in Chicago, New York and other large cities, it is a decision being made more and more often. And that, in simple terms, is why the urban white ethnic neighborhood - part of what President Ford recently called the nation's "ethnic treasure" and presidential aspirant Jimmy Carter called "ethnic purity”- is losing more and more of its character. Next to New York, Chicago is perhaps the nation's biggest “ethnic kettle” and academicians, sociologists and influential leaders in the city generally agree that the time of the traditional, white, European ethnic neighborhood is passing.
Immigration from Europe has slowed to a trickle. Children, when grown, have generally "moved up" and onward. One expert, Msgr. Geno Baroni, president of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Studies, says that unless an energetic national neighborhood policy is pursued, the neighborhoods will die and the nation will "face a new era of American apartheid - cities that are black, brown and broke and ringed by hostile and isolated suburbs.”