by Hank Morris Patrick Leonard Touhy (1839-1911) was born in Freakle, Ireland. He eventually immigrated to New York where he worked in the carpet business. In 1864, he moved to Chicago and opened a grocery store. One year after he opened his grocery (1865) he married Catherine Rogers, daughter of the late Philip McGregor Rogers. […]
by Hank Morris Philip McGregor Rogers (August 15, 1812 – December 13, 1856) once owned all the land in an area bounded by Lake Michigan, Birchwood Terrace (now Juneway Terrace), Ridge Boulevard, and Devon Avenue. He lived with his family in a house on the northwest corner of what is now known as Rogers Avenue […]
by Hank Morris The first Rogers Park Library was a private one established in 1874 in the Old Doland block on Clark Street. It was opened by the Rogers Park Woman’s Club, who worked as librarians and books were donated until 1917. In 1905, the Chicago Public Library took over the Rogers Park collection and […]
Named after Civil War General Philip Henry Sheridan (March 6, 1831 – August 5, 1888), who took charge of restoring law and order after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, this thoroughfare offers a peek-a-boo view of Lake Michigan as you pass each east-west street. Just east of Sheridan Road, the “street-end” beaches offer residents […]
by Hank Morris The history of West Ridge is so intertwined with that of Rogers Park that, at times, the two seem inseparable. When Rogers Park was incorporated in 1878, it extended west to the larger of two geological ridges running fairly parallel with the shore line of Lake Michigan. The smaller ridge is known […]
by Hank Morris Like many diagonal streets that interrupt the grid patterned streets of Chicago, Rogers Avenue comes from a past far earlier than the surveyors who laid out Chicago’s streets. An ancient Indian trail, the passageway we now know as Rogers Avenue holds a special historic significance. On August 24, 1816, the Treaty of […]
by Hank Morris Howard Street was the northern city limits for Chicago, east from the shores of Lake Michigan, all the way west. That changed on Monday, February 8, 1915, when a tiny panhandle was added to Chicago’s northern border when the city annexed the area known as “Germania” (so called because of its association […]
As late as the 1870s, the area now known as Birchwood Beach, along Lake Michigan from Touhy Avenue to Birchwood Avenue, had no paved streets and was a sandbank filled with birch and oak trees. Samuel B. Chase, a developer of Rogers Park, named the area after his farm in the Lake View section of […]
The small, almost indiscernible, point of land that juts into Lake Michigan on the southeast border of Rogers Park is not particularly remarkable from a topographical perspective. This area was once called Cape Hayes and its official boundaries were the lake on the east, Devon Avenue on the south, Sheridan Road on the West and […]
Chicago is famous as a city built on a grid of streets, each laid out one-eighth of a mile apart from the other, many of them stretching for miles through the city, out into the flat Midwestern horizon. Some Chicago streets do not fit into that grid, however. Ridge Boulevard is one such street. How […]