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By Root 227 0

up from Berwyn, a neighboring town, and one of the firemen runs in to pick up lunches for his colleagues back at the firehouse. “I don’t think they’re supposed to bring their trucks over here,” Quercia whispers. Boyle’s cell phone rings. It’s his wife, Nadine. She still worries that if she hasn’t heard from him it means he’s been arrested by the police. “I’m all right,” Boyle assures. “Love ya.” A retired Cicero police officer enters the store, and while he and Boyle don’t exchange greetings, they don’t holler at each other either—which, all things considered, is progress. A few weeks back, they had gotten into it at the town hall. “You’re nothing but a goddamn lawyer,” the retired officer had yelled at Boyle. “At least you didn’t call me a fuckin’ Cicero cop,” Boyle had yelled back.

Boyle recounts this exchange as the retired officer exits. They acknowledge each other with barely perceptible nods. “You know,” Boyle tells me. “I can’t even remember what we were arguing about.”

GT’s Diner

The world intersects at the corner of Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues, on the city’s northwest side.

The names of the commercial establishments read like an intercontinental guidebook. Within a three-block stretch, there is Raul’s Tire Shop and a Supermercado, there is Holy Land Baker and Jerusalem Food and Liquor, there is Jas Hind Grocery, New Seoul Optical, Thai Little Home Café, and Patricia Cowboy’s Fashion. More than half the people in this neighborhood, which is known as Albany Park, were born in a foreign country. This is America’s gateway, the port of entry for newcomers to this country. For small merchandisers, the biggest-selling item is phone calling cards. One establishment sells only calling cards. The local Volta Elementary School offers bilingual classes in Spanish, Gujarati, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Bosnian. Six clocks in the hallway are set to the times in Sarajevo, Lima, Jerusalem, New Delhi, Hanoi, and Chicago. Albany Park, one resident told me, “is the neighborhood for everybody else who doesn’t have a neighborhood.”

For half a century, this community of wood-framed homes, brick bungalows, and three- and four-story tenements was home to mostly Russian and Eastern European Jews. Then in the 1960s, Koreans moved in, and they became such a political force that Lawrence Avenue was given the honorary designation of Seoul Drive. Then immigrants from unraveling nations poured in, refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador, families fleeing the fragile Mexican economy, and then Laotians, Thais, Cambodians, and Filipinos fleeing the political instability of their homelands, and finally refugees from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. By this time, many of Albany Park’s original settlers had moved on. Temple Beth Israel first was converted into a Korean Presbyterian church and is now a Romanian Pentecostal church. Congregation Mount Sinai became, not without irony, the Beirut Restaurant. From Albany Park, it has been suggested, you can watch the world change.

The neighborhood has the feel of a small village, in part because the El runs at street level, like a trolley, making the community quite accessible. But it’s also because virtually everyone here shares a common journey: They have come to Chicago, to America, for a better life. And so an amalgam of ethnic and religious groups mingles in a manner unlike the city’s other more insular neighborhoods. At Thai Little Home Café, for instance, the owner, Oscar Esche, who is seventy-seven and has been in this country and this neighborhood since 1972, doesn’t serve pork since many of his customers are Middle Eastern and Muslim. The Cambodian Association on Lawrence Avenue is building a small memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge, and they are doing so with the financial and moral support of the Jewish community. Jewish leaders—some of whom grew up in Albany Park—have spoken with members of the Cambodian Association about how one moves on after the decimation of one’s people. And at the Albany Park Theater Group, teenagers from places as diverse as Poland and Cambodia come together