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I was born in the Avalon Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1965. During that time, the neighborhood was beginning to change.
The neighborhood was first populated by Germans and Swedes in the 1880s. And for the next 80 years, it was predominantly white. But African-Americans began moving in the neighborhood in the early to mid-1960s. Chicago, one of the nation's most segregated cities, was experiencing white flight throughout the city, a phenomenon which was encouraged by unscrupulous real estate agents who engaged in panic peddling among white families. This happened in Avalon Park as well, which was well-documented by this 1963 article in a real estate journal, "How Marynook Meets the Negro", which looked at how a relatively new community in Avalon Park called "Marynook" addressed integration.
Despite the best intentions of many, white families in Avalon Park were almost non-existent by 1980. But the neighborhood is still a middle class community, with 65 percent of its African-American residents employed in white collar jobs, a much higher number than when the neighborhood was all white.
The neighborhood also maintains some of its wonderful landmark attractions, from the beautiful Avalon-Regal Theatre, designed by noted theater architect John Eberson in 1927; to the imposing Chicago Vocational High School, a mammoth institution built in 1940, with a still-extant airplane hangar; and the hundreds of handsome bungalows built in the 1920s.
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