Taste of Greektown ran August 28 to 30 on Halsted between 300 and 315 South, free, with Mediterranean food, live music and dancing. Greektown is now roughly four blocks of restaurants and almost no Greek residential population, which makes this festival the most load-bearing thing left.

What Happened to the Neighbourhood

The short version is a highway and a university. Greektown was a substantial immigrant neighbourhood on the Near West Side, and mid-century urban renewal took most of it — expressway construction and the University of Illinois Chicago campus consumed the residential blocks, leaving a commercial remnant along Halsted.

What survived is the restaurant strip. The people who lived above and behind those restaurants dispersed, largely to the suburbs, and the neighbourhood became a destination rather than a home. The buildings that remain are mostly businesses serving visitors.

So a festival on those four blocks is not a neighbourhood celebrating itself. It is a commercial district maintaining a cultural claim on behalf of a community that no longer lives there, and the honest version of the story says so.

The Comparison Set

This is the sharpest example of a pattern running right through the Chicago summer. Andersonville turned sixty with a Swedish midsummer festival on a strip that is now among the city’s queerest and most Middle Eastern. Lincoln Square runs three German events a year on a commercial German identity. The Gold Coast Art Fair is sixty-eight years past the Gold Coast.

Against those, the counter-examples are instructive. Chinatown’s Summer Fair is thrown by a community that is still there and growing. The Puerto Rican Fest on Paseo Boricua happens between two steel flags a community erected specifically to hold its ground, and its population has fallen but not vanished.

Greektown sits at the far end of that spectrum: the festival is essentially all that is left of the claim, and it is a good festival.

That is not nothing. Four blocks of restaurants that have kept a cuisine, a set of recipes and a reason for the name to persist, plus one free weekend a year when the street behaves like a neighbourhood, is a real inheritance even if the census does not support it.

Free food and dancing on Halsted, thrown by restaurants for a neighbourhood that an expressway removed. The wall is still standing, and it is the only one.

Cover image: Idawriter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)