![]() ![]() We moved to Chicago because I was hired to teach at the university in Evanston, which is within walking distance of Rogers Park. Women push baby carriages here, little boys eat bags of potato chips in front of the markets, and men smoke outside the train station while the trains rattle the air. There is an open Jamaican restaurant, a Caribbean-American bakery, a liquor store, a shoe store, and several little grocery markets. ![]() There are a dozen empty storefronts on the avenue between the lake and the train station – a closed Chinese restaurant, a closed dry cleaners, a closed thrift shop, a closed hot-dog place. Seven blocks to the east of the train station is the shore of Lake Michigan, which rolls and crashes past the horizon, reminding us, with its winds and spray, that we are on the edge of something vast. The Chicago trains end here, and the tracks turn back in a giant loop around the gravel yard, where idle trains are docked. This neighbourhood is now called Rogers Park, and the city blocks of Chicago, all paved and lit, run directly into the city blocks of Evanston, with only a cemetery to mark the boundary between the two municipalities. At the turn of the century, this was the sparsely populated place between the cities of Chicago and Evanston, a place where the streets were unpaved and unlit. S hortly after we married, my husband and I moved to a part of Chicago that was once known as No Man’s Land. ![]()
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