Forgotten Chicago

[launderess]

Found this website showing some of the once great manufacturing that was centered in Chicago. Much lies either abandoned and in ruins now, and or was demolished.

http://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2016/01/western-electrics-hawthorne-works.html

About Cicero, Illinois:

https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-blo...ent/7c0835b2-1c65-4747-8f33-a36d35224948[this post was last edited: 12/11/2016-23:48]

 

[philr]

Thanks for sharing these links Launderess. My grandfather worked for Northern Electric and he had interest in the company's history and in Western Electric too.

 

[rp2813]

Though my father, his sister and four brothers were born in Chicago, they grew up in Berwyn, in a similar neighborhood to the "one flat" street pictured in the link.

 

The extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins in the area all worked at Western Electric at one time or another.  I'm sure it helped get them through the Great Depression.

 

My uncle delivered laundry to one of the Capone households in Cicero, and when my dad, the most self-sufficient of the bunch, was +/- 21, he consumed mass quantities of bootleg hooch and helped get it to speakeasies during prohibition.  They both used to tell some great stories.

 

I also learned long ago that you're never in Cicero.  The proper term is by Cicero.  I don't know if that's a mob thing or a Czech/Bohemian thing.

 

[launderess]

Pop, Six, Squish, Uh uh, Cicero, Lipschitz

*LOL*

 

[vacerator]

Cicero today

is a melting pot of several ethnicities. Latino, Polish, Chaldean, etc. Chicago has 87 ethnic neighborhoods.
Admiral was in Chicago, Zenith, Borg warner, etc., etc.

 

[whirlykenmore78]

Thanks Launderess:

Those were very interesting articles.
WK78

 

[davey7]

Just drove by there, huge empty lots... Had the building hung on a few years it would have been ripe for loftversion. Wait, I think I'm thinking of something actually in Chicago.

Forgotten Chicago has some interesting programs for those in the area.

 

[firedome]

The breakup of AT&T...

and spinoff of WE was among the greatest travesties in American industrial history,
a mistake of titanic proportion, imho. Western Electric and Bell Labs was one of the greatest concentrations of innovators in the history of the world, now completely scattered to the winds.
What a shame.

 

[rp2813]

Roger,

 

Truer words have never been <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">spoken</span> typed.

 

[polkanut]

Here's a link to another site featuring lost Chicago manufacturing, and also other long lost sites and experiences from the Windy City area.

http://www.craigslostchicago.com/lost-mfg.php

 

[rp2813]

I remember the Curtiss candy factory along the Chicago River, and how the aroma of Butterfingers wafted over the surrounding area.

 

I didn't know that Frango Mints weren't still being made in the original (even if no longer Field's) kitchens.  I'm glad they've survived regardless.  So light, yet buttery!