Last Saturday, I wanted to get as far away from the Air and Water Show as I possibly could. On the loudest weekend of the year, I wanted to go to the quietest neighborhood I could find. So I went to Edison Park.
Edison Park is to Chicago what the Northwest Territories are to Canada: a province so remote that when its inhabitants go downtown, they declare, “I’m going to the city.” A chimney-shaped neighborhood protruding from the top of Chicago, Edison Park is a salient into suburbia, hemmed in between Park Ridge on the west and Niles on the east. Edison Park was once a suburb itself, but joined the city in 1910 to take advantage of the Chicago Public Schools: It was easier for students to take a train to Schurz than ride a horse to Maine West.
Way out Northwest, 15 miles from the Loop, Edison Park still feels like suburbia. Its main link to the rest of the city is a UP-NW Metra stop, from which one can see the hazy shapes of downtown skyscrapers. The three-story apartment blocks are embellished with those stone accents that looked so mod in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s also the whitest neighborhood in the city: 82.5 percent, mostly Irish and Italian, mostly cops and firefighters. If a traveler didn’t have Google Maps, he might think he’d followed the Northwest Highway — Edison Park’s main drag — all the way to Des Plaines.
Edison Park wasn’t as quiet as I’d hoped: It’s in the O’Hare flight path, so a commercial jet scrapes through the sky every 20 minutes or so. Still, not as loud as a Navy F-35. It’s also home to one of the loudest little businesses in Chicago: Metal Edge Records, the retail fantasy/man cave of Paul Giamarusti, the Gen X owner who dons a Replacements t-shirt on Saturday afternoons to sell vinyl by Led Zeppelin, Randy Rhoads, UFO, Twisted Sister, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy, Dio. Kids listened to those bands 40 years ago, and kids today wear their t-shirts.
Metal Edge Records is the contemporary version of Championship Vinyl, a quarter-century after High Fidelity. Could Rob Gordon afford a storefront in Wicker Park today? Probably not. He could afford Edison Park, though. Metal Edge is jammed between Snappy Dog and Emerald Isle, which sells “Edison Park Irish” t-shirts. Giamarusti had to nail a wooden board above the counter to keep out raccoons. Last winter, he hauled in a space heater because his heat was off.
“Bubble gum, shoestring, and Band Aids is how we keep it together,” he said. “We had a band play out back last week during Edison Park Fest. They wanted $250 to get on their list. I don’t have $250. I just want to change the world through music. We had a young girl come in with her guitar. I said to the singer of the band, ‘Hey, Captain Kirk, you want to play with her?’ It may have changed her trajectory.”
Edison Park’s oldest landmark isn’t actually in Edison Park. It’s a Dairy Queen, built in 1958, just across Ozanam Avenue in Park Ridge. Who can really tell the difference between city and suburb here, though? A hand painted menu above the door advertises HAMBURGERS, HOT DOGS, FRIES, FISH-WICH, all still on the menu, 65 years later. The old fashioned motto is “Home of the cone with the curl on top.” I got mine dipped in butterscotch.
All the streets in Edison Park begin with O, since O is the 15th letter of the alphabet, and Edison Park is 15 miles from the city limits: Oliphant, Onarga, Oxford, Oketo, Oleander, Osceola. On the 7100 block of North Oriole Avenue, the neighbors were throwing a summer block party. It was a portrait of both Americana and Chicagoana. A bouncy castle for the children. A cornhole target painted with the emblem of the Chicago Police Department. American flags and Back the Blue flags fluttering on the porches of bungalows. Yard signs declaring “Proud Union Home” and “Notre Dame College Prep,” a Catholic high school in Niles. Country music. The woman in charge of the block party was Dana C., a young mother who wouldn’t give her last name because “my husband’s a detective.”
“Is it Italian?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Cusumano?”
“Close.”
Dana and her husband are “transplants.” They moved to Edison Park from Garfield Ridge because “the school system is very good here and it’s very family oriented. It’s very generational. A lot of city workers. Kids grow up here and stay here.”
Like Brian R., a firefighter sitting in the shade of the tent, sipping a beer.
“His parents live four blocks from his house,” Dana C. said.
“My dad’s a firefighter, too,” said Brian R.
For an out-there neighborhood, Edison Park has a restaurant row to rival Lincoln Park or River North. Nonni Pino’s for Italian food, Firewater for barbecue, Moretti’s for pizza, Tavern on the Point for rooftop dining. All with valet parking. For years, residents say, Park Ridge and Norwood Park were both dry, so Edison Park had to satisfy the thirst and the appetites of both communities. I tried to stop in at Tony’s Italian Deli & Subs, which has been in business 45 years — so long it has an honorary street sign — but they were closing early on Saturday. A big man in an apron appeared. His name was Vito. He was from Sicily.
“I wish you come earlier,” he told me. “I would make you a meatball sandwich.”
Vito also makes a muffuletta sub, with olive salad, salami, capicola, mortadella, and mozzarella, and a Mike North’s Pappy sub, after the sports talk radio loudmouth who lives nearby, in Park Ridge. Besides olive oil, pasta, and bread, his store sells t-shirts with such slogans as “Don’t Forget the Cannoli,” to counter the overwhelming local Irish pride.
“Our neighborhood is all Irish, and we turned ’em all Italian with our food,” boasted Vito’s wife, Maria.
Since I was too late to get a meatball sandwich from Vito, I went around the corner to the Edison Park Inn, across the street from the train station. I drank a beer, then went upstairs, to the eight-lane bowling alley, even though a sign said it was closed for a private party: the firefighters of Battalion 18 would be bowling.
“There aren’t many upstairs bowling alleys left,” said the manager, Dennis G. “There were a few in the city, but they burned down. “We were here long before they got liquor.”
On his phone, Dennis G. showed me a photo of the Old Edison Park Inn, with a Schlitz sign out front. I asked Dennis what the rest of Chicago thought of Edison Park, or whether the rest of Chicago thought of Edison Park at all.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of people downtown saying, ‘Let’s go to Edison Park,'” he said. “We get a lot of people on the train. People used to meet here to go to Arlington Park. Hopefully, in a few years, they’ll tailgate here and go to the Bears game.”
Jonathan R., the bar back, was standing in the doorway of the bowling alley, near the “Shoe Rental $2, Bowling $4” sign, waiting to turn on the lights. Edison Park, he observed, was a sibling to the city’s other corner neighborhoods, Hegewisch and Mount Greenwood.
“I was in Hegewisch a week ago, and it was very similar,” Jonathan R. said. “This is a place stuck in time. If you go downstairs, look at the restaurant. It feels like the ’60s. This neighborhood, it feels like one of those old school American movies. In a way, that’s what makes it unique. You don’t see places like this too much anymore.”
