Lake View: Published Views

Historical Perspectives 

This post reflects on how old Lake View has been documented by the writers/authors since 1974-2017

 particularly in the northside of Chicago when township of Lake View (1857-1887), the City of Lake View (1887-1889)  was well known for a vegetable nationwide called a celery and while it grew from a township, city, district, and neighborhood of Chicago. 
I begin with WBEZ's Curious City followed by 'The Lake View Saga' that was first published in 1974 & 1985. After that, the 'Hidden History of Ravenswood & Lake View' published in 2013. The next two perspectives are 'Lake View' published in 2014 & finally 'East Lake View' in 2017. The last book is from the township days about ordinances of that day - 1879.
The photos I posted are from various other primarily the Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection sources. 
The black & white photos of that collection are from 
historical association that I belong since 2013.

I needed to add some additional text [ ] for historical clarity. 

Curious City

City Of Big Agriculture: Here Are The Crops Chicago Was Once Famous For

by Monica Eng

August 20, 2017 

photo download with edit - Etsy

In the decades following the city’s founding in 1833, Chicagoans drained swamps, and once they had gained metal-blade plows they worked the rich soil that lurked below a vast prairie. This farming continued for many decades, sometimes in land smooshed between roads and commuter rail lines. The city’s emergence as an agricultural center occurred at the same time the city was industrializing and, in fact, for some of the very same reasons.

“If you think of it, all those things that made us this trading town, they also made us a very good place to export,” says Daniel Block, Chicago State University geographer and author of Chicago: A Food Biography. Specifically, these things included great railway access, abundant immigrant labor, central trading markets and processing facilities. Plus, Chicago had awesome soil and plenty of manure.

If you’re inclined to think of 19th-century Chicago as a railway-tangled, smoke-belching industrial behemoth, here’s more about how it was also the first city of flowers, a pickle powerhouse and the heart of American celery- pun definitely intended.

Celery: Miracle food meets Lake Michigan

image - Lycheerose via Zazzle

The city’s remaining link to its once-vast celery industry may be the celery salt finish on Chicago-style hot dogs. But 150 years ago the city was at the heart of a celery craze that had spread across the United States. 

“Celery was huge, kind of like kale today,” says food historian Bruce Kraig. “It was this big 19th-century food fad because people thought it had miraculous health properties. I think it’s because it was so fibrous and you had to chew it so long.”

Folks ate celery at restaurants, used special crystal celery vases and consumed celery pills and tonics like Paine’s Celery Compound advertised as “a positive cure for dyspepsia, biliousness, liver complaint, neuralgia, rheumatism, and kidney troubles.”

both images - Esty

So, Chicago — with its celery-friendly sandy soil, abundant fresh water and national rail transportation — was a perfect spot to grow and export the vegetable to an often dyspeptic nation. Plus, celery could be harvested as late as January

during a mild winter, so long as it was packed in sand or soil.

image - Esty

Hundreds of Chicago immigrant farmers grew the vegetable on what became the city’s North Side. According to 19th century Chicago horticulturist Edgar Sanders, Lakeview Township soil was “black,” “boggy” and “plentiful mixed with sand.” He added: “There is no land which can compete with such as this for celery culture.” By the end of the century [and after the annexation of the City of Lake View by the City of Chicago], though, other lands stole Chicago’s celery crown. Kalamazoo, Michigan, had cheaper land, as did California, which had also had an advantage of a year-round growing season. [Still] farmers in what became the Edgewater neighborhood [once part of Lake View Township] grew celery well into the 20th century. 
In an essay for the Edgewater Historical Society, Carl Helbig recalls that his father grew it in manure-filled hotbeds over “black and sandy” soil as late as the 1930's. But he admits the crop was already well on the way out. “I venture to say that my father was the last one to grow celery in that large a volume in Edgewater,” he wrote.

Pickles: Agriculture Meets Industry

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

The community of Bowmanville once part of

 Lake View Township/City

In the late 1880s, Chicago was home to no fewer than three nationally famous pickle brands: Budlong, Squire Dingee and Claussen. These operations thrived in Chicago for several reasons: European pickle know-how; a robust local salt processing industry; rail and other transportation options; and — early on, at least - productive pickle farms. In 1903, the Chicago Tribune reported that there were “12,000 bushels of onions & cucumbers picked and sacked in a day” during the busy season on North Side farms that stretched from Bowmanville (Foster & Western area) to Evanston.

The Budlongs

 photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

Lyman Budlong [with the support of his wife] became an industry leader shortly after he arrived in Chicago. In 1859 he established a pickling business near Foster and Lincoln avenues in the middle of his Budlong Pickle Farm, which, by some accounts, stretched across 700 acres. 

The Budlong Farms

photos - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

By the turn of the century, though, a pickle blight forced pickle-makers to import cukes from outlying farms. Still, according to Eleanor Atkinson’s 1912 'The Story of Chicago and National Development', Budlong’s farm kept growing other crops [and then later flowers]. 

The Greenhouses of the Budlong Farm

 photos - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

“The farm is occupied profitably with raising every kind of garden truck [vegetable] which can be persuaded to grow, most of it going to city tables, but some shipped to distant points in the U.S. and Canada. This farm gives employment to about 2,000 hands in the busy season and affords healthful and remunerative employment to those who toil in the city during the winter and can get out to the pickle farm for air and ready money when the work is slack in town and the city is stifling with dust and heat in its crowded quarters.”

But such a large farm couldn’t last forever in the expanding city. By the 1920s the Budlong Farm had become a golf course and was later subdivided into a residential area called Budlong Woods. Squire Dingee also moved its operations out of Bowmanville to Lincoln Park and eventually merged with Beatrice Foods.

Vegetables for any season: Chicago’s climate meets European Innovation

Even though Chicago had the fertile soil and infrastructure needed for farming, the city lacked year-round warmth. So local truck farmers (those who “trucked” produce to Chicago’s central markets) turned to greenhouses to supply lettuce, tomatoes, peas and other veggies in the off season. It was a popular European technology that could be fueled cheaply by Chicago’s abundant coal supply.

“Illinois ranked first among other states in area covered by glasshouses [or greenhouses]. [These enterprises were scattered throughout the old Lake View well into the turn the first quarter of the 20th century.]

The Albert Fuch Greenhouses

 The Wittbold & Company

images - 1894 Sanborn Fire Maps

 A large percentage of these in neighborhoods of Chicago, and several firms have each over a million square feet of glass,” Cathy Jean Maloney writes in her book Chicago Gardens. In 1870 the John C. Moninger Co. was founded in Chicago and would become one of the nation’s biggest greenhouse manufacturers. Immigrants from Luxembourg ran many of the greenhouses on Chicago’s north Side and its northern suburbs. Thousands of Luxembourgers settled around Ridge and Devon Avenues, where the ground was higher and good for planting outdoors as well. In the Encyclopedia of Chicago, author Kathleen Neils Conzen writes that there were “Perhaps a hundred greenhouse clusters stretched from Rogers Park northwest through West Ridge, Niles Center, and Des Plaines, most in Luxembourg hands by 1919 when their growers' association numbered some 1,200 families.”

Jim Leider of Leider Horticulture is a third-generation Chicago grower. But he says his tropical plant business today is different from his Luxembourgish grandfather’s turn-of-the-century truck farm with a greenhouse in Rogers Park.

“My grandfather tells a story that he had to get up early, early in the morning to take his produce down to South Water Market,” Leider says. “He’d load it up on the horse and buggy, sell it there, and come back home. He said that he was so tired by the time he was going back to Rogers Park that he would fall asleep, but the horse knew the way home.”

Chicago’s greenhouse culture wouldn’t last forever. Once refrigerated trains could efficiently import cheaper produce from across the country, there was less need to grow off-season produce locally.

“Plus, the cost to heat them in the winter was getting prohibitive,” Leider says, “and rising real estate values in the city made it more attractive for people to just sell them.”

Flowers: Infrastructure and technology 

allow Chicago to bloom

Like a lot of Chicago’s flower growers, Joseph Budlong (the brother of pickle-maker Lyman Budlong) started his Bowmanville greenhouses to grow vegetables, but when their profitability declined, he transitioned to flowers exclusively by 1880 with the Budlong Nursery around Lincoln and Foster Avenues. A 1907 description in American Florist magazine estimated that the Budlong Nursery housed 30,000 grafted rose plants (mostly American Beauty and Richmond) in its dozens of glass houses. It may be hard to believe, but for several decades Chicago was the nation’s flower capital.

 photos - Italian Court Flowers

[As a side note,] one of the earliest citizens to grow commercial flowers, especially roses, was Dr. John A Kennicott - [Kennicott Brothers Company]. In 1837, he settled in what is now the village of Glenview - specifically a National Historic Landmark called 'The Grove'. In 1881 his descendants built a wholesale business that served flower farms across the city and suburbs. Great-great-grandson Harrison “Red” Kennicott says Chicago was the nation’s floral capital for some familiar reasons. “For one, Chicago was a railroad hub and that was the main means of getting flowers to other localities,” he says. “There was also a very inexpensive local source of coal to fuel the greenhouses. And there was also a plentiful supply of labor to work in the greenhouses.” In the early part of the 20th century flower greenhouses covered swaths of the North Side and northern suburbs. And there, Kennicott says, growers produced hundreds of thousands of roses and carnations that would find their way to tables, weddings & graves all over the country. [Kennicott Brothers is still a wholesaler who sells to retailers like my dear friend who owns Italian Court Flowers.]

But by the 1950's, affordable and reliable air shipping shifted the center of flower production to California and later South America. Perhaps the oldest legacy of Chicago’s floral past can be seen in the annual Chicago Flower and Garden show, which started in 1847 as the Chicago Horticultural Society’s “Exhibition of Fruits and Flowers.” 

Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association Account

Lyman A. Budlong was a Rhode Island native who moved to Chicago in 1857 & founded the mammoth Budlong Pickle Company and Budlong Nursery in the 1860's. The nursery, located near West Foster Avenue (5200 north) & California Avenue (2800 west), sat on more than 10 acres of land & at the turn of the century produced 100,000 bushels of pickles, 100,000 bushels of onions, & 50,000 bushels of assorted garden vegetables. The nursery, known as the "village of glass" was composed of 18-20 greenhouses filled with roses, carnations, & chrysanthemums. Budlong's bounty was known nationwide. The elementary school at 2701 West Foster Avenue, on the former grounds of the business, is named after him, as is the local neighborhood, Budlong Woods.

Other Accounts of Lake View

BOOK ONE

book cover - part of my personal collection

The Journey West

Early Chicago

 The Lake View's Pioneer

BOOK TWO

book cover - part of my personal collection

This edition was the last of its series

Dr. Conrad Sulzer
photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

The Township of Lake View 1887
later that same year the City of Lake View

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
The first of many cemeteries established 
after the closure of Chicago Cemetery/Lincoln Park, the park

BOOK THREE

book cover - part of my personal collection 

that was published in 2013

Ekstrom & Walden's Bakery

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

3709 North Clark Street, near Waveland Avenue, interior view of bakery owned by Swan G. Ekstrom of 3233 North Halsted Street and Karl Walden. Six men pose in the bakery workroom. Sign on window reads

 "Ekstrom & Walden Swedish Health Bread."

 A calendar from September 1914 hangs on the wall. 

BOOK FOUR

book cover - part of my personal collection

that was published in 2014

A photo book of Experiences ...

image - Discover Nisei

The commercial district of Lake View - intersection of Belmont-Lincoln-Ashland in 1917
photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
a German-American gathering place on Paulina

BOOK FIVE

book cover - part of my personal collection
that was published in 2017

This is part of a continuous series of books by this author

I am mentioned in the acknowledgments!

 An Account of eastern part of Lake View

1960 photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

1899 photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
When this segment of original roadway along the shore was renamed Sheridan Road/by Grace Street

When the Cubs were indeed comical

 both images - part of my personal collection
published in 1988 when the lights came on in Wrigley Field

Still words to live by

Post Notes

Continue to read my topical blog about the sights & scenes of the neighborhood I call home.

Important Note:

These posts are exclusively used for educational purposes. I do not wish to gain monetary profit from this blog nor should anyone else without permission for the original source - thanks!