Historical Perspectives
image - Esty
photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
The Wittbold & Company
photos - Italian Court Flowers
Early Chicago:
The Lake View's Pioneer:
The Lake View Saga 1837-1985
BOOK TWO
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
photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
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
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
This post reflects on how 'old' Lake View has been documented by the writers/authors since 1974-2017 to be followed by my perspective on the subject in another post.
photo download with edit - Etsy
particularly in the north-side 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. 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 are from a collection by the historical association that I belonged to since 2013. I needed to add some additional text [ ] for narrative clarity.
City Of Big Agriculture: Here Are The Crops Chicago Was Once Famous For
August 20, 2017
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 between roads & commuter rail lines. The city’s emergence as an agricultural center occurred at the same time the city was industrializing.
“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.
“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.
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.
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
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
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.
[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.”
The Ravenswood-Lake View Historical
Association Account
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.
via Edgewater Historical Society
Bruno's Celery Garden
published in 1998
by Carl Helbig
Did you know that Edgewater was once known for its celery farms?
My family never owned one, but we certainly were in the celery-growing business. Mr. Miller lived across the alley from us on Hermitage. He was a retired farmer, but there was nothing to indicate “farmer” in his dress. He always wore a vest and tie. My father, Bruno Helbig, was a bricklayer, but he dressed like a farmer. Some mornings, Mr. Miller would walk through our yard and stop to talk with Bruno in his high, squeaky voice. I don’t know how much my father knew about growing celery before talking to Mr. Miller but, once he got interested, we sure grew a lot of it.
Our backyard was exceptionally large since Clark Street ran on an angle and the Northwestern Railroad ran straight, north and south. There wasn’t room enough for another street so we got a large lot. The soil was black and sandy - ideal for growing celery. But you didn’t just plunk seeds in the garden and expect celery to grow. The plants had to be started in hotbeds to make their growing season long enough. The hotbeds had to be ready for seeding by March 15th of each year. Our four hotbeds were patches of earth covered by bottomless, boxlike structures we constructed with planks and topped with special glass windows with cedar frames. The planks were low in the front and higher in the back so that the hotbeds would be slanted toward the sun.
The ground under the boxes was dug out to make room for a layer of horse manure, then soil was relayered over that. As the manure fermented it got hot. The boxes trapped this heat as well as the heat from the sun, making the hotbeds warm enough to merit their name. There were a couple of stables within wheelbarrow distance, one at Ridge and Ravenswood and the other at Consumer’s Ice Plant, which supplied our needs very well. Besides celery, we seeded tomatoes, lettuce, endive, cabbage, kohlrabi and radishes. The garden provided needed food for our table and my father sold the tomato plants for 25 cents a dozen. Those were Depression times and my father couldn’t find a job at his trade, so the tomato money was welcome. My mother even raised his beer money allotment. But celery was always king of the crops.
The celery plants were very fine when they first came up, but later they needed more room to grow in the hotbeds. Except for the tomatoes, the other plants had either been harvested or relocated elsewhere in the garden by the time this was necessary. Thinning out, or transplanting, was a back-breaking job, especially in hotbeds since you couldn’t get at the plants without reaching down into the boxes. Meanwhile, the area of the garden where the celery was to be planted next was being prepared with our own compost or more horse manure. One year, when I was a milkman driving a horse and wagon, my father talked me into bringing some horse manure home from work in my ‘62 Plymouth convertible. I took the cushions out of the rumble seat and filled it with manure. I never could get it all out of the car. Trying to wash it out with a hose only drove it further into the crevices. From then on my car smelled like a stable.
Transplanting the celery from hotbed to garden was another monotonous job. A couple of weeks before Halloween, we would dig a trench a foot deep, dig up the celery, now 4 to 5 inches tall, pull off any yellow stalks and replant it in the trench, real close together. We did the same with our endive, though the trench was not as deep, and covered up both crops with burlap bags and leaves to prevent freezing. After a couple of weeks, the celery and endive would bleach and turn yellow. The celery would be real tender and the endive would no longer be bitter.
My father was very proud of the fact that we had vegetables out of the garden at our Christmas table. We had celery on the table at every evening meal and celery in the stuffing of our Christmas bird.
When I married Lorraine and brought her to my home, my father, who lived on the second floor, finally gave up on trying to make me a gardener and taught my wife what he knew about the subject. At last a reprieve! I was called upon to help, however. One year my wife decided we should gather the dead alewife fish that Lake Michigan washed ashore on the beach and use them for fertilizer. We had to spread mothballs all over the yard to keep the neighborhood cats from digging up our garden. Everything grew very well - the tomatoes, corn, even the carrots. But you couldn’t eat them; they tasted like rotten fish!
Despite the “fishy” story, my father taught my wife well. She continues to garden, although in a space one quarter the size of my father’s garden. Our garden does not have even one hotbed. We do not plant celery!
I venture to say that my father was the last one to grow celery in that large a volume.
Other Accounts of Old Lake View
The Lake View Saga 1837-1974
Being a General Survey of Cook
BOOK ONE
book cover - part of my personal collection
The Journey West:
The Lake View's Pioneer:
BOOK TWO
book cover - part of my personal collection
This edition was the last of its series
photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection
later that same year the City of Lake View
The first of many cemeteries established
after the closure of Chicago Cemetery/Lincoln Park, the park
book cover - part of my personal collection
that was published in 2013
Ekstrom & Walden's Bakery
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 ...
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
that was published in 2017
This is part of a continuous series of books by this author
I am mentioned in the acknowledgments!
When this segment of original roadway along the shore was renamed Sheridan Road/by Grace Street
Read more with from the title link above
My Small Contribution
This story is about a small triangluar garden space called Sheridan Triangle Garden located on inner Lake Shore and Sheridan Road. I drafted a short tale about the garden spaces history - its link to the Hotel Lake View, the namesake of the township (1857-87) and city (1887-89). The story was published by a local historical association called the Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association and then a local newspaper called Skyline (p.11). Below is a cut/paste version from the historical association.
Post Notes
Continue with the next post about my view of Lake View along with the other 70 topical post within this blog.
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 from the original source - thanks!
