ABSTRACT
Alan Gugel recalls of his early years in Wicker Park: “When I moved into this neighborhood, that’s the one thing they kept saying, ‘There’s a lot of artists, a lot of artists, move down there.’ And when I got there, there were no arts. I couldn’t see them.” Word of mouth indicated that Wicker Park was a likely site for a penniless young artist to find cheap rents and like-minded individuals, but those who moved in during the 1980s at first found that the local scene was comparatively underdeveloped, lacking public spaces to which newcomers might easily find their way. In the late 1980s, Wicker Park was a neighborhood on the
verge, but it required the increasing preponderance of commercial spaces geared toward the needs of the artists and aesthetes moving there for the scene to become recognizable to both insiders and outsiders, and for the neighborhood to finally veer onto the path that would differentiate it as Chicago’s 1990s bohemia.
