Saturday, December 22, 2018

Looking North at the Clay Pit from the top of the natural gas tank at Albion and Albany Avenues, Chicago. Circa 1945

The Clay Pit looking North from the top of the natural gas tank from about Albion and Albany Avenues, West Ridge community, West Rogers Park, neighborhood, Chicago (1945). 
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The “Clay Pit” was a multi-acre wildlife area that served in the 1930s as a source of material for making bricks. It seemed gigantic, stretching eight blocks north to south and several wide, defined by the streets Whipple (east), Pratt (south), Kedzie (west), and Touhy (north). The Entrance to People's Gas, Light, and Coke facility was on Whipple Street. 
The Clay Pit at Touhy and Kedzie, looking southeast. Circa 1950


Its wilderness-like atmosphere included swamps and ponds with reeds, brush, trees, birds, squirrels, skunks, snakes, frogs, and fish. 

By Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

Four photographs of North, South, East and West View of Devon & Western Avenues in 1914 Chicago, Illinois.

A Brief History of Devon Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
Devon Avenue was originally known as Church Road. It was renamed in the 1880s by Edgewater developer John Lewis Cochran after Devon station on the Main Line north of Philadelphia. 

Initially known for its cabbage and truck farms and greenhouses, North Town, as it was then called, began to attract residential and commercial development in the early 1920s. Developer Henry B. Rance opened the area’s first real estate office in a frame shack at the corner of Devon and Western Avenues.
Western and Arthur Avenues, Chicago, 1920s.




 
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This is Devon Avenue in 1914, looking East from just East of Western Avenue. The people (from L to R) are B.F.'s Great Aunt, his Mother, Grandmother, Uncle, and another Grand Aunt. They were walking from Angel Guardian's Church (the steeple is barely visible in the background on the far right-hand side, just above the tree line) back to a Truck Farm on the S.W. corner of Rockwell and Devon, where B.F.'s Grandparents worked.

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