BELMONT CRAGIN — The far Northwest Side of Chicago looks nothing like a big city, and Belmont Cragin business owners and community members want visitors to know that.
Late last year, thanks to a local grant and in collaboration with local shops and restaurants, the neighborhood joined dozens of others to proclaim a unified identity on a decorative street banner.
All along Cicero Avenue, Narragansett Avenue and Fullerton Avenue, 100 street light poles now hang green flags marking the borders of "The Bungalow Belt."
The idea was to showcase the neighborhood's abundance of single-family homes as a point of pride and a way to attract new visitors, said James Rudyk, director of the non-profit Northwest Side Housing Center.
"This is really a way of showing that the community is coming together to create an identity around an area people may not be as familiar with," Rudyk said. "Just like Lincoln Park is a destination because of its bars and Hyde Park is a destination because of the University [of Chicago], we want to show that we're a destination because of who we are: a community of single-family homes."
Last summer, the housing center partnered with the Belmont-Central Chamber of Commerce to secure a grant from the Local Initiative Support Corporation to pay for the banners. They held a competition for banner designs, and after multiple open community meetings, they settled on an illustration of a one-story brick house on a heather green backdrop submitted by Steinmetz High School student Brandon Pozos.
"It's a great aesthetic, and it shows the unified support that businesses have for the community, and vice versa," said Larry Lynch, board president of the chamber. The name of a different local business is printed along the bottom of each banner.
"It's kind of like putting an ad in the paper — for people driving along there, they're going to get drawn in," Lynch added.
Creating a neighborhood identity around single-family homes, Lynch and Rudyk said, is a symbolic bulwark against the tide of gentrification.
"I think a lot of people see [single-family homes] as a sign of a stronger community, as opposed to big apartment buildings, which can sometimes bring communities down," Lynch said. "The bungalows are representative of the middle class and working class community — that's who they were built for in the 1920s and '30s."
With a huge proportion of Belmont Cragin residents spending more than half their income on rent, Rudyk said, most are wary of any coming development.
"If we're going to continue to be branded as a community of homeowners, and not renters and investors, we need to keep working hard to maintain affordability," Rudyk said. "The last thing we want is to become the next Logan Square."
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