A few months after taking another shot of this pawn shop, I took this one at the same address, 1022 West Wilson. The store had moved a couple miles north on Broadway to the area just south of Loyola. I guessed the pawn shop was looking for people with more money to buy things or more things to sell. It didn’t take vandals long. With the burglar bars removed, the shop was quickly looted and destroyed. Today, this address is a parking lot.
A reader sent me an link that puts this photo in an interesting statistical and graphical perspective. It’s a story about Chicago’s disappearing middle class. Even though Uptown was shown on 1970s maps as one of the City’s lower income neighborhoods, as he said, “My take when I was living in Uptown during the 70s was that despite the prevalent economic conditions, there still was a sense that doors to real empowerment were always open…”, even if they were somewhere else in a better neighborhood.
