In 1974, I photographed this super market in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood on Lawrence directly across the street from the Aragon. Most people bought their food at small neighborhood shops like this every day on the way home from work. There may have been larger grocery stores somewhere in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see them. Note the 7-digit phone number on the store sign. The Justice Department filed suit that year against AT&T which had a monopoly on telephone service in the U.S. In 1982, the government succeeded in splitting up AT&T. Many feared the split up, but the competition ushered in an era of innovations in telecommunication. Within a decade after the split up, fax machines and cell phones became commercial realities. Phone companies quickly ran out of numbers and had to go to ten digit numbers to supply the demand for new accounts.
