In 1975, the center of Latin King activity in Uptown was on Winthrop near Ainslie. You can see their graffiti scrawled on several of the buildings here. Note the boarded up windows, dents in the cars in the foreground, police cruisers parked across the street, a beer truck parked further down, and the man with the cane. The bleakness of this shot symbolizes much of Chicago’s Uptown in the mid-1970s. Today, a trip down this block will reveal that almost everything has changed. The street is now tree-lined and filled with tidy townhomes. Things have improved radically during the last four decades – a tribute to the people of Uptown.
