A Walk to Two Grocers

Life, Death and Winter have had too much control.

It is time to write something and show you a little of The Six Corners. The Six Corners is one of many places in Chicago where three streets intersect and therefore formed six corners. The major streets intersecting are Irving Park, Cicero and Milwaukee. Chicago is laid out on a grid system with addresses being north, south, east or west of State and Madison which is zero zero. Chicago’s grid system though is one point three degrees off of true north. As a slave to my natural compass this was very disturbing at first but I have adjusted. The streets that are called north south or east west pretty much stick to the eight one hundred blocks per mile normal in large cities. Just for fun though they built a lot of streets on diagonals to the grid. Milwaukee Avenue is one of those. This Six Corners is distinguished as The Six Corners because the local businesses have formed an association which is a special shopping district and tax district funded by property taxes. You can read more about that at:

http://www.sixcorners.com

It also historically was a major shopping district which rivalled Chicago’s downtown business district known as the Loop. Six Corners is on the east side of Portage Park. Portage Park is so named because the native americans used to portage their canoes across this area. On a walk yesterday afternoon to Family Fruit market for an assortment of nuts and to the Jewel for protein drinks, liquid water enhancers and laundry needs I covered about a mile and about two thirds of the Six Corners area.

This little walk produced some bleak images that I tend not to see as I see the thirty something businesses recently opened instead of noticing all the still vacant spaces. Our alderman is busy trying to return this to a shopping area as well as an arts and theatre district. Me I just try to keep the Parklet halfway nice.

The Parklet and Phenomana