I was born in Baltimore and crab is still my favorite thing to eat. But when I moved to Chicago at the age of 21, I fell in love with the city the first time I drove down Lake Shore Drive and saw the Buckingham Fountain in full spurt. After that momentous day, I learned to dress in layers, collected stories on the Archer Avenue bus, and became a die-hard White Sox fan. In 1994, as a virtual native, I contributed to the third edition of A Native’s Guide to Chicago, published by Lake Claremont Press. Here is an excerpt from my Introduction to Chicago’s South Side.

Somewhere in our history, Chicago’s South Side has come to be regarded as the poor relation of the glitzy lakefront and the trendy north side. The die was cast early. In Edna Ferber’s 1924 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, So Big, the title character tells his mother, “Chicago’ll never grow this way, with all those steel mills and hunkies to the south of us. The North Side is going to be the place to live. It is already.”

In contrast, it was on the South Side that much of the character of Chicago was developed. Among the first to arrive were the Irish, escaping the potato famine in their homeland, and lured by work opportunities provided by the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal from 1836 to 1848. The opening of the Union Stock Yards a few miles south in 1865 brought in another group of immigrants, primarily from the Slavic countries of Europe. Soon after the turn of the century, Mexican Americans and African Americans were flocking to Chicago for work.

We can’t escape the fact that the racial and political divisions of Chicago are an integral part of the city’s heritage. Much of the story of the South Side is the story of race—white Europeans moving out of neighborhoods because African Americans and Latinos were moving in. It’s a pattern that continues, and unfortunately, keeps many people from mining the various pleasures of the South Side.