We Think Therefore We Are!

Not big enough to constitute one of the City of Chicago’s 77 established neighborhoods, Gladstone Park is one of 228 vaguely-defined sub-communities with no commonly-agreed-upon boundaries. Making up the northern section of the officially-recognized Jefferson Park, its borders are roughly defined by two of its main roads as they diverge northwesterly like an isosceles triangle flung on its side.

Despite its small size and distance from downtown, though, Gladstone Park has always spoken for itself. At least since Englishmen from way back made it its own entity by labeling old maps of the area with the last name of their popular late nineteenth century British prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone. Which, in an era when local towns were naming themselves “Washington” and “Lafayette” after the colonies’ Revolutionary War heroes, could have been a fairly unpopular choice considering England was America’s sworn enemy up through at least the War of 1812. Yet the name stuck, cemented by developers filing the first subdivision in the community as “Gladstone Park” and railroad officials designating its century-old whistle stop as the “Gladstone Park Station.”

With Gladstone Park some 10-12 miles northwest from the Loop and about as distant as anyone can be from the center of the City of Chicago, it’s often recognized as a part of the whole only in passing. The Chicago Tribune has made a trope of referring to the community as being in “The Far Northwest Side” as if the sub-community were on some alien planet. That leads to kind of wiping us off the list when it comes to them rating restaurants and reporting on local events. Part of the reason may be because Gladstone Park’s northern border, just past W. Devon, is the divide between the city and (eek!) the suburbs.

Other than the “Welcome to Gladstone Park” signs positioned near its presumed south and north borders, nearly all else about who exactly does or doesn’t live in Gladstone Park is in dispute. Few know where the community actually begins and ends. And no one knows for sure how big it is either.

According to many authorities such as the U.S. Census Bureau, Gladstone Park is the small dark grey triangular area on the map that starts at the apex created by the intersection of N. Northwest Highway and N. Milwaukee in the south, broadening to about a half mile wide as it heads northwest nearly 1.3 miles on the longest side. This Zip Code Tabulation Area, established for purposes of cumulating demographic data, makes up about one-quarter of USPS zip code 60630 in the southern section and a much smaller portion of 60646 in the north. By this measure, Gladstone Park is only a quarter of a square mile in area with about 650 residential buildings and 1700 people.

But almost no one living in Gladstone Park accepts the U.S. Census Bureau’s boundaries as sociological entities. Chicago itself doesn’t find them useful for statistical and governmental purposes. Acknowledging the strength of its neighborhoods and their sub-communities (as well as their ambiguities), the city government decided some 50 years ago to try to clear up the confusion residents had about where they lived. Going back to an old standard, it adopted the 77 sections that had been blocked off in the late 1920s by University of Chicago research sociologists in its Chicago Studies division for the purposes of keeping track of what was going on throughout the city. Because the city had long found these 77 areas useful for urban planning purposes, it set its Planning Department to task in the 1970s to verify the what and where of each of them…and the tinier sub-communities within them. A now defunct webpage mounted by the City of Chicago detailed how interviewers were sent out into the field to ask 10 random people in various areas, “What is the name of this neighborhood?” and “What are the boundaries?” to get a handle on the communities with which people identified. The information they collected confirmed how different areas of the city had organically shifted and grown over the last one hundred years. In 1978 it resulted in Chicago drawing its first modern neighborhood map.

Admirably, Chicago has always given recognition to the vibrancy of its neighborhoods in fostering culture and pride of its many diverse residents. Actively promoting itself as a city of distinct neighborhoods, the city understands the value of letting all 253 sub-communities within its 77 neighborhoods function as mini-boosters for the metropolis at large. It’s what gives Chicago its small-town-within-a-big-city feel. At the same time, the City Council long sat on the fence over the neighborhood map’s blocked-out divisions and long resisted the idea of “officially” adopting it. Finally a compromise was reached in 1993 when the map was first approved…with caveats. “City government does not recognize or use [the 77] Chicago neighborhood boundaries for official purposes,” Chicago Municipal Code 1-14-010 declares in bold. Meanwhile, another part of the code affirms a total of 178–not 228–smaller neighborhoods that are also presumably not official.

So, if none of the neighborhoods are “official” in so many ways, how do they get anything official done? In Chicago, all the legal and political business is accomplished through the structure of its 50 wards which cut some neighborhoods in half while encompassing parts of more than one in others. Each is headed by an Alderperson who represent his or her constituents on a hyperlocal level, managing their concerns over such issues as tree trimming, street permit parking, zoning changes, and sidewalk repair…allowing them to have more of a voice than most people living in large cities. But because the Alders function as members of the City Council, they also serve together to conduct the greater business of the city at large, along with a usually more powerful Mayor who can rely on the disagreement of the many to implement his political platform. The oft unworkable size of a 50-member City Council has long been fodder for debate, highlighting Alders’ differences, thereby weakening their collective power by requiring coalitions of special interest groups to get anything done. The setup magnifies the political implications of every vote and, some believe, leads to the corruption for which Chicago is known.

Making the situation even more volatile, Chicago wards are restructured following the every ten year release of updated population figures from the U.S. Census. In 2022 many boundaries were contentiously redrawn, resulting in one skinny ward egregiously snaking north to south through parts of multiple neighborhoods that had little in common with each other. Fortuitously, the Council kept most people from Gladstone Park in the 45th Ward along with their brethren from the greater Jefferson Park in which the community resides. But for the purpose of reducing and balancing the numbers of precincts in each ward citywide (and thus reducing the need for so many election judges), the council appended the northerly community of Wildwood to the 45th. Another completely detached section that includes an illogically broken-off piece of neighboring Edgebrook was also thrown in. And a rejiggered “tail” to the southeast adds and subtracts streets from the previously-defined 45th with new lines through parts of adjacent Norwood Park on the west as well. Unlike for last 10 years, the 41st ward on the west overlaps part of the the 45th now as well. And some residents from Gladstone Park’s northeastern streets fall into the 39th Ward in a rogue district that includes the rest of Edgebrook and other parts of the Forest Glen community. All that confusion leads some Gladstonians to believe they live in another place called either “South Edgebrook” or Forest Glen. (More on this later.) Still, in the main, the new 45th Ward unifies similar communities in the Far Northwest, allowing them to come together and work for common goals.

Coming full circle in trying to explain the conflicting neighborhood, sub-community and ward borders everywhere, the city acknowledges on its website that “Chicago neighborhood names and neighborhood boundaries can change over time” and “Different people may have different perspectives on the names and locations of designated neighborhoods.” Thus the paradox: the Chicago government has never fully acknowledged where and how big its many neighborhoods and sub-communities are, making none of them (except for the wards) truly official. Yet the neighborhoods have utility, breaking the city up into statistical areas that allows the government to keep tabs on what’s going on everywhere while giving the media specific locational names to use for their news stories. But most of all, the recognition bestowed upon communities provides people living in them with the impetus to pull together their common threads to develop their unique personalities, the ones that make living in the city of Chicago so personal. Wisely, the city embraces the ambiguity, encouraging its people to identify with their non-official communities in recognition of the fact that one of Chicago’s biggest assets is the great strength of its neighborhoods. Instead of feeling like a number in an unfeeling metropolis, everyone here is instead duly and freely granted standing as well as the right to self-determination in any amorphous, community atmosphere s/he wants to create or promote.

The irony of it all is, ask Chicagoans anywhere and they’ll tell you exactly what community they live in! No ambiguity there!

So we’re back right where we started…Gladstone Park as one of 228 vaguely-defined sub-communities allowed to exist in Chicago with no exact location or commonly-recognized borders. Its people know they are Gladstone Parkers just because that’s who they think they are!

Opening Up a Can of Worms

Gladstonians refuse to regard their community as a cold, limited Zip Code Tabulation Area. That would be short shrift for a community that, while it doesn’t like to brag, thinks of itself as a much bigger entity. The question is: What bigger entity is that?

Even two most active organizations in Gladstone Park haven’t settled on common boundaries. The Gladstone Park Chamber of Commerce (GPCC) and the Gladstone Park Neighborhood Association (GPNA) draw their borders differently to serve different purposes, the former concentrating on the business and industry corridors with the latter focusing on over-all community well-being. Whichever of their borders you pick, however, the result is about the same in total area. According to calculations on GIS Chicago, Gladstone Park is 0.97 square miles in area as defined by the Neighborhood Association and a 1.0 square mile with the small extra bit of business territory the Chamber of Commerce throws in.

While organizations pretty much agree Gladstone Park’s eastern boundary line is N. Central and its northern border is along the Forest Preserve of Cook County to where it meets W. Devon at the suburbs, the two groups dispute how far south and west the community extends.

GPCC, seeing the need to promote the businesses that extend west from the W. Foster/N. Northwest Highway/N. Milwaukee intersection, ropes in that entire southwestern quadrant even though that area’s residential streets are cut off from the rest of Gladstone Park by the Kennedy Expressway. GPNA, feeling that lack of connection, excludes that section entirely. That leaves the residents in that southwest triangle outlined in blue unsure whether they should to self-identify with Gladstone Park or the adjacent sub-neighborhood of Union Ridge, a sub-community of adjacent Norwood Park.

As the author extensively walked the community to take her photographs, her gut told her the red GP Neighborhood Association lines linked the commonalities of Gladstone Park people better. Thus, she excluded the Union Ridge homes southwest of the Kennedy Expressway within GPCC’s parameters from her photo files because there seemed to be no real feeling of physical connection to that section. She only differed with both organizations when it came to the tiny triangle west of N. Northwest Highway bordering on Metra’s Union Pacific/Northwest Rail Line roughly near the middle of the community (just above the westward bend of the gold Kennedy Expressway on the map). The tracks there created a real divide that made those few streets beyond them too isolating for her to justify including in her project.

Initially it seemed more intuitive to augment Gladstone Park with the streets, homes, and businesses to the east of N. Central all the way to N. Elston since they seem such a connected part of the community. That would have extended the area all the way to Metra’s Milwaukee District North Rail Line to the northeast, which would also have brought the Chicago North Department of Motor Vehicle facility and the Mariano’s that Gladstonians have treasured since the grocery store opened in the neighborhood in 2012 into the fold. It also would have added the “L” residential streets from N. Leclaire to N. Luna to Gladstone Park’s “M” streets. (See Streets for more on Chicago’s alphabetical street naming scheme that further shaped the local community by designating roads that start with one common letter in order as they run east from the lakeshore.)

However, that lofty notion was quickly shot to pieces, mainly because some of the entities on N. Elston to the east of N. Central maintain an identification with the small adjacent community of Forest Glen, another sub-community of the greater Jefferson Park. These include the “Forest Glen” Animal Hospital, Chicago Transit Authority’s “Forest Park” (Bus) Garage, and Metra’s Milwaukee District North Rail Line to Rt. 94 with its railroad bridge splashed with the big white letters “Forest Glen” calling attention to the accompanying train station just up the hill behind it on “N. Forest Glen Avenue.”

But the most confusion over community names and where people figure they live stems most spectacularly from the overlapping elementary school districts that serve Gladstone Park youngsters.

Although there are no public high schools in Gladstone Park, younger Chicago Public School students in the community who choose to go to a neighborhood (rather than a magnet) school are divided among three elementaries. The great majority of pre-school and K-8 students go to the only school within both GPCC’s and GPNA’s defined borders, Rufus M. Hitch Elementary School at 5625 N. McVicker. But that district also draws in students from Union Ridge of Norwood Park, the area Gladstone Park’s two main organizations dispute that’s south of the Kennedy Expressway.

Meanwhile, Gladstone students who live in a big chunk of blocks north of W. Rosedale to W. Devon attend William J. Onahan Elementary School, 6634 W. Raven, which is squarely in the adjacent Norwood Park neighborhood. With school attachment so strong, the disjoint encourages many students and their families to declare the crossover area they live in as “East” Norwood Park…even though Gladstone Parkers are unquestionably part of the Jefferson Park neighborhood. And then there are those in the four-block strip west of N. Central who walk east to go to James B. Farnsworth Elementary School, 5414 N. Linder, along with most of the children from the Forest Glen neighborhood to the north. No one can blame them when the vexing circumstances have these students maintaining they’re from Forest Glen, not Gladstone Park (which at least correctly keeps them in the greater neighborhood of Jefferson Park).

There’s less confusion concerning Taft High School that serves all the students in the elementary districts mentioned above and many more. Noteworthy as Chicago’s largest public secondary school with a sending district with 3400 students, Taft is located in at at 6530 W. Bryn Mawr in Norwood Park. Because it’s only two short blocks west of Gladstone’s borders, many Gladstone Parker teens are fortunate in being able to walk to high school. Besides serving Jefferson Park (with the sub-communities of Gladstone Park, Indian Woods, and parts of Norwood Park East), Norwood Park (with Oriole Park, Big Oaks, Union Ridge, Norwood Park West, Old Norwood, and other parts of Norwood Park East), and Forest Glen (with Edgebrook, North Edgebrook, Old Edgebrook, Sauganash, and Wildwood), students also come from the greater Edison Park and O’Hare neighborhoods.

All the different allegiances Gladstone Park students and their parents develop with their assigned schools create bewilderment when it comes to which communities they associate with. Is it any surprise that some of them instead say they are from Union Ridge, Forest Glen, Norwood Park, East Norwood Park or another community rather than Gladstone Park?

Because of the many disputes over place name, Gladstone Park faces a running battle to claim businesses within its borders. Often unsure which one of several communities they should be identifying with, the Liberty Bank for Savings, 6210 N. Milwaukee, in one glaring example, calls itself the “Norwood Office” just because it hovers on the Norwood Park East border. Meanwhile, signage on the front of the Wintrust Bank, 6336 N. Milwaukee just up the street boldly announces it’s the “Gladstone Branch.” Both, ironically, are members of Gladstone Park’s Chamber of Commerce, probably because the City of Chicago labeled the businesses along this most northerly strip of N. Milwaukee Avenue as the “Gladstone Park Corridor Study” by its planning department.

The befuddlement over place name extends to Gladstone Park’s most iconic commercial concerns as well. In “The 10 Best Hot Dog Stands, Ranked,” Chicago Magazine’s June/July, 2021 issue awarded the community’s Superdawg (Hot Dog) Drive-in, known internationally for its old-fashioned carhop service, fifth place in the city…but told people to go to Norwood Park to experience it. This is even though the 1950s-style eatery is on the eastern corner of N. Milwaukee and W. Devon, firmly in the Gladstone Park Corridor Study (but in the disputed Norwood Park East section). Superdawg is also across the street from the aforementioned Gladstone Branch of Wintrust Bank (but kitty-cornered to the neighborhood’s Shop & Save Grocery Store that plasters “Norwood Park” all along its inside back wall).

Homeowners, too, get caught up by constructs that tell them they live someplace other than Gladstone Park. Realtors, who love to frame the communities they sell in as more highly desirable than perhaps they are, freely bat about place names within the community. They often refer to Gladstone Park houses located in the handful of blocks north of N. Elston associated with the swankier Edgebrook community, for example, as “South Edgebrook.” This is even though the area is physically separated from Old Edgebrook and Edgebrook proper by a half-mile of Cook County Forest Preserves. And the fact that the designation doesn’t match the location of “South Edgebrook” on Chicago’s official neighborhood map shown earlier (although it’s in a different Ward, the 39th). Interestingly, none of the homes there are no swankier than those in the rest of Gladstone Park.

Likewise, houses east of the adjacent Norwood Park neighborhood are bandied about by realtors as “Norwood Park East” in order to associate them with a community that sometimes commands more prestige and thus, higher average selling prices. That leaves Norwood Park East to be claimed by both the greater Jefferson Park neighborhood (and Gladstone Park specifically) and the greater neighborhood of Norwood Park at the same time, further puzzling homeowners in the area..

Most people, even Loopers from downtown, have heard of Jefferson Park if just because it’s a major stop along the El’s Blue Line out to O’Hare Airport. So as to simplify the whole works, some residents in this Far Northwest community just tell people who don’t know any better that they live in Jefferson Park, Gladstone Park’s greater neighborhood. And technically, they’re right!

But hey, that’s OK. Variety is the spice of life.

How Did We Get Into This Hot Mess?

It might be illustrative to go back some 100 years in time to explore how Gladstone Park got to be where it is today. See Early History for even earlier details.

The first apparent instance of Gladstone Park residents coming together to work for the common good under its name comes from historical park district records as detailed on the Chicago Park District website. By the 1920s new homeowners from the Gladstone Park Subdivision had formed its first neighborhood association, the Gladstone Park Community Club. Seeing the need for a pubic park for its children, its concerned citizens successfully hit up the city to help them develop a small plot of land for a modest field house and outdoor play areas.

Within the same timeframe, Gladstone Park was seeing commercial growth spreading along N. Milwaukee from the larger Jefferson Park town center at W. Lawrence to its south with shops and service industries. That was accompanied by a boom of light industry along N. Northwest Highway, aided by the rail line that ran behind it. Both could often be found referencing the sub-community’s name for identification.

Everything was going along swimmingly until Chicago butted in with its midcentury plan to build a freeway to speed cars in and out of city. Progress could be made only by slicing the whole northern width of the city, lacerating established neighborhoods and chopping secondary roads into sections no longer connected to each other. When the Kennedy Expressway opened in 1960, it swerved through Jefferson Park at W. Foster just north of its main business district, creating, for the first time, an actual barrier separating much of Gladstone Park from the larger Jefferson Park neighborhood that had previously encapsulated it.

The Kennedy Expressway’s stark physical divide between the Jefferson Park and Gladstone Park business districts became a logistical as well as a psychological barrier. It reaffirmed the dominance of greater Jefferson Park to the south as the neighborhood’s downtown business center, anchored by the neighborhood’s only U.S. Post Office. The greater Chicago Park District established the much larger seven-acre (Thomas) Jefferson Memorial Park a block from the commercial center with the neighborhood’s only (outdoor) pool. A grand former theater, reworked as the Copernicus Center, an auditorium and community center for the Polish community, was there. Soon after, the only Chicago Library branch in Jefferson Park went in.

The split the Kennedy Expressway created also had the effect of putting a geographical cap on the size of Jefferson Park’s established commercial center, forcing building upward rather than outward. From that point onward, increased growth in Jefferson Park’s downtown would come primarily by constructing taller buildings with more density. More traffic congestion and the consequent need for more stoplights and parking meters followed. In 1970 the Jefferson Park commercial hub developed further when it became the site of the comprehensive Jefferson Park Transit Center with area-wide bus and rail connections to anywhere and everywhere you might want to go.

At the same time, the Kennedy Expressway summarily interrupted the gradual, seamless expansion of Jefferson Park’s commercial and industrial concerns into Gladstone Park. Divided off from the more robust commercial center to its south, the Gladstone Park business community was forced to develop in isolation, by its own standards. Because its plentiful, lightly-developed land remained relatively cheap in comparison to that of the rest of the City of Chicago and even that of Jefferson Park’s business district itself, it attracted entrepreneurs with smaller investments. They built more modest stores, restaurants, and service centers no more than one or two stories tall. Growing with a more suburban-like low-rise landscape, its commercial corridor boasted buildings spread further apart from one another, too. Locating more sprawling commercial concerns on bigger tracts of inexpensive land made financial sense here because it gave merchants and service providers of businesses such as banquet halls the advantage of being able to attract customers with free parking lots. The result made for a Gladstone Park business and industrial district that is poles apart from that of the Jefferson Park commercial center to its south…although both are technically in the same official neighborhood.

While road reconfiguration was going on virtually everywhere during the 20th Century, there was little pressure to add any substantive changes to N. Milwaukee, Gladstone Park’s main artery. Its two-mile length through the community had already been widened to four lanes in the 1920s as part of Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 City development plan, along with 100 miles of other major Chicago streets, according to Gladstone Park Corridor Study: Milwaukee Avenue from the Kennedy Expressway to the City Limits. It was more than adequate.

In fact, the commercial corridor on both sides of N. Milwaukee sat essentially untouched throughout the Great Depression and even into the 1940s and 1950s, the Study revealed. It was not until the 1960s that most of the vacant land along its commercial corridor was finally developed into the outline of what it still is today, 50 and 60 years later. Some might call its present circumstances a time warp reflective of a lack of progress and others might see it as a district ripe for historical preservation. In either case, there are plenty of options for smart future expansion.

In 1998 Chicago’s Planning and Development Department recognized the need for enhancements to the infrastructure in Jefferson Park’s more dynamic southern commercial area by establishing the Jefferson Park Business TIF (Tax, Increment Financing) District. Because its 79-acre TIF ran from W. Montrose on the south and ended near W. Foster on the north, all improvements and growth in the initiative were restricted to Jefferson Park proper. Gladstone Park’s commercial corridor further north was left to putter along by itself.

That is, until what became known as “The Border Wars.” As recounted by Editor Brian Nadig of Nadig Newspapers at the June, 2022 Gladstone Park Neighborhood Association meeting, that’s when Jefferson Park decided in the early 2000s to hang banners on N. Milwaukee all the way up to W. Bryn Mawr, claiming the center of the Gladstone Park Business District as its own. The spat was only resolved when the Jefferson Park signage came down, whether by friend or foe. Interestingly, in 2022 and 2023 the Gladstone Park Chamber of Commerce implemented its own plans to hang “Gladstone Park” banners up and down the northern section of N. Milwaukee to help develop cohesiveness and pride in the community.

It was not until 2017 that the City of Chicago completed the Gladstone Park Corridor Study, assessing the businesses that existed on the cut-off stretch of N. Milwaukee north of Jefferson Park’s commercial center in order to make recommendations for its future development and growth. Interestingly, this official City Department of Planning and Development plan included the entire two-plus miles of N. Milwaukee from W. Foster all the way to and across W. Devon to its border with Niles (the suburbs) even though this stretched everyone’s definitions of Gladstone Park.

Continuing the Gladstone Park Corridor Study area a quarter mile north past W. Devon all the way to the city limits — an area of blocks that few people even realize is still in Chicago proper — was, in one way, an oddball choice. This small isolated section, inarguably part the Norwood Park East community, is not included in either GPCC’s or GPNA’s boundaries. But since businesses operate contiguously all the way up N. Milwaukee through to the suburbs, the official Chicago document declared it part of the Gladstone Park commercial area. So it must be so.

More provocative is the existence of another quasi-no-man’s-land between where the Jefferson Park TIF ends as the Kennedy Expressway veers west near W. Carmen where the southern border of the Gladstone Park Corridor Study and GPCC begin at W. Foster. Although GPNA includes these two long blocks further south on N. Milwaukee in its territory, no one else does. Maybe the tire shop or the car wash along that strip don’t care if they’re associated with either community, but it seems kind of egregious to assign the 16th District of the Chicago Police, Jefferson Park Station that’s there at 5151 N. Milwaukee, to the wilds!

New Alliances?

So, what was the point of all these maps and discussions? To prove that no one agrees where Gladstone Park is, how big it is, or where it begins and ends?

No. But maybe it should prompt a new discussion. When the Kennedy Expressway was trenched through Jefferson Park, it created divisions that established a new reality to the land on the Far Northwest Side of Chicago. The area south of the new highway (“downtown Jefferson Park”), as previously noted, developed into a denser business district that included all public services (post office, public pool, library). Jefferson Parkers became more like their neighbors in Irving Park, Mayfair, and Albany Park. At the same time, the highway’s construction thrust the more suburban-like Gladstone Park and Norwood Park areas together to develop differently. If one were to look at what goals they now have in common, wouldn’t it make more sense for Gladstone Parkers to secede from Jefferson Park to align with Norwood Parkers for everyone’s mutual benefits?

Before this notion is dismissed outright, people should remember that the more than 100 subcommunities of Chicago are constantly changing. And even Chicago’s “official” neighborhoods that have been around for decades have seen at least two major changes in their designations, as detailed by The Block Club. First, there was the land to the west of the city that became neighborhood #76 when it was annexed as the O’Hare International Airport in the new O’Hare neighborhood. Then there was Edgewater, the community on the east that lobbied during the 1960s and 1970s to separate itself from Uptown to become its own entity based on its unique historical identity. In 1980 the city approved Edgewater’s initiative to secede from the greater community to became Chicago neighborhood #77.

Having Their Cake and Eating It, Too

Just because the Gladstone Park community isn’t official and just because its very presence is indeterminate doesn’t mean it’s nondescript or even ordinary. On the contrary. The very mystery behind the what and where of the community is what gives it the opportunity to be exceptional.

Clearly, Gladstone Park is complicated. Like any city neighborhood, it has its attributes as well as its share of problems. Up here on the “Far Northwest Side,” the distant and somewhat undefined community gets ignored by the powers-that-be in Chicago as much as it gets put upon. But existing 10-12 miles away from the purview of big metropolitan departments and red tape can be a good thing. Sometimes it’s easier to be what you want to be by flying under the radar.

Most people who move to Gladstone Park say it is the best place they could afford to live comfortably where they could be a part of Chicago…but not feel like they were in a big city. Ensconced in their sturdy vintage homes on lush tree-lined streets, they relish all the perks of living in a low-rise, family-friendly community that feels more like a country village. Yet by hopping on a bus, they can get to the Jefferson Park Transit Center within a mere five minutes and connect via bus, “el,” and Metra to all the world class museums, pro sports arenas, lakefront beaches and music and theater venues they want.

So tell people in this one-square mile community you never heard of where they come from. Tease them about being small and insignificant. Make fun that they were named after an old British prime minister. Poke at them for their dedication as public servants…teachers, police, firefighters who may be more law and order than progressive. Levy any insult, but none would hit the mark. Why? because Gladstonians are proud Chicagoans who are having their cake and eating it, too. Why would they want to live any other way?