The following history of Albany Park is take from an essay by anthropologist Dwight Conquergood called "Life in Big Red: Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic Tenement."

Most urban sociologists note that Chicago is "America's most segregated city" and journalists echo this theme...Albany Park is located on the Northwest Side of Chicago, an area that historically has been predominantly white. During the 1970s and particularly the 1980s the ethnic composition of Albany Park shifted, not from white to black but from white to an emergent third category in the racial and ethnic geography of Chicago, "immigrant" or "diverse."

Back in 1907, the completion of the Ravenswood Elevated public transportation line that terminated at the Lawrence and Kimball intersection at the center of Albany Park stimulated a building boom, and the population grew at a stunning rate. Population growth and housing construction continued apace into the "roaring twenties." The building boom was over by 1930 and the Great Depression of that decade.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Albany Park could be characterized, in the words of one resident, as "a step-up-and-then-out" community. After 1912 Russian Jewish immigrants augmented the original population of Swedes, Germans, and Irish. By 1930 Russian Jews were the majority among foreign-born whites. In 1934, when the population of 55,822 had almost reached its zenith, it was almost 100 percent white. There were 43 listed under "Negro" and 43 listed under "Other." It was a community predominantly of first- and second-generation immigrants: 27.4 percent foreign-born white, and 43.8 percent native white of mixed or foreign-born parents.

An uncatalogued archival paper in the Albany Park Branch of the Chicago Public Library dating from the 1960s, "Changes in Population in Albany Park Area," interpretively summarizes the history of Albany Park's transitional population:

Presently Alb Pk. [sic] is in the midst of the second population change since the war and its third in the last 40 years. Original settlement was Scandinavian, German and English. In the 1920's and 1930's a middle class Jewish population came in and was succeeded by a lower income Jewish population. Now a non-Jewish population is moving in and the Jewish population is moving away....

From 1940 to 1980 the population of Albany Park declined 18.7 percent, but during the 1980s it grew 7.4 percent.

Moreover, the ethnic diversity of the neighborhood increased dramatically during the decade of the 1980s. From an immigrant but overwhelmingly white neighborhood, Albany Park has changed to a neighborhood with a majority of nonwhites during the 1980s. At the same time that the total population of the neighborhood boomed 7.4 percent, the number of whites declined 40 percent, blacks increased 500 percent, Latinos increased 73.4 percent, and Asians increased 83.6 percent. According to the 1990 census figures, African Americans now make up 3.4 percent, Latinos 31.8 percent, and Asians 24.1 percent of the population of Albany Park. With twice as many Asians as in Chinatown on the near South Side, Albany Park is now the city's biggest Asian neighborhood.

Demographic data from the neighborhood schools vividly reflect the out-migration of the Jewish population in the 1960s and early 1970s and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. In 1959 Roosevelt High School had been 70 percent Jewish; in 1965 it was still 60 percent Jewish. By 1988, however, Roosevelt High School was 39.17 percent Latino, 24.01 percent white, 22.29 percent Asian, and 14.2 percent black.

Until his death in 2004, Dwight Conquergood was professor of performance studies and communication studies and research faculty at Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. A dear friend to APTP, Dwight also co-produced two award-winning documentaries based on his fieldwork in Albany Park: The Heart Broken in Half and Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America.

"Life in Big Red" was originally published in 1992. More recent demographic data can be found at http://www.census.gov/. The complete essay, "Life in Big Red," can be found in the book, Structuring Diversity: Ethnographic Perspectives on the New Immigration.