Edward M. Bury

Observances of a neighborhood in transition. That summarizes the subject and scope of an essay I wrote and presented during Fall 2017 as part of ENGL 574: Non-Fiction Writing Workshop, the course I completed in December. The essay centered on the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago, where we’ve lived since 2000, when we purchased a modest two-flat in what then was still a work-class community, sometimes plagued by crime but far from being blighted and beyond renewal. Avondale has evolved — gentrified in many ways — a process I called “greening.”

The essay is titled, The “Greening” of Avondale, and the work includes some original images and lyrics to a song, “When Will I Leave Chicago.”