Bungalows and row houses are the most typical residences in the neighborhoods surrounding Midway Airport. Midway is between 55th and 63rd Streets, and Cicero and Central avenues bound the Southwest Side. Garfield Ridge is north and west of the airport, while Clearing is south of Midway. Both offer quiet streets and single-family homes.
It is still possible to buy an older bungalow for less than $100,000 on the Southwest Side, but average prices are higher in both Garfield Ridge and Clearing. The affordability of housing in this area, as well as the convenience of local industry and the Loop, made it a popular place to settle down and raise a family.
In the fifties, these were the dream houses of a diverse mixture of working-class Bohemian, German, Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Slovak families. Outwardly, the bungalows look much the same today as they did fifty years ago, even to the ornamental lamps and plants in the front windows. What has vanished is the neighborhood-centered life that once buzzed around them. The shops where merchants and customers knew one another; the comings and goings between adjacent back yards; the activity in the streets that was monitored during all the waking hours of the day by the informal law enforcement system of the neighborhood: the at-home mothers.
Today, the Southwest Side is a shell of its former self, with few stay-at-home parents, most of its local businesses bought up by distant corporations, and not one nun left in the local St. Nick's struggling parish school. Plant closings took their toll on the economic life of the community; divorce took its toll on families; and women's increased labor force participation deprived the schools and churches not only of their volunteers, but also of interested close observers of their missions. Community seems to have evaporated.
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