“Voices of the Streets” by Keira Lamb
(From Real Chicago magazine, pp. 18—20 October, 1992)
Chicago’s uptown boasts a diverse mix: hillbillies from Kentucky, renovating yuppies shoring up ailing grey-stones, poor people, the homeless.
And the kids.
As a kid in uptown, you learn early that the only way to survive the streets is to know them. Those that don’t absorb the lesson usually don’t make it in this small patch of crowded landscape bordered on one side by the cold, unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan and on the others by decaying buildings, clogged city streets, and other signposts of urban blight.
Uptown’s kids fall into three categories: the invisible are the ones who go to school, come home, and do their homework. These kids rarely venture out into the street; they do not play
