The New York Times Bestseller, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, reconfigures how various peoples evolved as they had.  How it was that the Inca emperor was slain by soldiers sent across the ocean by the King of Spain and not the other way around?

While the Taylor Street Archives is galaxies short of Jared Diamond’s revelation on the Fates of Societies and how various peoples and their particular circumstances had evolved, the sounds reflecting the games we played and the things we did in the legendary Taylor Street’s Little Italy shed some light on how and to what our culture evolved.  Read more…

‘It was a glorious time.’

By Vince Romano

‘Where are you going?’

‘No place, ma…I’m just going to the club.’

During the 30s and 40s and on through the decades of the 50s and 60s, Taylor Street had clusters of Social Athletic Clubs (S.A.C.s). Growing up in Little Italy you were identified as a member of one of these clubs as much as you were identified with the school you attended or the street you lived on. Like fiefdoms, they were spread throughout Taylor Street’s ‘Little Italy’…from Halsted Street on the eastern boundary of Little Italy to Western Avenue bordering its outer fringes. Read more…

By Vince Romano

Collaborator:  Johnnie Parise

September 2006

The historic significance of the Dante School yard dates back to the turn of the century and then some. It shares center stage with the Jane Addams Hull House (circa 1889), Halsted Street, Greek Town, Maxwell Street, and Cinder Stadium. While one could make a sociological, philosophical or political connection that extends as far back as Dante Alighieri’s literary works, we will confine our story to the Italian American experience of growing up in the legendary Chicago’s Taylor Street neighborhood.

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By Vince Romano, June 2005

I grew up in Taylor Street’s Little Italy, the Hull House neighborhood.  I share this with the other members of the Taylor Street Archives. I’m sure there are many stories that have come out of the old neighborhood.  This story I cherish.  I have given it a chapter in my memoirs:  “Over the Fence is Out!

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