Time was, if you told me your address in Chicago, I could tell your ethnic origins, make a reasonably accurate guess at your family's household income, know whether your parents ate in the kitchen or in the dining room and whether your father came to table in his undershirt. So balkanized was the Chicago of my youth - the 1940s and 50s - that each Chicago neighborhood (and there are by current count some 237 of them) was a village unto itself, with its fairly intensive ethnic ethos, its own mores and folkways. And one didn't often, except to go to work, and not always then, leave the neighborhood; no great need to, for churches, parks, restaurants, movie theaters, taverns, and everything was there, close at hand.
- Joseph Epstein
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