An Indianapolis, Indiana, woman offers a followup to our discussions about various geographic belts around the country. The Bungalow Belt in Chicago refers to a strip of small brick bungalows just inside the city limits originally occupied by Catholic European immigrants. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bungalow Belt”
We talked on an earlier show about regions of the country known as belts, like the Rust Belt and Borscht Belt.
Corn Belt.
Yes. And it turns out that there are smaller belts, too, like just in Chicago.
There’s a particular belt called the Bungalow Belt.
Interesting.
We learned about this from Susan Hyatt. She’s a professor of anthropology at Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indianapolis, and she wrote us to say that bungalow belt in the 1980s was used in Chicago to refer to neighborhoods on the south side that at the time were made up of small brick bungalows occupied mostly by Catholic European immigrant families who originated mostly from Eastern Europe, Ireland, Lithuania, and Italy.
They were considered to be somewhat conservative, so the term was used rather disparagingly to signal a kind of narrow-mindedness.
I haven’t lived in Chicago since 1989, and now those neighborhoods are much more diverse and much more expensive.
But the bungalow belt.
Bungalow belt.
Yeah, I’m wondering if there are other belts just in cities like that.
Besides green belts. Some places have green belts.
Yeah.
There’s a green path that they’ve moved to their city.
Right. We’d love to hear about it if you have one in your city.
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