IN THE LATTER HALF of the twentieth century, gentrification crept northward along the shores of Lake Michigan, hitting Lincoln Park in the 1960s and ’70s and Lakeview soon thereafter. But among Chicago neighborhoods, Uptown stands apart. In a period when apartment fires set by landlords in search of insurance payouts plagued cities across the US, Uptown averaged a fire every three days, its many stripes of low-income people vulnerable to sudden displacement. It has remained stubbornly low income; decades of organizing around federally financed housing keeping those units available to those who need them most. Emil Ferris, who spent several years of her childhood in the area, lovingly depicts its many single-room-occupancy buildings like the Hotel Darlington, nightclubs like the Green Mill Lounge, and the Golden House Diners, in her graphic novel series My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017– ). In a drawing from the first volume, she portrays the area’s many dispossessed populations—Appalachian coal miners, Native Americans kicked off their reservations, a rare concen…
