You can go home again—or, using your hometown in fiction

I grew up in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, and Chicago still holds a large part of my heart. So it was no surprise when I began to write a new mystery, Saving Irene, with new characters, that I discovered the protagonist lived in Hyde Park. What was a surprise was the learning I had to do to create a realistic fictional world in that familiar neighborhood.

If my character—Henrietta (Henny) James, a TV chef’s gofer--was to live in Hyde Park, she needed first an apartment. I chose Cornell Avenue, because I remembered rows of three-story buildings, some once private homes, others always apartments, but most with the bay window that for me characterizes much of Chicago’s older residential architecture.

Henny, who hates her full name, must learn where to shop, and dine out, and go to church, all the things that tie us to the neighborhoods where we live. All these years later (we won’t say how many), I found my memory was good on the big things but weak on the details. I would have to do a lot of research to create a believable fictional world. The internet proved to be a huge help.

Online, because I had no inclination to travel to Chicago during the pandemic, I discovered that some places prominent in my memory are gone. The YMCA where we had sock hops has been moved now far south and renamed. Cunag’s, the candy shop that made the thickest chocolate milk shakes ever, closed years ago. But the United Church of Hyde Park still dominates its corner at 53^rd and Blackstone, its congregations dwindling and the church in financial difficulty, the result probably of an aging congregation. Henny goes to church there—once.

Promontory Park

Keying in remembered names, I learned a lot: the Point, a grassy finger of land extending into Lake Michigan, is now part of Burnham Park which extends along the lake shore from 12^th Street to 57^th and is called Promontory Point. Its shelter house looks in much better shape now than when my friends and I went there to sunbathe and swim. Henny and her friend, Patrick, bike to the Point on rental bikes—yes, Chicago has a Bike Share program. I can even tell you where the rental stations are.

Being the assistant to a chef, even a second- or third-tier one with a show on a local television channel, means a lot of cooking off-screen. I discovered that the venerable Coop, once a pioneer in changing community grocery shopping, is no more, but Henny shops at a nearby Whole Foods and at Harper Foods on 57^th Street. The Hobby House coffee shop, where we went for late night coffee, disappeared, but there is a wealth of small restaurants—Valois, rumored to be a favorite of the Obama family, an upscale restaurants called

appropriately Promontory, and a university neighborhood pub, The Woodland Tap, known familiarly as Jimmy’s after the late owner, where they serve terrific Polish sausage sandwiches.

In my day, Hyde Park was the home of the first Morton’s Steak House. When I was in college, I worked in a hospital administration office (the hospital now condos), and my boss used to take me to Morton’s for lunch and let me have a Brandy Alexander. It’s gone downtown now, but there is a boutique hotel, the Sophy. Henny has a lobster roll there and luxuriates in a place she can ill afford.

Searching for cookbooks for her chef employer to reference, Henny goes to 57^th Street Books, an independent bookstore with an electric choice of titles with plenty of browsing chairs and corners. I used to go there on Sundays in college to buy The New York Times.

Henny’s work requires her to consult with Irene Foxglove, the chef, at the Foxgloves’ North Shore apartment. A search led me to put the apartment on North Clarendon; actual buildings there gave me details to describe the apartment. Henny is not quite brave enough to drive on Lake Shore Drive, known in my day as the Outer Drive (it always scared me a bit), but I learned that she can take a public bus from Hyde Park right up to Clarendon Park—an hour-long bus ride.

Writing about and discovering the changes in my little corner of Chicago was a lot of fun but also educational. I hope the combination of memory and internet research allowed me to create a realistic fictional world for Henny, Irene, and Patrick. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.