History

The Forgotten History of Chicago’s Hillbilly Heaven

Years ago we remember stumbling into a breakfast joint in Lakeview and finding a perfect example of the kind of Southern country diner we grew up with in the midwest. What’s a Southern diner doing in the midwest, you ask? A lot of the south, white and black, wound up in more industrial parts of the north, midwest and west during World War II and after, and here was a place dishing up dirt-cheap, rib-sticking-good biscuits and gravy and grits to their kind, as if what was all around them was pig farms and Highway 61, not Chicago. It’s long gone, as is most of this white Southern Chicago of the 60s and 70s by now, but David Witter in New City has an evocative piece on the community centered around the Appalachian community in Uptown nicknamed Hillbilly Heaven. Witter cites, not surprisingly, Carol’s Pub as the main remaining outpost of redneck culture in the area, but we’d argue that there are still signs of it in bars and also in diners like the one we knew. (The recently-closed Standee’s was one, for instance.) If you know of one still around and worth checking out, feel free to post in the comments. [New City]

The Forgotten History of Chicago’s Hillbilly Heaven