I grew up in Albany Park, a few blocks from where, according to law enforcement, Elias Rodriguez left Chicago on May 21 with a .9 caliber pistol in his checked luggage. After he arrived in Washington, DC, witnesses say he shot to death two people attending a social event at the Capital Jewish Museum.
The killings might not have hit me as profoundly if I hadn’t also lived in an Albany Park courtyard building — so called because the apartments form a U shape; it is the architectural signature of the neighborhood, which is about six miles northwest of the Loop.
The L tracks that form a loop around the city’s commercial center bisect Albany Park. Fifty years ago, it was something between a working-class and lower-middle-class community. A branch of the L ended at Kimball and Lawrence Avenues, in the heart of the neighborhood…