Taylor Street Certified: Growing up in Chicago’s Little Italy

What does it mean to be raised by a neighbourhood? In this essay, Louis  reflects on growing up in Chicago's Little Italy, where community meant looking out for one another, showing up when it mattered, and making sure nobody went without.

People say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, on Taylor Street, Chicago’s Little Italy, it took a neighborhood.

I invented the phrase Taylor Street Certified™  while writing my new book about the neighborhood that raised me. Nobody called themselves that when I was growing up. There was no certificate, no test, and no committee deciding who qualified. I needed a way to describe the people who made Taylor Street what it was—the people who lived by an unwritten code that everyone seemed to understand.

Being Taylor Street Certified™ had nothing to do with money, education, status, or importance. It was about how you lived. Family mattered. Loyalty mattered. Friendship and responsibility mattered. You showed up when someone needed you. You watched out for other people’s children. You helped when a family was struggling. You understood that being part of a neighborhood carried obligations as well as benefits.

You didn’t have to do anything extraordinary to be Taylor Street Certified™. You simply had to be there when someone needed you.

Take, for instance, the Cozzi family, who owned Cozzi’s butcher shop.

Everybody on Taylor Street knew Cozzi’s.

My mother would send me there with instructions:

“Tell Joe we need meat for dinner, and something I can make another meal from. We only have a dollar. Joe will know what I need.”

So I would go to Cozzi’s and tell Joe exactly what my mother had said.

And Joe did know.

He didn’t reach for the cheapest meat in the case. He gave us the best he had. Then he would top it off, adding enough to make sure my mother had what she needed—not just for that night’s dinner, but for another meal as well.

I gave him the dollar and carried the package home.

I was a kid. I didn’t understand what had just happened. To me, this was simply how you bought meat at Cozzi’s.

As far as I knew, dinner—and sometimes tomorrow’s dinner—cost a dollar.

It took me years to understand what Joe Cozzi had done. And he wasn’t doing it only for us. The Cozzis took care of families throughout the neighborhood.

The Cozzis were Taylor Street Certified™.

And they were just one of many.

That same spirit ran throughout Taylor Street. If someone was sick, you visited. If someone died, you attended the wake. If a family needed help, you helped. If a child got into trouble, someone stepped in to set him straight before his parents ever heard. 

Relationships mattered. People mattered. The neighborhood mattered.

As a boy, I thought that was simply how people lived. It took a lifetime away from Taylor Street to understand how special it was.

That is why I wrote Taylor Street Certified™: The Tales of Chicago’s Little Italy—to preserve not only the place, but the people and what it felt like to belong there.

People say it takes a village to raise a child. I had one. It was called Taylor Street.

"You can find this story and many others about the people who made Chicago’s Little Italy what it was in my new book, Taylor Street Certified™: The Tales of Chicago’s Little Italy."