The Furious Spoon, The Crotch, The Wonderful Walgreen's, and The Goddess And Grocer

5/20/2015

...Continued From Yesterday:

I hope Claire and Miguel’s new neighbors turn out to be as nice as they are.

But I do believe that city neighbors have to learn to be neighborly to and considerate of each otherwise nobody would survive living in such close quarters.

I say this having grown up in the city and, though I’ve spent most of my adult life living in what one of my children once described as “chain-link suburbia”,

I am a city girl at heart.

The view from my family's front yard in Northeast Philly.

Anyway, Friday evening after we were all cleaned-out for the day we headed back to Claire and Miguel’s apartment to clean up ourselves,

...and from there we walked to a Bucktown ramen restaurant called The Furious Spoon.

The décor was fun – we sat at long tables.

The place was pretty crowded, which was not surprising as the food was great.

Tom got the Chicken Ramen. Nobody was sure what that little spirally thing was in the soup, but Tom said it was quite tasty.

Claire and I got the Vegetable Ramen, which was loaded with mushrooms and had the most delicious broth,

...and Miguel got the Furious Ramen, which had slices of pork and a poached egg and which he said was very spicy but very good,

The only problem with the Furious Spoon was the ear-splittingly-loud rap that blasted from ubiquitous wall speakers. I asked the server to turn the volume down a bit but to no avail. Thus we hurried through our delicious meals and were quickly out of the restaurant, which Miguel thought was the point of the loud music: get the customers in and fed then chase them out so more customers can come in, be fed then chased out. If that was indeed the principal it worked, at least with us.

After dinner we strolled towards Wicker Park until we came to the 6-street intersection known as The Crotch.

I asked Claire and Miguel why this intersection is so called and they explained that many decades ago a 6-cornered intersection was built in another part of Chicago and was named Six Points. A few years later when later another 6-cornered intersection, this one, was built in Wicker Park, the locals also began calling their intersection Six Points. Well, it ticked off the folks in the area of the original Six Points that the Wicker Parkers had swiped not only the idea of their intersection but its name as well, and so in derision the original Six Pointers began calling the Wicker Park intersection The Crotch. And the name stuck.
Now, I've never seen Six Points, but I'd venture to say that of Chicago's two 6-cornered intersections The Crotch must be the superior as the world's grandest Walgreen's is located on one of the Crotch corners in what used to be an old bank building:

The vitamin section is in the old bank vault, and is thus called The Vitamin Vault:

After our tour of the wonderful Walgreen's we all agreed that some ice cream would be the very thing, so we walked to a deli called The Goddess And Grocer where we'd had dinner on a previous visit (see post from 9/30/2014).