Now We Live on Clifton

1974, 26 minutes

Now We Live on Clifton
Now We Live on Clifton

Now We Live on Clifton follows 10 year old Pam Taylor and her 12 year old brother Scott around their multiracial West Lincoln Park neighborhood. The kids worry that they'll be forced out of the neighborhood they grew up in by the gentrification following the expansion of DePaul University.

Now We Live on Clifton will be released on DVD in 2012 as part of The Kartemquin Collection, Volume 4: The Collective Years.

Comments

May 12, 2011 - 10:47pm

Anonymous

Wow!! I was 13 when this was filmed, my name is Raymond Walter evans, my nickname was Wally at the time. I barely remember being filmed with my best friends Scott Taylor and Mario Gonzalez. I seen the film on wttw channel 11! A flood of childhood memories came rushing back after watching the film! I've often wondered what life had laid out for Scott, Pam and Mario! My old neighborhood , and the people in it, seem like another place and time. My life after this film was made, is another story. I am a survivor of the depaul neighborhood and and an abusive family life, and became somewhat successful inspite of many hardships. I hope to purchase the DVD when it becomes available! Thanks for keeping this film alive!

May 13, 2011 - 1:40pm

Anonymous

I saw the film for the first time last night. Anyone know when was the film made? I grew up in Chicago around the same time and recognize some place in the film.

It is fairly easy now to use the internet to locate your friends from the past. You never know, they may even be on Facebook. I hope you can find them. Good luck!

May 13, 2011 - 7:51pm

Rebecca Amdur Daly

I attended Oscar Mayer in the 70s and early 80s with my two sisters. I can't beleive I have never heard of this film! My sister in Seattle left me a message on Firday, but I had already missed the first showing. I am so excited to watch on Sunday. Anything for a glimpse back at the rolling hills of Depaul that brought us so much laughter!

May 15, 2011 - 2:35am

Anonymous

I saw this film tonight,alas missed the very beginning.What a wonderful story and I so enjoyed seeing the neighborhood as it was. I attended De Paul beginning in 1983 and the gentrification was a full-on press already. But I still remember Belden as a two way street and that a junkyard actually was on Fullerton divided in half by Wayne Ave. When I started at De Paul it had enormous gravel parking lots, but we students spent a lot of time on the Hill as well.

August 12, 2011 - 1:37pm

Anonymous

I am showing this film to some of students at DePaul on August 29 and am wondering what happened to Pam and Scott? Would love to have them or others featured in the film come and share the memories with my students.

December 10, 2011 - 7:32pm

Elizabeth L. Miranda

Hi, I remember when this was filmed. I was playing in the play ground that day and my brother Rick was on the monkey bars watching the boys play baseball. It's in the film.

I lived down the street from The Taylor's and had a crush on Scott. I was five years old then and remember saying " if I'd marry Scott one day, I'd be "Elizabeth Taylor". This was a great blast from the past. Thank you!

December 10, 2011 - 8:32pm

Dotty Cowles-Newton

I have sought to see the film in its entirety but always I seem to come into it the same place on at least 3 of the occasions WTTW has shown it. Even so it captivates, and wonder what has happened everyone interviewed. I grew up similarly a few streets away at Armitage and Howe and went to Lincoln school from 1965 to 1971certainly multicultural, and economically diverse at that time. I relate very much to lament that change was coming, apparent and inevitable homogenization. My family and I living in an apartment that rented for 100 dollars a month. Our neighbors included; hippies and yippies commingling with the rising up angry militants. My 12 year old black, Spanish and white cohorts and I gathered on stoops each evening and watched the world, we sat and listened to anti war rhetoric and peace chants from our third floor window as well as to shouts and rants from student riots across the way at Waller. Overall we learned to live with others. Thanks for capturing the innocence and poignancy of that time and place.

December 11, 2011 - 12:56pm

Peter Kuttner

I know the building Dotty lived in. My Rising Up Angry friends Pam and Aaron lived on the third floor with a flock of uncaged finches. The birds stayed in one room because of a curtain of glass beads hanging in the doorway. Both of them worked at the Fritzi Englestein Free Health Clinic in a church just east of Brown Line L stop at Diversey, run by Rising Up Angry, an organization serving the white poor and working-poor community. The clinic which was modeled after the Black Panther health centers on the south and west sides. There is more to the church's historical connection to the IL Black Panther Party. The door to the West Side apartment in which Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in 1969 was hidden in the room of a seminary student who lived above the Fritzi clinic. The almost 100 bullet holes shot through the door from the outside helped lawyers to prove that the FBI and Cook County Sheriff's police intended to kill whoever was in the apartment

Pam continues to work in alternative health care in Chicago.
Aaron, the cartoonist for Rising Up Angry Funnies, a regular feature of the organization's newspaper, designs beer bottle labels for a printer in La Crosse, WI.

December 28, 2011 - 1:16pm

pam taylor

wow! i can't believe that this film had such an impact on people. my sister just sent me this link. hey, wally, if you read this i know scott would love to say hi. we wonder about our friends all the time. i loved growing up in that neighborhood. i still live in the city and am raising 2 kids who attend public schools as well. i feel so lucky to have been a part of such a great film. it takes me back to a different time.

January 13, 2012 - 7:32pm

Shawn Goldstein

I have only been able to see the clip of this - I live out of the Chicago area now, but this was one of the happiest carefree times of my life. I don't remember the filming of this, even though I am in it...

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Video

See video

Recent News

The Chicago Maternity Center Story screens at Doc Films this Sunday

November 16, 2011

Doc Films' 10-week Kartemquin retrospective continues this Sunday, November 20 at 7pm with The Chicago Maternity Center Story & Women's Voices: The Gender Gap. In celebration of Kartemquin's 45th anniversary, The University of Chicago's Doc Films is bringing the art of documentary storytelling back to the place where our history all began…

Attending this event and leading the discussion after the screening will be:

Suzanne Davenport and Jerry Blumenthal, filmmakers;
Kay Harvey, doula and ICTC member;

Filmmakers

Filmmakers
Jerry Blumenthal
Alphonse Blumenthal
Susan Delson
Sharon Karp
Peter Kuttner
Gordon Quinn
Richard Schmiechen

Distinctions

Special Kartemquin 45th Anniversary Broadcast
WTTW 11
2011
I Space Gallery, UIUC
2005
Official Selection
Festival dei Popoli, Florence, Italy

Press

"By allowing the children to watch the world around them and talk about it, Kartemquin has managed to make the film accessible to the public at large..."

—Ralph Cintron, The New Art Examiner