South Philly

We often say that if there's one other place in this country we'd like to live, it would be Philadelphia.  South Philly, in particular.  It's the one place that really encapsulates the qualities that we love about our favorite neighborhoods in Chicago---that mixture of successive waves of immigrants from around the world, thriving all-American businesses creating a time-warp to a lost era, and young people like us caught up in between.  Ninth street is the quintessential example of this: the century-old Italian produce stands and butchers are joined by competitors run by Latinos, and, for us, the cheese steaks for which many still stand in lines around the block have been supplanted by the tacos de queso at Fiesta de Acapulco.