In 1908, Dr. Norine Devere Spencer and her husband, Dr. Charles Spencer, graduated from Loyola Medical School and moved to Albany Park. “When my husband and I came to look at the neighborhood,” Spencer remarked in 1948, “he said ‘Who are you going to treat, the mosquitoes?’”
As a historian of Chicago neighborhoods, and most fervently of my own, I think often about Norine Spencer’s story and the interesting ways it parallels life in Albany Park today, some 110 years later.
