Rehak Creative Services Announces Publication of Founder Bob Rehak’s New Photo Book

Uptown: Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood in the mid-1970s illustrates the impoverished times of this once-thriving neighborhood, says a spokesperson from Rehak Creative Services.

HOUSTON, TEXAS – September 30, 2013 – Rehak Creative Services is proud to announce the upcoming November 2013 publication of Uptown: Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood, from Rehak Creative Services founder and owner Bob Rehak.

The title will be published by Chicago’s Books Press, an imprint of Chicago’s Neighborhoods, Inc, says the Rehak Creative Services spokesperson.

According to Rehak Creative Services, the genesis of this project occurred in late July, 2013, when Rehak published a few of these images to his photo blog. With the assistance of a fellow online blogger, who re-posted the photos to her website, they soon went viral. At their peak, the postings received in excess of one million hits each month, reveals Rehak Creative Services.

Rehak Creative Services says Uptown was a popular entertainment district in Chicago during the 1920s. The dazzling array of spectacular ballrooms and movie theaters attracted a host of affluent professionals. They lived in apartment hotels and mansions designed for a modern urban lifestyle and often partied in the many taverns and clubs throughout the neighborhood. Fifty years later, Uptown had changed dramatically.

The book focuses specifically on this neighborhood of North Chicago. However, Rehak Creative Services points out that every major city in America contains at least one area coping with the same economic, social and political challenges.

Rehak Creative Services reports that Uptown and its highly unique forms of architecture attracted a much different crowd after World War II. As Uptown’s original residents moved to the less raucous suburbs, these deteriorating mansions were divided.

Apartment hotels eventually filled with poor migrants who had arrived from Asia, Appalachia and the South in search of work and inexpensive rents, says Rehak Creative Services. Many of these were converted into halfway homes for parolees, alcoholics and deinstitutionalized mental patients, The once-vibrant neighborhood, which many believed would surpass the city’s central business district, had become a wasteland.

When Rehak Creative Services founder, Bob Rehak, exited the elevated train at Broadway and Wilson Avenue in order to document the lives of Uptown residents, he found one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods – as well as its poorest.

The neighborhood was not merely a melting pot, according to owner, Bob Rehak of Rehak Creative Services. During years fraught with tension and anxiety, it also became a simmering cauldron of conflict. A long-time member of the Chicago Fire Department told the founder of Rehak Creative Services that the nation’s busiest fire station during the 1970s and early 1980s was based in Uptown.

According to Rehak Creative Services, the first person that Rehak photographed was an African American man fell to his knees, folded his hands in prayer and shouted, “My name is Jehovah.” This was just one of many such experiences that Rehak had on his first day of photographing in Uptown. Thus began Rehak’s four-year love affair with Uptown. He spent most of his free time, even holidays, exploring the life of this volatile neighborhood from late 1973 to early 1977.

The Rehak Creative Services founder intended to capture the stories of a variety of Uptown residents, including a number of struggling parents trying to maintain their families as street gangs, slumlords and day-labor agencies threatened to exploit their children.

Uptown: Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood is available on Amazon.com BarnesAndNoble.com, and select independent bookstores, says Rehak Creative Services.

Contact Rehak Creative Services:
3939 Glade Valley Drive
Kingwood, TX 77339