Marla Mason remembers an Albany Park far different from the one home and condo buyers are flocking to today.

Mason, a pioneer developer in the famously diverse Northwest Side neighborhood, began acquiring properties when the area – bounded roughly by the Chicago River on the east and north, Montrose on the south and Kostner on the west – was in decline. Back then, most buyers were reluctant to look at anything west of Western Avenue.

Mason’s first property, an 18-unit apartment building at Sunnyside and Whipple, was in the midst of a “rock-and-roll neighborhood,” she recalls. “When we bought it, people were basically armed. They were getting arrested while we were showing apartments. It was really tough.”

Undeterred, she continued amassing buildings in the area and began converting them, believing that people who had been priced out of other “hip” neighborhoods would consider Albany Park, wishing to be part of its distinctively urban milieu. Numerous affordable and mostly anonymous restaurants and shops operated by a wide range of immigrants were a hidden charm, she believed at the time.

“People thought we were crazy,” she says. “I remember calling a guy with a building for sale. I said, ‘I’d like to see the building,’ and he said, ‘Just go over there. There aren’t any locks on the doors.’ I literally had to kick the door in. There were radiators on the stairs. My brother, who is my partner, refused to go inside. It was way below zero. I ran in and ran out. I remember it was really cold, and it smelled really bad in there. I came back to the car and said we had to make an offer.”

Mason was fortunate to have at least one friend who shared her belief in the viability of the neighborhood.

Robert Gecht, the Albany Bank (now Albank) executive who backed Mason and another developer when they began converting neighborhood buildings into condominiums in the early ‘90s, also remembers naysayers doubting the wisdom of these investments: “When we did (the first conversion), the reaction was, ‘You’re nuts. You’re crazy to be doing it. Nobody will ever buy.’ Our feeling was if we didn’t invest in our own community and try to increase the housing options in the area, then we really would be crazy.”

Time has vindicated both Gecht and Mason as Albany Park has rebounded spectacularly from its moribund late-‘80s state and evolved into another of Chicago’s “hot” neighborhoods. Property values are on the rise and developers are fighting over the types of buildings Mason was landing for a song just a few years ago.

“There has been a sea change in the perception of the community,” says Joel Bookman, a longtime resident and community redevelopment consultant. “Five or six years ago, people would say they wanted a condo anywhere but Albany Park. Now, it’s a desirable place they want to be. People are moving here because they want to be in a neighborhood that’s not only safe and interesting but also diverse, where they can comfortably experience other cultures. This is the way cities are supposed to be. Albany Park may be the pre-eminent example of that in the country.”

The North River Commission, a non-profit organization that works in Albany Park and the neighboring communities of North Park and Irving Park, reports that more than 40 percent of residents in the area are foreign-born, and students at Roosevelt High School, 3436 W. Wilson, speak more than 40 languages.

“Whether you are a Cambodian coming over and looking for a place to live where you can work nearby or a young professional who has been priced out of Lakeview but still wants an urban experience, there’s something for everyone,” Bookman says.

Though they shared a belief in the area, little did Mason or Gecht know that Albany Park would be swept up in a redevelopment explosion that has seen the relatively rapid transformation of many once-blighted and “iffy” neighborhoods.

“In retrospect, we were nuts,” says Mason, whose company, JMM Realty, LLC, now focuses mainly on building new homes. “But it worked.”

Albany Park’s very first conversion – large two-bedroom, two-bath units in a center-entrance six-flat – sold then for roughly $75,000, Gecht says. “Those same units today are selling for close to $275,000. New condominiums are typically selling anywhere from $200,000 to $225,000. The cost of housing has clearly gone up. However, compared to other areas around it, Albany Park is still relatively inexpensive.”

Albany Park has a number of things working for it, according to those who live and work there: proximity to expressways (the Kennedy and Edens expressways are a five-minute drive); proximity to mass transit (the Brown Line elevated train ends in Albany Park, at Kimball and Lawrence); its diverse collection of shops and restaurants; a river path; spacious homes; and tree-lined streets. But atop its list of attributes is value, those in the business say.

Prospective Lincoln Square and Ravenswood buyers who can no longer afford prices in those areas are more willing than in the past to head west, says Deborah Hess-Flocco, a principal at New Chicago Real Estate, Inc. She estimates prices in Albany Park are 10 to 20 percent less than those in Lincoln Square.

“I was with a single-family home buyer recently,” she says. “They bought a beautiful little vintage home on Sawyer near Wilson. I believe they paid $260,000 for a two-story home with a full basement. It needed some work, but I can tell you in the heart of Lincoln Square, a fixer-upper is still going to go for $400,000. You do the math. They just had to be willing to go across Kedzie Avenue.”

The median price for a three-bedroom house in Albany Park is $310,000 to $320,000, Hess-Flocco says. The median in Lincoln Square is getting close to $500,000.

Skip and Connie Chapman and their three children had outgrown their townhome in Ravenswood, where they had lived since 1989. When they began searching for a single-family home they could afford, they also “did the math” and realized Ravenswood was “out of the question.” They looked in Irving Park, Rogers Park and West Ridge before settling on a three-bedroom home in the 4800 block of North Christiana. They liked that the house was set back from the street with a decent-sized yard and a two-car garage, and that it was in a neighborhood full of families.

Connie Chapman believes Albany Park is a secret no more. A long-time commuter, Skip Chapman used to note that the crowds on the train began to thin out around the Irving Park and Montrose stops. Now, he says, trains are crowded until they stop at Western. “And there are still a lot of people getting off at Kimball Avenue.”

“There are a lot of people who don’t want to spend all their money on their home,” adds Mason. “People would rather send their kids to a really cool school or take a nice vacation. For them, the values in Albany Park are amazing.”

Chapman agrees, calling prices in Ravenswood “outrageous.”

“More and more people are finding out about this area,” Skip Chapman says. “They’re discovering these little hidden restaurants. Word of mouth is beginning to spread. It really reminds me of Ravenswood in the mid-‘90s.”

Albany Park has long been a multiethnic melting pot where immigrants new to America have sought to establish a foothold, find work and begin saving for their shot at the American Dream.

Bookman, who consults in community development around the country, has seen any number of cycles play out in Albany Park and says the area will always be an incubator for immigrants, primarily due to its proximity to the Brown Line and the abundance of multifamily buildings.

“The economics have traditionally worked in favor of the immigrants,” Bookman says. “Multifamily buildings have historically kept rents affordable and the shops along Lawrence Avenue have provided ample job opportunities for newcomers.”

Development has complicated the affordable housing equation somewhat, he concedes, but the city’s tax-increment financing program, for example, is providing loans and grants for upgrades primarily to homeowners of limited income in Albany Park.

“What you get is a real urban and ethnic polyglot,” Bookman says, “where people don’t just coexist, they enjoy living and shopping and working with each other.”

Nowhere is that ethnic mix more evident than behind the counter at Markellos Bakery, 3520 W. Lawrence.

Owner Steve Res, whose family emigrated from Greece when he was an infant, has created a shrine to the many ethnicities that support his business. More than 70 bills from at least 50 countries have been collected in the nine years since Res began encouraging customers to pay for their baked goods with the exotic – and often worthless – currencies of their homelands.

There’s everything from Iranian rials to Guatemalan quetzals to Vietnamese dong on the wall. There’s even a note for 10 billion Yugoslavian dinara. All told, it’s probably worth no more than 50 bucks, Res jokes, but that’s not the point.

“When people come in here, they want to look at the wall and see their currency up there,” he says. “There’s so many people from every part of the world here, it’s really just one big melting pot.”

One wave of newcomers follows another. In recent years, Latinos – primarily Mexican Americans – are filling in the gaps left by Korean Americans who left the city for the suburbs. The Koreans, so dominant in the ‘70s and ’80s that part of Lawrence was given the honorific name of Seoul Drive, replaced a thriving Jewish community that fled the city for the suburbs in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Other groups, including Yugoslavians, Bosnians, Lebanese and Vietnamese, also are in Albany Park but in smaller numbers. And in recent years, a new group – young professionals – has begun to make its presence felt.

“These aren’t BMW-driving yuppies,” Gecht is quick to point out. “These are Chevy-driving yuppies.”
“In terms of the dynamics on the street,” he adds, “we have more Mexican restaurants and they say they are opening a Starbucks at Kedzie and Wilson. So I guess that’s responding to the forces shaping the neighborhood.”

And some observers say Albany Park is poised to benefit from commercial redevelopment along Lawrence in the same way that Ravenswood has benefited from a commercial boom in Lincoln Square.

“I see lots of parallels going on in the development of Albany Park,” Hess-Flocco says. “Lawrence Avenue between Western and Kedzie is ripe for the kind of consumer-oriented development we’ve seen in Lincoln Square. All the same things that brought people to Lincoln Square – one of the huge draws was the Brown Line – are available in Albany Park.”

Gecht says that although only 30 percent of the buildings in Albany Park are owner-occupied, that figure is up from a low of about 19 percent in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“The percentage of owners has certainly increased,” he says. “Increasing the number of people who have a stake in the neighborhood is a good thing for any neighborhood.”

Parvin Naghavi is thrilled with the changes she’s seen in Albany Park since she and her brother opened Noon O Kabab eight years ago. The small restaurant, which serves Persian cuisine at 4661 N. Kedzie, was featured on WTTW’s Check, Please!, and has since been drawing lines of hopeful diners that stretch out the door, even on weeknights.

“I believe this is a very cosmopolitan place,” Naghavi says of Albany Park. “We see a lot of nationalities every day: Some they are Arabs, some they are Spanish; there are a lot of Americans moving in…Polish people…Korean people. I believe Albany Park has a lot of potential for people to show their beauty and the beauty of their culture to each other.”

And what does she think of the impending arrival of Starbucks, not to mention fairly new McDonald’s and Subway franchises not far from her front door?

“I am so happy,” she enthuses. “One day they go there, the next they come here. If it was only Persian food, or only Arab food or only Mexican food, there would be no basis for comparison. People would get bored. I like this situation.”

Dominic Pacyga, a professor of history at Columbia College Chicago who has written several books on immigrants and Chicago neighborhoods, says the infusion of young professionals could signal difficult days ahead for those at the bottom of Albany Park’s economic food chain.

“They’re attracted to these places because they are real,” he says. “They get attracted by the diversity. Once they move in and prices go up on rents and the Starbucks move in, then the Korean, Vietnamese and Mexican merchants can’t keep up with rents. And as their traditional customers move on, they move on also.”

Gecht and Bookman, who have spent a combined 60 years living and working in Albany Park, agree that maintaining diversity in the face of growth will require a delicate balancing act in Albany Park during the coming years.

Gecht acknowledges that some change may be inevitable.

“If you look at every neighborhood along the Brown Line, you see that every neighborhood – every single one, all the way downtown – has become somewhat gentrified. And I think that process is going on here, although I think there will be a different twist. And that is diversity will still be preserved here, although it may be more social and ethnic diversity than economic diversity. Here, I think you are still going to have people from lots of different areas, but their economic situation is going to be generally more homogenous because they are going to need more money to live here.”