History in Little Village

Vincent and Mary Grittani opened a tavern here in 1923 and named it the "Home Run Inn" because baseballs had a way of flying out of the park across the street and shattering their front window at 4254 West 31st Street in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.  Vincent and Mary had a daughter, Loretta, who married an Italian immigrant named Nick Perrino.  Nick had moved to the United States at the age of 17 and ended up serving in the armed forces during the Second World War.  At the conclusion of hostilities, he returned home looking for a job.  Meanwhile, his father-in-law Vincent had passed away in 1943, and Mary needed help running the business.  Nick, a former mess sergeant, went to work at the Home Run Inn and began baking breadsticks for the bar patrons.  The breadsticks were a big hit, so Nick and Mary began experimenting with pizza.  After settling on a recipe, they began cutting up square slices of hot pizza and giving them away to the customers.  The pizza, which debuted in 1947, was an instant sensation, and before long the Home Run Inn became a pizza parlor.  Over the ensuing six decades, and primarily under the stewardship of Nick's son Joe, the Home Run Inn began selling frozen pizzas to local grocers, expanding to new retail locations, increasing the size of their original location (it now accomodates 600 people), and creating new facilities to manage the frozen pizza distribution demand.  Today, consumers in 20 states enjoy Home Run Inn's famous thin-crust pizza.  Incidentally, Mary Grittani passed away in 1970, and Nick Perrino passed away in 1990.  The business remains in the family today.

Farragut Career Academy was founded in 1894 at 2345 South Christiana Avenue, and named for David Farragut, who served as First Admiral in the United States Navy during the Civil War.  Its alumni include Kevin Garnett (who won an NBA title with the Boston Celtics in 2008), Pat Sajak (best known as host of the TV show “Wheel Of Fortune”), and Ernie Terrell (former heavyweight boxing champion and brother of Jean Terrell, who sang with the Supremes in the 1970s).

Al Capone was one of the most notorious gangsters in U.S. history.  He and his henchmen made their money primarily by bootlegging and operating casinos and speakeasies in the "roaring twenties."  He was on Chicago's first "most wanted" list, and he became the face of 1920s American gangster violence.  Capone made the suburban Hawthorne Hotel at this location one of his many business headquarters.  On September 20, 1926, a rival group of gangsters (including Vincent Drupi, Bugs Moran, and Hymie Weiss) attempted to kill Capone while he was eating lunch right here at the hotel (which is now the parking lot for a bank).  In the middle of his afternoon meal, the sound of machine gun fire flooded the restaurant, and Capone hit the deck.  Once the noise abated, Capone got up and walked to the front door in an effort to get a glimpse of his assailants.  At that moment, his bodyguard noticed that there was no damage and that the shots had been blanks designed to draw Capone into the open.  Again, Capone hit the deck just in the nick of time.  A fresh wave of machine gun fire promptly ensued, this time with more than 1,000 live rounds fired into the hotel.  Somehow, Capone survived the assault.