My mother grew up in a four or five room apartment on the second floor of a three story building on Niska Street. She was very fond of its balcony and apparently spent a good deal of time there. This undated photo shows her standing behind one of the flower boxes she kept to brighten up the otherwise drab exterior of the building. Note the appearance of the street and surrounding buildings. Her memories of growing up in an apartment with a balcony may have been one of the reasons that she and my father chose the apartment with the balcony in Chicago in which we lived until I was twelve.