William Friedkin's Childhood Apartment

4826 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60640

Film director William Friedkin (1935 - 2023) lived in an apartment in this building in his youth. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who had fled a pogrom in 1903. 

Friedkin later attended Senn High School in Edgewater, where he excelled at basketball, if not in class. 

Friedkin is famous for directing The French Connection (1971), which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, and The Exorcist (1973) which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won two (Best Screenplay and Best Sound). He later directed To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), starring Evanston native and Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member William Petersen and Park Ridge native John Pankow (the brother of Chicago trombonist James Pankow), and directed two film adaptations of the work of Chicago playwright Tracy Letts, Bug, (2006) and Killer Joe (2011).

As a young man, Friedkin worked at WGN, where he worked on Bozo’s Circus, among other programs. His film debut came when he directed a made-for-television documentary about a Illinois death-row prisoner, Paul Crump. The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) succeeded in sparing Crump’s life. According to a 1993 essay published in the Chicago Tribune, Friedkin had had only one hour-long lesson in filmmaking before shooting the documentary. 

In the same essay, Friedkin recalled that he “used to hang out with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, and I played poker at Algren's house every Friday night. . . .Those were great days, and I learned a lot from them. . . .In those days Algren, who's easily one of the most definitive Chicago novelists, found his books banned from the Chicago Public Library.” 

In his interviews over the years and in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection, Friedkin often described his early life in Uptown. After Freidkin’s death in 2023, NewCity’s Ray Pride noted that Friedkin’s memoir described how, in the aftermath of a heart attack, Freidkin had “A sudden image of myself pumping a little three-wheeler bike as fast as the wind along Sheridan Road in Chicago when my world was filled with promise.”

Pride quoted Friedkin as sharing additional details of his Uptown childhood: “Our neighbors were Jewish, German, Irish and Polish, descendants of the Europeans who settled in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. We used to sleep in Gunnison Park just off Sheridan with thousands of other families on a summer’s night. [But] it wasn’t as though I was deprived of anything. We were poor, but I never knew it. All my friends lived the same way.” [The Chicago Park district currently has no park named “Gunnison Park.” It is unclear to which park Friedkin may have been referring, although small green spaces currently exist along the east side of Sheridan just south of Castlewood Terrace and, fenced-in, just north of Lawrence Avenue.]

Friedkin worked at Wrigley Field in his early adolescence, “selling pop. They only had bottles of pop then, there weren't cans. You had to carry these huge cases of 30 bottles and kegs of ice in a half-moon tray that you wore around your neck. I used to get two cents a bottle — 60 cents a load. I would sometimes come home with 40 or 50 dollars. In a double-header I would make 90 dollars. I remember by heart the lineup of the 1945 Chicago Cubs team, which was the last [Cubs] team to go to the World Series [before the 2016 World Series Champions].” Around the same age, he worked as his uncle’s tavern, the Sip and Bottle, a mile south of this location at the corner of Irving Park and Sheridan. 

In Friedkin’s 1993 essay, he recalled the Chicago of his youth: “I loved Chicago then, as I do now. Life was an adventure, and the city was my teacher. As a kid, you could go from one neighborhood to another and enter into whole other worlds. My childhood was a very exciting time in a very exciting place. A lot of cultural currents were at work then that later came into flower, both politically and artistically . . .”

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