Mom with the ‘spirit of the hustler’ bringing homemade ice cream to neglected stretch of North Lawndale

When she was a kid hungering for ice cream, Ida Nelson would trudge to the local gas station or perhaps to a food & liquor mart — the stand-in for a grocery store in her neighborhood.

North Lawndale had plans for an ice cream shop back in the spring of 1968. But then the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and those plans went unfulfilled in the wake of the riots that followed.

But Nelson has a dream. In a boarded-up North Lawndale three-flat — its walls grubby with graffiti, the grass strip just to the east littered with empty liquor bottles — she imagines gleaming glass cases, behind which “Key Lime Vibe,” “Peach Cobbler,” “Unicorn Magic” and countless other ice cream flavors tempt and tantalize.

A sun-bleached vinyl sign a few blocks away — “Coming Soon: Sugar Rush, Gourmet Coffee & Ice Cream Shop” — speaks of someone else’s unfulfilled dream.

That won’t be Nelson’s story, she says.

“I’ve got the spirit of the hustler. I’ve got that resilience from North Lawndale, where I learned from very early that no one was coming to save me,” said Nelson, 42, a single mother of five.

She plans to open Ida’s Artisan Ice Cream in early fall in the space at 3935 W. Roosevelt.

As a kid, Nelson remembers snow cones coming from a man who sold them out of a yard with sunflowers swaying at his back. At church, for special occasions, a parishioner would bring in homemade vanilla ice cream. Nelson has never forgotten the taste of real vanilla bean.

“You can’t get better than homemade ice cream,” she says.

Nelson offers hints of a difficult childhood, but she only invites so much prying. She grew up in her grandmother’s care, her father absent entirely, is all she will say.

“There were a lot of hard trials, but I navigated through it,” she said. No college though. She got pregnant at 16 and had to turn down an offer at Southern Illinois University.

Nelson makes her ice cream from scratch, but she isn’t starting from there. Her story began back in spring 2020, when COVID-19 swept across the city and she lost her marketing job at Rush University Medical Center. She allowed herself some time to fret, and then started thinking how she would survive.

Before she got laid off, she’d ordered a $40 ice cream maker on Amazon — something at the time for her kids’ enjoyment. Why not have a go at making — and trying to sell — ice cream?, she wondered.

She made her first batches in her North Lawndale kitchen, loaded them into the back of her 2016 Chevrolet Traverse, spreading the word on Facebook.

“I sold $1,000 worth of ice cream out of my trunk the first weekend,” she said.

She struggled with funding — something many Black entrepreneurs, and especially women, must deal with, she says. She tinkered and dabbled in her kitchen, with ingredients that included cream cheese, lemon, blueberries and Mexican cocoa.

Her first big order came a year after she started — a check for $2,000 to cater an event at Lawndale Christian Health Center in the summer of 2021. Far bigger orders followed. Visitors to last year’s Democratic National Convention got to sample her wares. Last week, she catered the Chicago Auto Show’s First Look For Charity Gala, and now she’s gearing up for a planned celebration for the city’s birthday in March.

In all, she’s sold about 7,000 gallons of ice cream, she says. It begins with hand-mixing the ingredients.

“I’m stirring up love in every bucket,” she says. Then the ingredients are churned in the “Ferrari of ice cream makers,” or “Big Girl Gertie,” as Nelson calls it.

“Every batch is tasted by me,” she says.

All five of her children — including her 8-year-old son Jet — are in some way involved in her business, which for now operates out of a cramped rented kitchen on the Northwest Side.

“He’s super cute, but he really actually knows the brand and the product and he knows how to talk to people,” she said of her 8-year-old. “He will come up to you and ask what is your favorite flavor.”

Nelson is insistent, though, that she isn’t simply selling and making ice cream. She scrolls through the text on her cell phone, reading off her bullet-point goals in the neighborhood where she grew up. She wants her shop to be a place to gather, a place for celebrations, a place to give folks who’ve struggled a second chance, so she’d like to hire some ex-offenders. She wants to be an inspiration to other Black women and other mothers who are considering opening up a business.

Gazing up and down the gloomy, long-neglected stretch of West Roosevelt and at the boarded-up windows of the three-flat where she hopes to open her shop, it’s easy to wonder if her dream will end up like so many before hers: nowhere.

Nelson won’t even consider the notion.

“I made it here,” she says, gesturing to the rented kitchen space around her. “I have had wild success on my own without having a storefront, without having an ice cream truck. The bottom line is: I’m not necessarily waiting for the door to open, I’m bringing the people to the door.”

To learn more about Nelson and her ice cream, go to idasartisan.com.