Pete Lit

Witnessed

Caffe RoM on Franklin Street, 8:15 a.m. Four businessmen sit at two small tables, all of them wearing dark blue suits, all with eyes glued to their Blackberries and fingertips racing over the buttons, none of them conversing with each other. Their physical proximity seemed fairly pointless. The scene would have made a great photograph.

Posted Without Comment

(Photo by John V. Moore.)

Metaphysical graffiti

I noticed these messages this morning, spray-painted on the sides of freight cars which idled on the siding adjacent to my commuter line.

FOR MY BROTHER, I MISS YOU! THE ONLY KING OF TOLEDO!

And, even better...

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

I wonder how many moms have even noticed that second one.

Jack Clark's cabbie noir

Intriguing piece here at the Reader about Nobody's Angel, by Chicago cabbie Jack Clark.

Set in the early 1990s, the book is an eye-opening immersion in a cabbie subculture built around a daily series of judgment calls and crapshoots aimed at avoiding the passenger who'll stiff or kill you. Written in prose that goes down easy as a cold beer, it offers locals the same delight-in-recognition we get from a good locally shot film, immortalizing the streets we walk and the neighborhoods we hang out in.

Equally interesting is the book's publication history.

About 20 years ago Jack Clark fashioned a noir novel out of a string of vignettes drawn from his night job as a Chicago cabbie. Having failed to find a publisher for it, he tried to get it serialized in the Reader. When the Reader took a pass, Clark self-published 500 copies under the title Relita's Angel and began distributing them from his taxi. For the next year or so, he carried a stack of the paperbacks in his cab, unloading them at $5 each—$3.14 more than his printing cost—on any passenger willing to say what the hell.

I don't read much crime fiction other than Jim Thompson, but I might just take the plunge on this one.

Overheard

"When Blago says 'It's in God's hands', I want to slap the crap out of him."
- Metra commuter, 7/29/10

Chicago words

Chicago Magazine presents the top forty English words produced by the city. Before reading the list, "clout" (which came in at #3) was the first word that came to mind, though I didn't realize it was from Irv Kupcinet - I had always associated it with Mike Royko. Other personal favorites on the list are smoke-filled room, Mickey Finn, razzmatazz and Dopp kit (that's what my Chicago-native dad always called a toiletry kit), and I had no idea that many of the other, more common words (like cloud nine, jinx, jungle gym, egghead, midway and yuppie) had Chicago origins.

(Via Wordorigins.org.)

Jesse White is my hero

Not only is Mr. White the founder of the ever-wondrous Tumblers, but his Secretary of State office has now instituted self-service kiosks (at the Loop facility, at least) for license plate renewals. The entire process is as follows: 1) scan the barcode on your renewal form; 2) swipe your credit card; 3) remove your sticker and registration from the printer. No waiting in roped-off lines, no suffering the indignity of having your personal check cross-checked against the deadbeat list. This new process is even easier than renewing by mail, which I rarely get around to doing in time anyway.

Stuart Brent, 1912-2010

Farewell to a bookselling legend. I never visited his namesake store, but did frequent his son Adam's Brent Books in the West Loop for several years and thoroughly enjoyed Stuart's memoir The Seven Stairs. My daughter has also been a member of the Stuart Brent Children's Book Club for several years, and their selections are consistently wonderful and first-rate.

Henry Blake Fuller

The Chicago Reader's "Best of Chicago" issue includes this entry: "Best Underappreciated Chicago Novel", which Whet Moser says is Henry Blake Fuller's Bertram Cope's Year.

Too gay for its time and too closeted to be ahead of it, it seems that Bertram Cope’s Year is destined to be rediscovered as a historical curio every couple decades, but it deserves better. Fuller was at his best when his prose was at its most dry and ironic, and taboos forced upon his writing a subtlety lacking in the overwrought realist fiction of the era.

Anyone who has slogged through Dreiser (whom I've enjoyed, though it's somewhat of a chore) has to be intrigued by that "subtlety" aspect. And "underappreciated" might be generous - not only have I not read Fuller's novel, I hadn't even heard of it before. With those past accolades by the likes of Carl Van Vechten and Edmund Wilson, of course I'll try to hunt it down, but given that my otherwise well-stocked local library doesn't even have Fuller's best-known novel, The Cliff-Dwellers, I'm not optimistic.

Mighty indeed

Plenty of tired but happy people around town this morning. Myself included.

Here come the Hawks, the mighty Blackhawks...

...and several years earlier than I would have expected. I had thought the Blackhawks were right there on the brink, though maybe still a year or two away from being championship caliber. Yet here they are, just one win away from their first Stanley Cup in almost fifty years.

I must admit that my Blackhawks history is surprisingly spotty. Given that I come from a Chicago-area spectator-sports-loving family and was quite a sports a fanatic myself for my first three decades, and have always admired hockey, I've never really been a big fan of the team.

When I was five or six, I remember listening to Hawks games on WIND in the evening, to lull myself to sleep. That was at the tail end of the era of Bobby Hull (part of the renowned MPH line, with Pit Martin and Jim Pappin), just before Hull bolted for the richer pastures of Winnipeg and the fledgling World Hockey League and put the team on a downward spiral that it didn't recover from for nearly two decades.

After Hull departed my fandom did as well, and was revived only during the late 80s and early 90s when, fresh out of college, I finally attended my first Hawks games at the legendary old Chicago Stadium and was instantly hooked. Watching games from the second balcony there was truly an unforgettable experience. Cheap-seats Hawks fans are probably the most passionate and knowledgable sports fans anywhere - and also cynical and sarcastic, which of course immediately endeared them to me. Two anecdotes from that period:

First: Back then the Hawks' power play was particulary inept. Even with a man advantage they'd be lucky to get off more than one or two shots on goal, and rarely scoring - in fact, a shorthanded goal by the other team was at least as likely as the Hawks scoring on the power play. It got so bad that when the Hawks were on a power play and dumped the puck across the blue line (since Denis Savard seemed to be the only guy on the entire team who could stick-handle the puck across the line, even with a man advantage), the guys in the second balcony would call out "Line change!", as if the best the Hawks could hope for on the power play wasn't a goal, but a moderately successful change of lines. Thing is, those fans were deadly accurate in that assessment.

Second: Ed Olczyk was a local Chicago kid who was a high draft pick of the Hawks and played several unaccomplished seasons with the team. Then he was traded away, to Winnipeg, and I happened to be at his first game back in Chicago after being traded. "This is cool," I thought. "The fans will definitely give the local guy a warm welcome on his return. Was I ever wrong. When they announced Olczyk before the game, some guy in the second balcony yelled, "Hey Olczyk! Your wife's a dyke!" Obviously I have no idea how accurate that comment was, but it was hysterical none the less.

Back then, the team's dinosaur owner, Bill Wirtz, refused to broadcast home games on local TV, even when the games were sold out, arguing that it wasn't fair to the ticket-buying fans. (Who presumably couldn't care less, since they wouldn't need to watch on TV anyway.) This mindless stance even extended to playoff games, and when the Hawks made the playoffs in 1991, I went so far as to watch every game at Sluggers in Wrigleyville, which swiped every game off the satellite dish and made a small fortune showing them on a huge projection screen in their back room. (Being there also gave me the memorable sight of a drunken patron, who had been at the Cub game that afternoon and whose drinking day had undoubtedly commenced around mid-morning, blearily marking the end of a Hawks' loss by flinging a full can of beer at the big screen. And not being ejected.)

My buddy Chris and I would sit there in the plastic lawn chairs at Sluggers during the Hawks-North Stars opening series, drinking far too many beers for a weeknight, and wondering if there would be enough players left on the ice to finish the game after the endless fights (especially between the troglodyte tag-teams of Stu Grimson-Mike Peluso vs. Basil McRae-Shane Churla) sent most of both rosters to the penalty box. But spending the next two years in Champaign for grad school dampened my ardor for the Hawks, even despite them reaching the 1992 Stanley Cup finals but losing to Pittsburgh, in what would be their last finals appearance before this season. And I've mostly been away from the team ever since.

Ah, yes, this season. Bill Wirtz passed away several years ago, and his son Rocky has totally revitalized the team, doing all of the right things. Putting home games on TV. Embracing the team's old icons - Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Tony Esposito - and bringing them back as heroes and the best goodwill ambassadors the team could possible have. Signing the team's young stars - Kane, Toews, Keith - to expensive long-term deals, locking them up as the stable core of the team for years to come instead of pinching pennies and letting them escape as free agents. And now they're one win from their first Stanley Cup since 1961.

And yet I can't really claim to being a fan, or truly savoring their fantastic playoff run. I just don't have that emotional attachment to the team, haven't been to a game in person for fifteen years didn't even watch a substantial portion of a game on TV this season until just this past Sunday, and am only just now figuring out how to pronounce "Byfuglien." So instead of getting stark-raving-mad, red-jersey-attired like most of the city seems to have become, I'm instead admiring the Hawks from a safe distance. Part of that is that I hate bandwagoners and know I have no right to claim to suddenly be a fan after ignoring the team for so long, and suppose part of it is also that, being so familiar with Chicago sports for so many years, there's always the nagging feeling that defeat will ultimately be snatched from the jaws of victory, as the Bears and especially the Cubs have proven so memorably, time and again.

When the Hawks win it - and I do mean when; they truly seem to be the team of destiny - I'll just sit back, smile, and raise a glass to them. But I won't be getting shitfaced drunk, running out to the souvenir stand or lining up for the victory parade. It will be their victory, and that of their true-blooded and long-suffering fans, but not mine. And I'm fine with that. This is great for Chicago, and I'm glad to be a part of it, even from such a far distance.

Beneficial compulsion

"Chance has certainly played its part, but one thing that’s certain is their inner compulsion – and the stronger the compulsion, the further one goes."
- Bei Dao, "Once Upon a Time the Zhou Brothers"

Dao's quote muses on the success of the Zhou brothers, Chicago-based artists, in the recent "Chicago Issue" of Granta. Reading that line on the train this morning inspired me to set the journal aside and delve back into the short story I've been writing off and on during the last few weeks. I rarely write in the morning, but thanks to that impetus I knocked off another couple hundred words or so before I arrived downtown. I'm certainly not compulsive with my writing, though a little compulsion would probably do me good and help me "go further."

The Almost-Trifecta

Julie pointed out last night that the Chicago area almost accomplished a clean sweep of the three big competition shows that concluded this week: Lee DeWyze (from Mount Prospect) won American Idol and Michael Ventrella (from Bartlett) won The Biggest Loser but, alas, Evan Lysacek (from Naperville) only finished second on Dancing With the Stars. All of which, for me, mitigates the ongoing woes of most (but not all - Go Hawks!) of our local sports teams a lot more than you might expect.

Pat Wright

That lovely painting above ("View From 18th Street Bridge") is the work of Chicago artist Pat Wright. I see this railroad bridge (at roughly 16th and Canal) twice a day from my train, and the building on the left also happens to be a paper recycler that is a client of the bank I work for.

White Sox, R.I.P.?

This screenshot from the Chicago Tribune suggests that the paper's website custodians might have been up way too late last night. Or is the paper wryly commenting on the White Sox's prospects for this season?

"When he struck out, the low moan was genuine."

The Chicago Reader links to a wonderful 1972 column by Mike Royko, in which he vividly remembers seeing Jackie Robinson's first visit to Wrigley Field.

Robinson came up in the first inning. I remember the sound. It wasn't the shrill, teenage cry you now hear, or an excited gut roar. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall, middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.

When Robinson stepped into the batter's box, it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.

He swung at the first pitch and they erupted as if he had knocked it over the wall. But it was only a high foul that dropped into the box seats. I remember thinking it was strange that a foul could make that many people happy. When he struck out, the low moan was genuine.

I still miss Royko.

Bill Jackson, a/k/a B.J.

I'm quite pleased to see this interview at Beachwood Reporter with one of my childhood heroes, Bill Jackson, creator of The B.J. and Dirty Dragon Show and Gigglesnort Hotel. Here Jackson memorably describes the frenzied taping of one segment:

The segment was a doozie. Multiple sets. Roll tape! The director hit the shots right on the money. The audio engineer feverishly controlled microphone volume, brought in mood music, and nailed a multitude of sound effects precisely on cue. Camera operators swiveled, dollied, trucked, framed, focused, and always, always kept the puppeteers heads out of the shots. And the puppeteers. The puppeteers, myself included, became a frenzy of bodies rushing from set to set, hitting marks, grabbing up a puppet, lip-synching the dialogue, tossing down that character and rushing for the next. When the scene ended, the studio resembled the remains of a battle field; a haze of smoke lingering over the sets; puppets strewn like dead bodies, their operators sitting in a panting daze; camera operators drooped against their machines; the audio operator face down over his console, and the director silent and staring wide-eyed at the screen.

Contrast that with his later description of what locally-produced TV has become:

Stations have been bought up by big companies and the bottom line has become a station manager's bottom line if he or she is to retain the position. Today's studio production almost totally is automated. Dehumanized. No camera operators, minimal lighting and sound, fewer stagehands, fewer engineers, and practically no one but a lone "director" operating a remote control board that switches the cameras to about three basic shots. Profits dictate and the ledger's bottom line has taken the heart out of locally produced programs.

I'm all for progress and moving ahead, but I can't help think that, in watching reruns on Cartoon Network again and again, my daughter is missing something magical that I enjoyed in my own childhood. Nothing that passes for kids' TV these days can compare with what Bill Jackson, Ray Rayner and Bob Bell created during the 1960s and 1970s. And that seems quite sad.

Dead River

Leave it to the good folks at Atlas Obscura to find a local oddity I had never heard of: Dead River in Zion, which flows towards but usually never quite reaches Lake Michigan. Here's a satellite image from Google Maps, which indeed shows the river dead-ending at the beach. As Atlas Obscura mentions, the Chicago River was once the same way - an inconsequential current flowing out of inland marshes, before the dredging of the river's mouth at the lakefront made it permanently navigable.

Moonbeam Returns

Jerry Brown's announcement this week that he is running for governor of California has prompted this fine NYT piece on where his "Governor Moonbeam" nickname first came from: Chicago's own Mike Royko. As a longtime Royko fan, I've always been aware of the nickname (in fact, I can't think of Brown without "Moonbeam" coming to mind) but didn't realize that Royko later distanced himself from it.

“I have to admit I gave him that unhappy label,” Mr. Royko wrote. “Because the more I see of Brown, the more I am convinced that he has been the only Democrat in this year’s politics who understands what this country will be up against.”

What the country would be up against was four years (and ultimately eight) of Ronald Reagan, a prospect which in retrospect we all should have been much more wary of.

Happy Birthday, Chicago!

A very happy 173rd to Chicago, which was incorporated as a city on this day in 1837. Chicago History Journal has some interesting insights on the city's earliest days, including this surprising response to its request for its very first loan:

State Bank Of Illinois, Springfield, May 31, 1837. Peter Bolles, Esq.,

Dear Sir: Your letter of the 18th, addressed to the president of this bank and proposing on behalf of the city of Chicago a loan from this bank of the sum of $25,000, has been laid before the directors of the bank, and, I regret to have to state, declined. I am very respectfully, your ob't serv't,

A. H. Ridgely, Cashier.

Re-JEC-ted! Fortunately, or unfortunately, the city has had absolutely no problem going into debt ever since.

(Image: Saloon Building at Clark and Lake Streets, which housed the first City Hall.)

Wabash Avenue, 1900

I love almost all of the old photos at Shorpy, but what I love most of all are the full-sized original versions of each displayed photo. Case in point: this 1900 image of the west side of Wabash Avenue in Chicago, looking north from Adams Street (presumably from the Adams El station). The main image is interesting enough, but if you click on "View full size" you'll see an immensely larger version, in which fine details can be easily discerned. That image I've posted above is cropped from just a fraction of the larger photo, from which you can clearly see the faces of pedestrians and read shop signs. The literatus in me couldn't help being drawn to the "Pilgrim Press Booksellers" and "Summer Reading", though the former was presumably a purveyor of inspirational works which would probably not have been of much interest to me. If you look several floors up on the facade of this building, the name "Potter Palmer" can be seen, which leads me to believe that this is actually the backside of the Palmer House hotel which would have fronted onto State Street, just one block to the west.

Royko vs. Sinatra: Postscript

A few months back, I posted about the infamous angry letter than Frank Sinatra once sent to Mike Royko, as Old Blue Eyes was quite miffed over a Royko column which he felt had insulted him. At that time I thought the hilarious column which Royko wrote in response, which I remembered as being titled "Don't Bet Against Sinatra", was no longer in print. However, this morning at the library I browsed through One More Time, one of two Royko anthologies still in print, and was pleased to find the column there, under the unfamiliar title "Mr. Sinatra Sends A Letter." And even better, it's available online at the ethically slippery but relentlessly addictive Google Books. Go check it out - it's one of my very favorite Royko columns.

Bill Gleason

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Chicago sportswriter Bill Gleason, who died over the weekend at the ripe old age of 87. I can honestly say I don't remember any of his writing (he was with the Sun-Times, and my family read the Tribune) but his real legacy was as a founding member of "The Sportswriters" talk show, first on radio on WGN and later on TV on SportsChannel. The setting of the show was wonderfully natural - four guys sitting around a poker table in a smoke-filled room (literally - Gleason and Ben Bentley would be puffing big cigars for the entire broadcast), arguing, laughing, launching opinions that they could sometimes back up, sometimes not. In other words, just like any everyday sports conversation you yourself might have. Gleason came across like the crusty, wise, seen-it-all old timer (even more so than the even older Bentley, who only seemed expert on the subject of boxing) who lent an air of gravity to the red-faced bluster of Bill Jauss and the hip smartassery of Rick Telander. It was just four guys talking - no guests, no call-ins, none of the blowdried ego-stroking that passes for sports talk shows these days.

"The Sportswriters" was the only show I could stomach on the maddeningly middlebrow WGN, the leading Chicago station of the era which my parents listened to avidly. One of my fondest memories is driving home from somewhere or another on Sunday afternoons, listening to the show with my dad (whom, owing to the combative nature of the show's participants, always called it "The Sportsfighters"). Gleason, like my dad, was one of those no-BS, old-school guys that are becoming rarer every day. Farewell, sir.

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"I have lived in other cities but been inside only one."
- Ben Hecht

(In case you're wondering, that city was Chicago. 1001 Afternoons in Chicago is one of my very favorite books about our fair city, and is due for a re-reading in the coming year.)

Racine Avenue, No Respect?

Racine Avenue doesn't seem to get much formal respect from the City of Chicago, despite being one of its longest streets. Its path runs for roughly 21 miles (albeit not continuously), from near the intersection of Lawrence and Broadway in Uptown, all the way down to Blue Island where it finally dead-ends at Vermont St. True, it's only a minor arterial street, situated halfway between the major arteries of Ashland Avenue and Halsted Street. But still, despite its considerable length, the street is chopped apart in numerous places, most notably at waterways and expressways where its pass-through would have come at considerable expense. Specifically, Racine does not have even a single bridge over any of the waterways it would potentially cross - not the North Branch of the Chicago River:

Nor the South Branch:

Nor even the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Blue Island - though, admittedly, the lack of a bridge there is a moot point, as the street ends just north of the canal:

And with highways it's not much better. Racine doesn't get an overpass on the Kennedy Expressway:

Nor the Stevenson Expressway; in fact, Racine doesn't even exist between the South Branch and 31st Street - had its path been continued, in this photo it would have intersected the expressway roughly at the 55 symol:

 

Nor I-57:

The only expressway where Racine gets an overpass is at the Eisenhower, and even there it only gets one ramp - an on-ramp into the westbound lanes:

A little Racine love, Chicago...please!

Algren and Terkel

Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel in 1975, just before Algren's departure from Chicago. Algren is at his wisecracking best (with his new home of Paterson, NJ bearing the brunt of his acerbic humor) while Studs hangs on for the ride. Algren also offhandedly voices the well-worn refrain of Chicago's lack of appreciation for him, as evidenced by the Public Library not having a single copy of one of his books.

(Via The Second Pass.)

Lord, I've been name-dropped

During the course of answering the question "Does Chicago Need A Literary Hall of Fame?" (quick answer: YES), Donald G. Evans was kind enough to mention this humble blog (albeit with name misspelled) as one of the media sources which is devoted to promoting the cause of local literature. Although there's any number of other outlets that are much more deserving of his mention than this blog, I still greatly appreciate the gesture.

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"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
- Carl Sandburg

Beautiful...and that reminds me that I really need to delve back into Sandburg's Chicago Poems one of these days.

Royko vs. Sinatra

Oh god, this is fantastic: Frank Sinatra's angry letter to Mike Royko, in which Old Blue Eyes threatened Royko after the latter had written a column that criticized the Chicago Police Department for providing free bodyguards to Sinatra during a 1976 visit to the city, will soon be up for auction. Royko's followup column, "Don't Bet Against Sinatra" (or something like that - I lent my copy of Sez Who? Sez Me, which includes the column, to a friend), is one of my very favorite pieces of his. Though I'll follow the auction with interest, I won't be bidding, as the pdf copy is more than enough for me.

And coincidentally, the current owner of the letter, Vie Carlson (the mother of Cheap Trick drummer Bun Carlos), is a very distant shirttail relative of mine, whom I've never met.

Chicago: A Biography

Local historian Dominic Pacyga has a new book out, Chicago: A Biography, from University of Chicago Press. Pacyga is interviewed in the video clip above by Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight. I greatly enjoyed his Chicago: City of Neighborhoods which I read several years ago, and am looking forward to this one. And check out the gallery of photographs from the book - I especially like this one, of the "Burnt District Coffee House", one of the many fledgling businesses to arise in the ashes - literally - of the Chicago Fire. Nothing represents the city's relentless commercial ambitions quite like some chap who opens a coffee house amidst all of that rubble and devastation.

A pantheon of one's own

This is a very welcomed development: The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. The nominees for the inaugural induction class of 2010 are the usual local luminaries, plus several more that I must admit I've never heard of: Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Harriet Monroe, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, Lorraine Hansberry, Ben Hecht, Shel Silverstein, Jane Addams, Leon Forrest, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Ida B. Wells, John Callaway, Edna Ferber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Franklin Rosemont, Fenton Johnson, Oscar Brown, Jr., Cyrus Colter and Norman Maclean.

I don't have an official vote, but if I did my votes for the Original Six would go to Brooks, Algren, Bellow, Terkel, Royko and Sandburg. And once the old guard is adequately represented, I expect future inductees to include Stuart Dybek (who is one of the current judges), Joe Meno and Aleksandar Hemon, among others.

(Via Robert Duffer.)

The Wieners Circle

Atlas Obscura is one of my new favorite websites. With its content focusing largely on geographical phenomena, oddball museums and outsider art, I was pleasantly surprised to see their entry on the infamous Chicago hotdog stand The Wieners Circle, home of both the char-broiled cheddarburger and the gleefully verbally-abusive staff. I recently saw a hilarious clip about Wieners Circle on local news channel CLTV (sadly, I can't find it online) in which they sent in a stooge who asked a bunch of insipid questions ("Do you have anything that's organic?" "Is there a lot of salt in that?") which, given the staff's tendency to demand that customers order quickly and get the hell out, soon had the order-taker exasperated. The questions escalated until this priceless exchange ended the segment:

Customer: Do you take credit cards?
Employee: Oh, sure, I'll take your credit card. And I'll just swipe it in the crack of my ass!

That final word was bleeped out, but it was clearly obvious what it was. Beautiful.

"A Bar on North Avenue"

Great piece at Granta by Roger Ebert about O'Rourke's, his old hangout near Old Town. It's pretty safe to say that the boisterous era of journalism that he so lovingly describes will never be seen again. I've never read Granta, but I'll definitely pick up the next issue, which will be entirely devoted to Chicago and is already garnering plenty of local praise. Really looking forward to it.

"Chicago, the Beautiful"

Here's a relic - a 1948 MGM travelogue on our fair city. Plenty of physical superlatives abound, such as "tallest" (Stevens Hotel) and "largest" (Merchandise Mart). I hope the Chamber of Commerce bankrolled this entire project, because they certainly got their civic-booster money's worth.

(Via Lake Claremont Press.)

"The other side of the Burnham Plan"

Daniel Burnham is getting a lot of attention here in Chicago right now, with 2009 being the centennial of his landmark Plan of Chicago. I've been meaning to read Carl Smith's well-received The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

But I've now come across another book, What Would Jane Say? City-Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos, by Janice Metzger, which postulates how the great social reformer (and Burnham contemporary) Jane Addams would have responded to the Plan. On the blog of Lake Claremont Press, Erik Germani writes:

Instrumental as they were in shaping the development of Chicago’s neighborhoods and creating its social institutions, the women were left on the sidelines while Burnham and the Commercial Club laid the course of Chicago’s future. The men knew that there was no profit in catering to the poor and downtrodden, as they certainly wouldn’t be footing the bill for their grandiose designs. So the Plan of Chicago was published, representing only the voices of the elite.

Though the plan’s drafters may have been uninterested in what Addams had to say, Janice Metzger cares, and makes the case that we should care, too. Her book, What Would Jane Say? City-Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos, breaks down the plan (and details its break downs), then imagines how the women would have responded to it, substantiating her speculation with detailed research.

Sounds like Metzger's book would be an excellent companion piece to Smith's. I think I'll read Smith first, and then Metzger as a sort of rebuttal.

From sublime to schlock

Nice (and exasperating) then-and-now series: Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball (And The Crappy Stuff Built In Their Place). Particularly galling are the Chicago examples of Grand Central Station and the Illinois Central Depot (pictured above), both of which were demolished decades ago for vacant lots (in the South Loop at Harrison & Wells and Roosevelt & Lake Shore Drive, respectively) which still remain undeveloped. The Chicago and Northwestern Station was a great loss, too, though at least there somebody bothered to build something (albeit something hideous) in its place. In retrospect, it's a minor miracle that Dearborn Station is still standing.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Algren at 100

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Algren, my hero and anti-hero, who was born in Detroit on March 28, 1909. Donna Seaman has a concise overview of the great man's career over at Booklist. For the initiate, I'd suggest you pick up his greatest novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, or his prose piece Chicago: City on the Make, which is the one book of his that I keep returning to again and again, and which I'm convinced is the best thing he ever wrote.

Algren would undoubtedly have a bemused chuckle at his centenary passing without a peep of official recognition from his home city, which right now is otherwise preoccupied with hastily filling the countless potholes and otherwise gussying things up for the arrival of Olympic committee muckamucks. The city, desperate as always to overcome its self-perceived secondary status, is throwing itself (and untold billions of dollars) at the world, as obsessed with its self-image as it was in the days when it ostracized Algren for daring to present Chicago as it really was.

Hoist a glass today to Chicago's greatest writer and one of America's most unappreciated literary talents. I'll be hoisting several.

Update: Jeff McMahon has an excellent Algren essay at Newcity. Very well done.

Only in Chicago

Secondhand bookstore...as front for a bookie joint. ("Yeah, sure, buddy, we got yer Chaucer...sixth race at Hialeah.")

Red and Norm

I don't follow sports nearly as much as I used to, but I can't help being touched and saddened by the passing (one not so sudden, the other quite sudden) of two local legends, Johnny "Red" Kerr and Norm Van Lier. My mom grew up in the same South Side neighborhood as the Kerrs, and knew Johnny's older sister quite well. He's always been a favorite of mine - despite being a shameless partisan as a Bulls broadcaster, he brought boundless enthusiasm and passion to the job and was a bigger fan of the team than anyone else. His knowledge of the game was deep but he never talked down to the fans - it was easy to imagine him sitting at your elbow, at a bar or your living room couch, excitedly commenting on the action as it unfolded. With all that this man accomplished in the game, as a player, coach, broadcaster and tireless goodwill ambassador, it's simply unconscionable that he still hasn't reached the Hall of Fame. Regardless of whether he ever gets there or not, he'll always be in my own personal Hall of Fame as one of the all-time greats.

And none of the above should in any way slight Van Lier. Much of it applies to him as well, though he's not quite of Hall of Fame caliber. Nobody ever worked harder than Stormin' Norman.

Farewell, gentlemen. You will truly be missed.

A treasure trove of old restaurant menus!

Here's a website that I'll be wallowing in quite contentedly for the near future: the Los Angeles Public Library Menu Collection. The database lets you search by city, so of course I pulled up all the Chicago restaurants. Here are my favorite menu covers (and if you click through the links, you can see the inside of the menus too):


Barney's Market Club


Cafe Bohemia


Colosimo's


Edgewater Beach Hotel


Henrici's


Riccardo


Walgreen's

Probably my favorite of the bunch is the Riccardo menu, whose stylishness is not at all surprising given how renowned the restaurant was for its art collection. And though the Colosimo's and Walgreen's menus have little artistic merit, I included them here for the sake of curiousity. Colosimo's was located in the notorious Levee vice district and was operated by Big Jim Colosimo, who was the kingpin of the Chicago mob before Capone took over. And the Walgreen's menu is notable for the breadth of its food selections - I've always imagined the old Walgreen's to only have soda fountains, but clearly they were regular short-order grills. (And I love how "perch" is crossed out with red ink on "Deep Fried Filet of Perch" and replaced with "haddock." Perch happens to be native to Lake Michigan, while haddock is an ocean fish. Odd that they ran out of the local species.)

It also occurred to me that this database is an excellent resource for fiction writers, especially those who write historic fiction. If one of your scenes is set in a 1950s restaurant, this would be a great place to skim old menus so you can get the old menu items (Swiss steak, anyone?) and prices just right.

Showmen's League building, Harry's Hot Dogs are doomed

Well, it looks like the quirky Showmen's League building and its anachronistic tenant Harry's Hot Dogs (which I first mentioned here) are in their final days. While I'm pleased that the John Buck Company is buying out the properties instead of making the city play the eminent-domain heavy, I still can't understand why the most powerful real estate developer in the city needs a $7 million subsidy from the city to build a plaza (in the not-exactly-blighted West Loop) which will primarily benefit - surprise! - the adjacent Buck office tower on Wacker.

"The last thing Chicago needs is another windswept plaza, another vacant lot," said Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago. "It sounds like a stupid way to go about urban planning."

The Showman's League building is one of the few left in the Loop that date from the 1870s, Fine said. He said it doesn't merit landmark consideration because of severe alterations, but still is more productive than a plaza that would mostly benefit Buck.

Nice words, but Fine and Preservation Chicago are tilting at windmills. The deal will get done, Buck will get richer, taxpayers will get poorer and City Hall will pat itself on the back for fostering "progress", just like it's always been here. Get yourself over to 300 W. Washington and enjoy the carved elephants, and a hot dog at Harry's, while you still can.

News from the home front

Two great pieces of news were passed along today by the good folks at Gapers Block:

First, the original Goose Island brewpub (on Clybourn Avenue in Chicago) will remain open, thanks to a renegotiated lease.

"I could not be happier," said founder John Hall in a press release. "I felt terrible, like I was losing a part of my family. We would not have been able to reach an agreement with our landlord without the support of our loyal customers. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support with e-mails, letters, and petitions."

I'm very glad that my earlier eulogy was premature.

Second, Ben Tanzer's Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine (which I reviewed here) is the latest selection of the Gapers Block Book Club. I'll take a tiny bit of credit for that, since I pitched his debut Lucky Man to the club a while back. Though they passed on that one, he apparently got their attention and his next book has now made the cut. As it should be - an engaging local writer and an entertaining book with plenty to discuss. Perfect for the book club.

Correction: Per Alice's comment below, Ben Tanzer's book was reviewed by but is NOT the next selection of the Gapers Block Book Club. I assumed, very much in error, that if a book was reviewed there, that meant it was the club selection as well. My bad. However, I stand by my earlier "great news" comment - a strong review like this one is always great news.

Studs Terkel

As many others have already reported, Studs Terkel passed away on Friday at age 96. I can't say I was at all surprised - you have to expect it from anyone that age, obviously, and Edward Lifson mentioned several weeks ago that he had heard Studs was in his last days - nor am I particularly saddened. For him, at least. Don't grieve at all for Studs, for he lived an incredibly long, joyous and productive life. (I'd guess that one of the few regrets he would have had was not living to see Barack Obama in the White House.) Instead, grieve for the rest of us who now have to live in a world without Studs' warmth, compassion and wit. He was a tireless champion of common sense and the common man, and his departure leaves us everyday people without one of our greatest advocates.

Growing up in Chicago, I was inevitably familiar with his name. My parents had a copy of Working on the bookshelf, though I don't remember anyone reading it, as I didn't either back then. I first read his prose from his introduction to Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, which I first read in college; Studs provided the perfect overture to what has become one of my very favorite books. But I didn't read Terkel proper until several years later, when on a warm day off from work I stopped at a used bookstore on Broadway Street in Chicago and chanced upon an old copy of Division Street: America, which I bought and carried to the lakefront. I sat on the boulders along the shore, basking in the sun, fully absorbed in his conversations with everyday people - their joys, sorrows, hopes and fears - and in a way felt, from the yellowed and musty-smelling pages of that book, a little more connected with the world. Discovering the rest of his works during the ensuing years has been nothing less than a fascinating and often exhilarating experience.

When a major public figure passes away, particularly a very elderly one, it's almost become cliche to say that they don't make them like him or her any longer, and that the deceased will truly be missed. But in the case of Studs Terkel, those words are perfectly appropriate. He was one of a kind, and will truly be missed.

Farewell, Studs.

The Chicagoan

Wow. This looks awesome.

While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name The Chicagoan. Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles. He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory.

While this might sound like a fanciful work of fiction, it's for real. Check out the stunning pdf preview. I particularly like the cartoon on page 13, with the caption "The 'W.G.N.' Staff discovers a pacifist." (W.G.N.: "the world's greatest newspaper", as the Chicago Tribune used to immodestly and inaccurately call itself.)

Ah, what could have been.

Hell has frozen over...

...pigs are flying, the Cubs have won...okay, the Cubs didn't win the World Series, but this is still quite monumental:

Tribune endorsement: Barack Obama for president

Of course, the cynic in me wonders if Obama wasn't from Illinois - or even if he was from as nearby as Indiana, Wisconsin or Iowa - if he still would have gotten the endorsement.

That faint whirring sound you hear is Colonel McCormick spinning in his grave.

Save the Castle Car Wash!

From the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois:

Castle Car Wash was built in 1925 and is the last remaining historic gas station structure on Route 66 (Ogden Avenue) in the city limits. Chicago was the eastern terminus of Route 66. Originally Murphy's Filling Station, the building stopped functioning as a filling station in 1966 and later became a car wash. The Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program of the National Park Service recognizes this building, with its unique castle design, as one-of-a-kind along the roadway and in April of 2005, the building was determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

The Joliet area has a few quirky Route 66 relics of its own, but nothing close to this gem. If this was located in Joliet, I'd buy it myself and turn it into a hotdog stand. I'm not sure what a new owner would do with this at its current location at 38th & Ogden, but surely somebody can think of something better than tearing it down for a bland new strip mall.

Oh dear gawd

As the subject line says, OH DEAR GAWD. That image shown above is a prototype for the redesigned Chicago Tribune, as reported by Editor & Publisher via Crain's Chicago Business. Apparently the Tribune is hellbent on making USA Today look, by comparison, like the New York Times. Suffice it to say that the day this prototype becomes will be the exact moment I stop reading the Tribune for good.

Given the state of the newspaper industry, it's likely the Tribune was already dying when Sam Zell took over, but he seems intent on finishing it off once and for all, as if administering chloroform to a stricken animal.

Quote

"I learned that, if you truly want to enjoy something, you have to share it with others."
- Ralph Freese, master canoe builder and waterway conservation activist

Memo to Mayor Daley

Just a thought: before you blow a billion-plus bucks on a temporary Olympic Stadium in Washington Park, you might consider this marvelous idea from 1958: Mechanized Stadium of the Future. Assemble and use it for the Olympics, then sell it to the next Olympic host city. Saves money while also representing the largest single act of recycling in the history of the world, thus further burnishing your "green" credentials. At least think about it, okay?

"That's a mighty fine Goose."

Well, this news thoroughly blows: Goose Island loses lease, to close its Clybourn spot.

It's truly sad that Goose Island and its landlord can't come to terms on a new lease, especially given the fact the brewpub was a true pioneer for the commercial redevelopment of the Clybourn Corridor area. When Goose Island opened in 1988 (in a former Turtle Wax factory, of all things), the neighborhood was pretty dicey. Now that the area has exploded, Goose Island is on its way out.

I've got a lot of great memories of that place, most notably:

+ Office Christmas parties in 1988 and 1989, with the second one immortalized when two over-indulged co-workers took a strong liking to a plastic, interior-lighted goose on display on a counter. The goose was spied from the adjacent tap room several times during the evening, prompting one of said individuals to repeat the phrase in quotation marks above. So great was their admiration for this object of dubious aesthetic merit that, at last sufficiently fortfied and emboldened by the tenth or twelfth microbrewed draft of the evening, they finally marched over to the counter, concealed the goose under a coat and snuck it out through the back door. Although I categorically deny any knowledge of who either of these nerfarious individuals might be, I've heard rumors that the goose's residence has alternated between their two homes ever since.

+ My going-away party when I left NBD in 1991 to return to grad school. Highlights were a) a male co-worker drinking out of female co-worker's shoe; and b) the evening ending with that same male carrying that same female out of the building, slung over his shoulder. The male was married, and the female single, and I can only guess what happened after that. Whatever it might have been, it would have occurred in a Toyota Celica. (Ewww.)

+ My wife's going-away party after she quit her job at this horrible equipment leasing company which happened to be in the same neighborhood. She and her soon-to-be-former co-workers arrived in midafternoon, but I only got there after driving back from my job in the suburbs. By the time I got there the only ones left were her and this goofy guy Jim, who was the only other normal person in the company and who quite valiantly kept her sane for the last several months she worked there. The three of us stayed for several more rounds, ruthlessly mocking the other employees.

+ Stopping in with Julie for a quick dinner last summer after my first-ever public reading. The mood was pleasantly celebratory, and the food and drink was as good as ever.

Good times, good times. While I wish Goose Island the best of luck finding a new location in the area, for me it will never be the same.