Pete Lit

Algren at Riccardo's

As if I wasn't already enough of a sucker for the vintage photos posted at Calumet 412, now here's one by the great Art Shay of my literary hero, Nelson Algren, enjoying cocktails and conversation at Riccardo's in 1955 with actress Janice Kingslow. Beautiful. Riccardo's was renowned for its murals depicting the seven "lively arts", which can be seen here on the back wall behind the bar.

Tip-Top-Tap

I absolutely love this 1960 photo from the Tip-Top-Tap, at the Allerton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. For years I admired the bar's brilliant sign atop the hotel, and always wanted to take my dad there for a drink. Sadly, I learned a few years ago that the Tip-Top-Tap had been gone for decades. And my dad is no longer with us, either. Still, it's nice to imagine settling in at one of those tables with him over cocktails (for him, most likely a "dry VO Manhattan on the rocks, with olives and a twist") and savoring that magnificent view.

And even in that distant future, Cub fans will still be waiting for next year

Screenshot from the new J.J. Abrams series Revolution. As they hike down the former Clark Street, these three probably don't even realize they just passed the hallowed former site of Yum Yum Donuts.

(Via Calumet 412.)

"'Curiosity never killed this cat' — that's what I'd like as my epitaph."

Happy 100th, Studs Terkel. We miss you.

Aw, crap.

So much for heritage, when Elston Avenue is in such desperate need of another big-box retailer instead. Now I'll treasure those bricks I scavenged even more.

Benson & Rixon, then and now

Chicago's Benson & Rixon Department Store, as seen in 1937 and today. What a bold, vibrant building it once was, and what a faded glory it has become. (Then again, "faded glory" accurately describes most of State Street these days.) Still, it's encouraging to see that some sort of facelift is going on, though whether that facelift includes purging McDonalds and its obtrusive signage remains unknown.

Lost Sullivan

This photo of the magnificent proscenium arches in the Garrick Theater is the only evidence required to successfully argue that the building should have been preserved instead of demolished. What a terrible loss.

Chicago Vice

Love this old editorial cartoon that comments, not too subtly, on the pernicious threat of Chicago's old Levee vice district. But come now, just look at the lovely Everleigh sisters, proprietors of the legendary Everleigh Club, the best-known Levee establishment. I know appearances can be deceiving, but still, they don't really look that vile and corrupting, do they?



I used to drink at a north side bar that was called The Everleigh Club, in homage to the brothel. However, of all the activities the latter was famous for, the only one practiced at the bar was drinking. Darned uptight Eighties.

Wingfoot? Huh?

As an avid student of Chicago history, I'm ashamed to admit I had never heard of the Wingfoot Air Express crash. Flaming blimp crashes onto a LaSalle Street bank, breaking through the skylight and raining burning debris onto the banking floor, and killing thirteen people? Nope, no idea. The tragedy is the jumping-off point for a new book, Gary Krist's City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago, which sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than The Devil in the White City, which I still haven't read, being seemingly the last Chicagoan to do so.

"Sleepy Hollow"

What an arresting photograph - a homeless squatter on Chicago's Northerly Island, in 1930. While the site (later to become the Meigs Field lakefront airport) would have given squatters plenty of isolation, it also must have been extremely windy, and forbiddingly cold during winter. Yet this gentleman still saw it as home, going so far as to blithely dub it "Sleepy Hollow."

Contrarily speaking

My latest essay, "Changing neighborhoods", is now up at Contrary.

The Sands...and no, not the Vegas one

Love this image from The Sands Motel in Chicago, from 1964. Uniformed waiters serving drinks, poolside. Now that's one classy motel.

"...the anxious midnight eyes of strangers..."

Nelson Algren's birthday was yesterday, so I really should have posted this then, but here is one of my very favorite passages of his, from Chicago: City on the Make:

"It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home."

Algren

(Photograph by Art Shay)

"However do senators get so close to God? How is it that front-office men never conspire? That matinee idols feel such guilt? Or that winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?" - Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

The great Algren was born on this date in 1909. My own writing is an endlessly fruitless quest to pay him honor.

Norman Mark

Longtime Chicago journalist Norman Mark has passed away, at 72.

"What I remember best about him through the years was his eclectic interest and knowledge. You could talk to the guy about politics, you could talk to him about pop music, you could talk to him about journalism," said Don Rose, a longtime Chicago political campaign consultant and former public-affairs talk show host. "He was extremely well-read and well-versed in cultural affairs."

I see that he was yet another alumnus of the City News Bureau, which I hadn't been aware of. I've had a copy of Mark's book Mayors, Madams and Madmen on my shelf for years, having found it at a garage sale [1]. I may have to move that closer to the top of the pile. Sometimes I need an event like this to prompt me to dive into long-unread books. Earlier this year, the closing of the Jane Addams Hull House social service agency finally compelled me to read Addams' memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House, and I'm glad I did.

[1] Upon further recollection, the book actually formerly belonged to my brother-in-law Al's parents, Helen and Joe Janicek. When the family house was cleaned out after Joe's death, Al let me have the book (and one by Studs Terkel) as keepsakes. Joe and Helen's basement was legendary for its wonderous clutter - a sort of suburban Smithsonian Institution.

Cutting-edge journalism

Check out the photo that the Tribune chose to lead a story on some layoffs in its own newsroom. Based on the Jane Fonda-esque woman at the center in the short-shorts and white go-go boots, the photo appears to have been taken around 1967. Way to stay timely, Trib. They probably also tried contacting Irv Kupcinet at the rival Sun-Times for a quote, only to discover he's been dead since 2003.

Precarious

Another day, another Calumet 412 stunner. This 1932 photograph, by Gordon Coster, will surely make my heights-phobic wife woozy.

Chicago lakefront, 1932

Lovely aerial photograph of Chicago's lakefront, circa 1932. (Apparently hand-tinted, since Kodachrome wasn't commercially available for still photography until 1936.) I love how the cloud shadows create an imaginary, seahorse-shaped peninsula off of North Avenue Beach. The southern end of Lake Michigan is strangely devoid of peninsulas and islands, two geographic features which always stoke my imagination.

(Via Calumet 412.)

The quiet solitude of coffee

I wonder what this woman was thinking, savoring her coffee while the busboys bustled around her.

(Via Calumet 312.)

Lost bridge

Check out this fantastic 1898 birdseye map of Chicago's Loop. One particular curiosity can be seen at the bottom center of the closeup above, which shows an extra bridge (for the Metroplitan West Side Elevated line) between Jackson and Van Buren. The bridge no longer exists. From the larger image, at the left you can also see the original course of the river, before it was later straightened to be more north-south.

(Via James Iska.)

Update: The Chicago Past tumblr just posted this 1907 photo of that very same bridge. Very nice!

Chicago's oldest restaurants

I've only been to seven of the top twenty-five: The Berghoff, The Walnut Room, Cafe Brauer, Lou Mitchell's, Swedish Bakery, Twin Anchors and the Billy Goat. You're right - I don't get out nearly enough.

(Via Gapers Block.)

From north to south

I'm in the early, conceptual stage with my novel, Express. The first section will be about a former jazz musician and now homeless man named Leon. I envisioned his story revolving around Chicago's Near Northwest Side (near Elston and Armitage), taking its cue from this old sketch which I wrote more than ten years ago, while I still lived in the city. The book will be very much about loss, both for the city as a whole (Algren's line "some sort of city-wide sorrow" is always present when I think about this section) and for specific characters. The setting of Leon's section comes straight from that sketch, and involves the departure of heavy industry from that neighborhood and the resulting economic impact.

But this morning I missed my usual train, and had to take the Rock Island Line instead. I ride the Rock Island now and then, and usually sit on the right side of the train, but today I sat on the left side, which provides a westward view as the train rolls through the South Side. This change in perspective drew my attention to the neighborhoods, so much so that I couldn't concentrate on my reading. I set my book aside, and focused on the passing view outside. The South Side is a tough place to begin with, and appears even more grim on a cloudless winter day. As I saw block after block of shabby houses, I was saddened with the realization of how solidly comfortable and middle-class these neighborhoods once were. My mom is a South Sider, having grown up in Auburn Park during the thirties and early forties before the family moved to the western suburbs in 1945. She has only rarely been back to the old neighborhood since, and not all for several decades, so heartbreakingly decrepit as it has become.

I finally came to the realization that Leon's story is, instead, that of the South Side. The North Side may have endured decades of decline, but it's gradually come back during the past twenty years. Much of the South Side, I'm afraid, will never come back. It's been hollowed out by the departure of factories and blue-collar jobs, then white flight and finally the diminished social safety net, leaving behind only the poorest of the poor to mostly fend for themselves. That's not the case with most of the North Side, and thus Leon's story would be much more compelling if set somewhere to the south. The deterioration of the South Side is a metaphor and frame for Leon's steady decline, from the heyday of Bronzeville's jazz clubs to the tumultuous sixties and the exodus of prosperity from that decade onward.

Now I'll have to rethink most of Leon's story. His circumstances will remain mostly the same, but the entire setting would have to shift, to neighborhoods that I'm not as intimately familar with as my old North Side haunts. Writing this won't be as easy, but I think it will be a better story for it.

"...believed that his remorse would prove lasting..."

Sad anecdote from Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House:

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended. After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children. When she finally opened the front door with the three shining children that they might all set forth together, the returned prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight, when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the wretched cycle.

Other than a difference of fifty-something years and another continent, this could have come straight from Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Behold my new online addiction

Calumet 412, a fascinating collection of Chicago ephemera from the same tireless folks behind Forgotten Chicago. That photo above is of Stouffer’s Top of the Rock, atop the Prudential Building, circa 1960. Now, that was style and class.

A brewery reborn

This is fantastic: Baltimore's American Brewery, which has been vacant since 1973 and decrepit as recently as 2005, has now been totally restored and renovated into the home of Humanim, a non-profit social service agency. The architect even went to great lengths to repurpose the existing brewery infrastructure into new uses - that second photo above is an old wort tank, now a unique workspace. This is exactly the sort of bold, forward thinking needed for Chicago's Michael Brand Brewery, which now faces demolition. I do realize, however, that any renovation of the Brand complex would inevitably be much less spectacular than American Brewery, as the Brand structure is much more utilitarian in design. Still, saving Brand is something that needs to be done, and I hope someone at least takes the Baltimore example as inspiration in what Brand could become.

Hull House to close

I had been wondering what book I should read next, and now I know: Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House.

Hull House to close
By Kate Thayer, Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2012

The need for its services is as strong as ever, but after years of rising costs and dwindling income from fundraising the Jane Addams Hull House Association will close and file for bankruptcy, the agency said Thursday.

"For the last several years the agency has had trouble in the fundraising side of things," said Stephen Saunders, chair of the association's board of trustees. "After many years of struggling, we have to close our doors. It was a very difficult decision."

The 123-year-old agency, headquartered at 1030 W. Van Buren St., provides foster care, domestic violence counseling and prevention services, child development programs, and job training to about 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.

Sad, but times change, and we have to change with them.

Chicago billboards, 1901

Check out these billboards on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago from 1901, taken from this panoramic view at Shorpy. Cigars, champagne, oatmeal, kidney water and some sort of haircare product, along with the soon-to-be-missed Kodak cameras. The panoramic looks north from 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road), with Michigan Avenue on the left, Grant Park in the center and the Illinois Central railyard (plus a bit of the lake) on the right.

Elmer Polzin

Farewell to a Chicago original, Elmer Polzin, newspaper horseracing columnist and handicapper.

"He loved the camaraderie in the press box," Surico said. "He was kind of the life of the party, and people loved him. Elmer could meet the queen, spend the night swearing a blue streak, and at the end of the night, he would be knighted."

Alas, truly one of a dying breed.

When soccer ruled Chicago

Nice rememberance here at the Chicago News Cooperative about the Chicago Sting's 1981 NASL championship.

"We were a good show and fans liked that when they came to games, lots of them for the first time," said midfielder Rudy Glenn, who scored the winning goal against the Cosmos. "We always pushed for goals, showed that soccer doesn’t have to be dull. We came from behind so many times. Then you had Pato with that long, straight hair and I had long curly hair, and Davey Huson, with little hair, blowing kisses to the crowd when he scored."

I played soccer at Cary-Grove (and was even on the school's inaugural team, in 1980), and was at the 1981 semifinal game at Comiskey Park. It was a miserable, rainy night, but the fans' enthusiasm would not be deterred and old stadium was rocking. I still have a piece of netting from one of the goal cages, as a souvenir of that memorable event.

"Be Careful Or You're Going To Dunning"

Love this: The Chicago Neighborhoods.

I love Chicago. I love design. I decided its about time to mash those two loves together, and the logos you see here are the result.

My dad once told me about driving out to Dunning from Lakeview with my grandfather, who was a family doctor and was apparently called on to treat some patients there. What my dad stressed the most was how long a drive it was in those days (no expressways, obviously), and not the facility itself - which leads me to believe he either had to stay in the car or at most in a waiting room, and didn't see the place any further than that. If he had seen the wards it would undoubtedly have left a lasting and traumatic impression on him, and he surely would have mentioned it to me.

(Via Coudal.)

Ronnie

A hearty congratulations to the late Ron Santo, on his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And shame to the Hall itself for taking so long to bestow this honor, and particularly in failing to do so during his lifetime and preventing him from basking in the glory he deserved. He was every bit the equal of Brooks Robinson as a third baseman, and yet Robinson was inducted decades ago. If there was a heaven, right now Santo would be clicking his heels.

Santo will become the fourth and final player to be inducted from the 1969 Cubs (the others were Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins - plus manager Leo Durocher), which makes that team's epic collapse even more inexplicable. Teams with four Hall of Fame players, and three of them still in their prime (Banks had 106 RBI in '69, in his last full season, but retired two years later) simply don't collapse like that.

The new hall-of-famers

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will soon be inducting its second class: Cyrus Colter, Theodore Dreiser, Harriet Monroe, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, and Ida B. Wells. I certainly can't object, since I thought Royko and Sandburg deserved inclusion in the inaugural class, and I've long admired Dreiser's Sister Carrie, one of the best novels written about Chicago (though, admittedly, at least half of the book takes place in Manhattan). Here's hoping for Ring Lardner, Ben Hecht and James T. Farrell, next year.

(Via Chicago Publishes.)

Save Michael Brand Brewery!

The rapidly-expanding electronics chain H.H. Gregg reportedly plans to buy and demolish the former Michael Brand Brewery complex at 2500 N. Elston, for a new store location. As the linked-to article notes, there's plenty of vacant land and underused buildings along that stretch of Elston (which is also already saturated with big-box stores) which the company could easily use for a new store. Surely it would be better to save and rehab the Brand complex instead of just wantonly throwing it away. I can hope.

I visited the site during the late 1990s, when I took several photographs and even scavenged a few old bricks I found lying behind the building. Interestingly, back then I thought that only the northern building (at the far right in this 1970s-vintage photo, from the excellent Forgotten Chicago website) was the Brand Brewery, but after seeing the photo I now realize that the southern building was part of the brewery, too. (What a shame that the charming archway between the two buildings is long gone!) The northern building also briefly housed the short-lived Golden Prairie microbrewery during the mid-1990s, which was gone by the time of my visit. The only thing marking the building as Golden Prairie was a sheet of paper with the brewery logo, which was hanging inside a plastic sleeve on the side door. Hard to believe I didn't scavenge that as well.

(Via Gapers Block.)

"Maeshe's Cafe Menu"

Library of America is publishing a new anthology, Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns, which has me intrigued. Though I admire LoA's mission, I'm not enough of a completist to want to own or read the entire works of a single author - I haven't even read everything Nelson Algren ever wrote, and the only LoA title I have is James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, which I've owned for years but have still read only the first book. But this new anthology is promising in that it seems to collect so many priceless pieces that would be difficult or even impossible to find elsewhere, which might be just enough for me to pick it up.

Thinking of newspaper columnists inevitably brings me back to Mike Royko, one of my biggest writer heroes. Here's a passage from "Maeshe's Cafe Menu", his 1977 tribute to a recently deceased Chicago restaurateur:

Maeshe, who passed on last week in the trunk of his car, used to run a restaurant called the H&H, on LaSalle Street, a couple of blocks north of City Hall.

Maeshe didn't go in for fancy decorations. His tables were in understated Formica. The only colors in the place were the varicose veins on the legs of his harried waitresses.

The cuisine was acceptable, if you fancy corned beef on rye, pickles, a bowl of borscht, and potato pancakes.

What made it popular was the atmosphere and the magnetic personality of Maeshe.

The distinctive atmosphere was provided by the lunchtime clientle, which included lawyers, judges, traffic court fixers, bondsmen, bailiffs, bagmen, aldermen and other Loop wildlife. Nobody ever talked above a whisper, for fear of being overheard and indicted. Many of the customers seemed to communicate solely by winking, nodding, and passing unmarked envelopes.

One day a waitress reached to pick up what she thought was a remarkably large tip. A judge gave her a karate chop on the wrist.

That wry phrase "...who passed on last week in the trunk of his car..." just kills me every time I remember it. "Maeshe's Cafe Menu" was included in Royko's long out-of-print Sez Who? Sez Me, but sadly not in either of his more recent University of Chicago Press anthologies.

Intolerance, Back of the Yards

During the past two weeks The Reader ran an excellent piece by Steve Bogira called "The Price of Intolerance" (part one, part two) about a senseless and yet not unexpected tragedy that occurred in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1971, and has echoed through the decades ever since. And here's one difference between journalism and fiction - fiction would have put a much rosier gloss on Sam Navarro's feelings at the conclusion.

(Photo of Sam Navarro by Jeffrey Martini, for The Reader)

Happy birthday, you old dog... woman... baboon... eh, whatever the hell you are...

Chicago's famous (/infamous) Picasso statue was unveiled on this date in 1967. I was too young to remember the event, but fortunately Chicago's bard Mike Royko was there, and his resulting Chicago Daily News column is one of my favorite of his.

They had wanted to be moved by it. They wouldn't have stood there if they didn't want to believe what they had been told that it would be a fine thing.

But anyone who didn't have a closed mind - which means thinking that anything with the name Picasso connected must be wonderful - could see that it was nothing but a big, homely metal thing.

That is all there is to it. Some soaring lines, yes. Interesting design, I'm sure. But the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean.

But why not? Everybody said it had the spirit of Chicago. And from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it.

I've never heard what Nelson Algren thought of the Picasso, but at least in terms of what the statue represented about Chicago, I'm sure he must have agreed with Royko. Those final paragraphs of Royko's piece really echo Algren.

Beautiful day

Yesterday we drove to the city for the Newberry Library Book Fair, a fantastic book sale which benefits that venerable Chicago institution. Considering the size of my ever-expanding book pile, at mass sales like this I try to avoid more common books and only pick up titles that would be difficult or impossible to find anywhere else. I came home with just three books: Carl S. Smith's Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920 (a survey of Chicago's literary heyday), Francesca Falk Miller's The Sands: The Story of Chicago's Front Yard (stories from Chicago's notorious Sands district of the 19th Century) from 1948, and Budd Schulberg's novel Everything That Moves (I'm a great admirer of Schulberg, but had never heard of this one), all of which only cost me ten bucks total. The sale ends today, so if you're in the area and love books you should definitely check it out. Today everything is also half-price.

Then for lunch we swung up to Lakeview (a few blocks from where my dad grew up) at Cassava, a wonderful place where everything is gluten free. All the bread is made from cassava flour, and we had both empanadas and rolls, which we liked so much that we brought several dozen home, frozen, for future eating. The hardest thing about going gluten-free is not being able to chow down on some really good bread, but Cassava's was delicious. Highly recommended.

Then we drove back home, grilled burgers and watched the end of Harry Potter 7.1. We've watched all of the movies in order during the past few weeks, and are heading to the theater this afternoon to watch 7.2. Should be great.

Randolph Street, 1900

At Shorpy, here's another lovely turn-of-the-century street view from Chicago, this one of Randolph Street, looking east from LaSalle. Sadly, unlike that fine stretch of Wabash Avenue, virtually none of the buildings shown here are still standing. The block shown here on the left (between LaSalle and Clark) was demolished to make way for the Thompson State of Illinois Building monstrosity during the 1980s.

The second tall building beyond the next corner (Clark) is the Schiller Building (with the "Burgomaster" sign) which was later known as the Garrick Theater. After the theater was demolished during the early 1960s, a new building was built which housed the Garrick Restaurant, where my dad ate lunch every day for years. (His old office was in the Oriental Theater, one block further down.) The Garrick Restaurant building is also now gone, with the popular theater district restaurant Petterino's now occupying the site. Julie and I have had several fine meals at Petterino's, but I didn't realize its distant connection to my dad until just now. Nice.

Lawless it is!

It's a rare event to read the private correspondence between a writer and editor, so I'm fascinated by this exchange between Stuart Dybek and his editor ("AMcP") at A Public Space, concerning how to name a housing project in Dybek's story "Four Deuces."

I could simply move him to somewhere notorious such as Cabrini-Green (it was just torn down finally). I am worried about loading the line with too much exposition. It could read: "He moved to the Lawless Garden Projects—excuse me, Low-Income Apartments. Lawless—they got that right." Or "He moved to Bronzeville, the Lawless Garden Project—excuse me, Low-Income Apartments. Lawless—they got that right." This is one of those places in the story where you not being a Chicagoan has been very helpful as the story has to be clear for someone who did not grow up in the city.

I admire Dybek's decision to not go with the infamous Cabrini-Green, which would seem like too obvious of a choice. And I love his comment about the CHA's tendency to add "garden" to the name of its housing projects. Garden spots, they certainly weren't, especially during their latter decades.

(Via John Williams at The Second Pass, returning the nod.)

Wabash Avenue, Then and Now

I was pleased to recently see the first photo, shown above, at Shorpy.com. The image is from 1907 and shows Wabash Avenue in Chicago, facing north from Monroe St. Knowing how well-preserved Wabash is - being next to the El tracks makes it a less-than-desirable location for new skyscrapers, and thus many 19th and early 20th Century buildings remain there - I guessed that a lot of these buildings would probably still be standing. So I swung over there this week and was pleasantly surprised to find even more vintage buildings than I expected. The second photo is taken from almost the exact same vantage point as the first, and almost every building in the first photo can still be seen.

Working from left to right in the original photo, the first building (with the arched cornice) is gone, but remaining are 30 S. Wabash (the tall narrow one, three windows wide), the Atwater Building (pointed cornice), the Barker and Haskell Buildings (slightly shorter), Silversmith Building (medium height with sign painted on its side) and Hayworth Building (tall, at the very center of the photo). And just beyond the Hayworth is the Mandel Brothers Annex (with flagpole on the roof) which was originally part of the old State Street department store and now home to Filene's, TJ Maxx and other discounters. Of particular note, the Silversmith is now a boutique hotel (odd location for one - I can't imagine paying a premium room rate that close to the El tracks); the Atwater, Barker and Haskell buildings date from 1875-77 and are some of the very oldest in the Loop; and recent renovation of the Barker and Haskell buildings revealed gorgeous facades designed by Louis Sullivan.

In framing this photo, I was also quite pleased to capture the young guy with the sunglasses and shopping bag, who nicely echoes the top-hatted gentleman in the original photo.

Best of Chicago

I greatly enjoyed the Chicago Reader's 2011 Best of Chicago list, and particularly the idiosyncratic categories on the critics' list. Here are my favorites that I've personally experienced:

Best Fulminator on Facebook: Tony Fitzpatrick
Best Elevators: Fine Arts Building
Best Bookstore With a Cat: Selected Works Used Books & Sheet Music
Best Book About Chicago Baseball Losers: Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out
Best Place for Ambience and Egg Sandwiches: Billy Goat Tavern

I couldn't agree more highly about Selected Works and its cat, Hodge (pictured above), which is probably the friendliest store cat I've ever had the pleasure to meet. My only regret is that Selected Works and Hodge have so little competition - every bookstore should have a cat.

Kotlowitz and Maier

Two Chicago greats: Alex Kotlowitz on Vivian Maier. I love the suggestion that a pairing of Maier and Studs Terkel would have rivaled the celebrated James Agee and Walker Evans. I think Maier and Terkel might have even surpassed them - though Maier wasn't quite in Evans' league as a photographer, Terkel's subtlety and grace would have easily surpassed Agee, whose prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men I often found pretentious and unreadable.

Boy's gotta have it.

Over five tons of scrap aluminum - specifically, used Chicago street signs. Current bid is only $222. Father's Day beckons.

588-2300

The passing of a local legend...

Lynn Hauldren, 89, the advertising copywriter who became the inspiration for the Empire Carpet Man in the 1970s and helped launch the company's signature jingle into national recognition, died Tuesday, according to an Empire spokesperson.

Mr. Hauldren rose to became a decades-long advertising icon, as the person who wrote the catchy jingle that accompanies the company's famous phone number, and often delivered it with style: "Five-eight-eight, two-three-hundred ... Empire."

By sheer coincidence, while driving to the train this morning I was remembering two other once-ubiquitous Chicago advertisers, Danley's Garage World and Tru-Link Fence Company, both of which are still in business but don't seem to advertise much on TV any longer, if at all. And neither was lucky enough to have a human spokesman like Hauldren, whose quiet, friendly warmth graced our homes for so many years.

More on the Raber House

Lynn Becker has a fine post on the Raber House (pictured above, in 1870) and a history of the surrounding Englewood neighborhood. Sounds like Lavicka is asking for more than the original Tribune article disclosed, but it would still be a very worthy undertaking.

Vivian Maier site redesign!

Vivian Maier's lovely photographs now have the lovely website they deserve. The old blog format really didn't do them justice.

"I probably like the buildings more than wisdom would allow, or should allow."

This is fantastic. I see this mansion whenever I take the Rock Island line to work, and despite the article's claim it's not that hard to imagine something beautiful returning there. I've seen 19th Century etchings of the house, and it was quite lovely in its day. Best of luck to Mr. Lavicka.

Bill Lavicka's renovations have always been unusual. The veteran rehabber and owner of Historic Boulevard Services has trucked four buildings intact from one site to another, converted small churches into homes, remade entire Near West Side blocks and showcased his quirky aesthetic by topping spires and balusters with bowling balls.

But the next remodel he has his heart set on raises the bar on unusual. Lavicka wants to turn a boarded-up Washington Park mansion, one of the city's last surviving examples of a multiacre country estate, into a winery.

And he doesn't want to import the grapes.

He wants to plant about 5,000 vines in the yard — what's now three or so bombed-out-looking blocks along the Dan Ryan Expressway just south of Garfield Boulevard.

The airport? It's that-a-way!

Gapers Block just linked to a database of Chicago aerial photos from 1938-41. The images aren't indexed (yet?) so I randomly clicked a link that brought up this photo, which includes the unmistakable outline of Goose Island (near the upper left - the diagonal that bisects it is the since-removed Ogden Avenue viaduct). Interesting enough in itself, but zoom in closer and you can see this, just to the west of the island:



The lettering is fuzzy, but reads "Chicago Municipal Airport 10 Miles" with a big arrow pointing to the southwest (the airport is now known as Midway). Wow. Fortunately, airplane navigation is much more technologically advanced than it used to be. All other things being equal, I'll gladly take the chance that a modern-day air traffic controller might be asleep on the job, rather than being back in the forties and having a pilot who has to read directional signs from the cockpit.

A conversation with Ben Tanzer

I lunch regularly with my great friend Ben Tanzer, but recently I decided to record our conversation to mark the publication of his latest and excellent novel, You Can Make Him Like You. Since this is the first time he's set a book in Chicago (where he's lived for the past sixteen years), in this podcast we chat about/riff on three locales that play key roles in the book.

Though those locales are our main focus, we characteristically veer into other topics, related or otherwise, including: Tom Cruise's cultural relevance to the ten-and-under crowd, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, the audacity of not only conceiving a fictional narrative during a rock show but actually writing out the first scene there, and possibly the worst description ever (mine) of Archers of Loaf. Plus, of course, an embarrassingly large number of "ums" uttered by me.

Please listen in. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Embedded player:

Podcast: Ben Tanzer and Pete Anderson, April 2011

Direct download:
Podcast: Ben Tanzer and Pete Anderson, April 2011

CVS gets classy

Behold, the most beautiful drugstore in the world. Then again, the store's beauty is obviously in spite of it being a CVS and not because of, with the real credit belonging to the vintage bank building itself. Regardless of aesthethics, though, this sure beats demolishing the old building and slapping up a new one in its place. Well done.

(Via Gapers Block.)