MADE IN CHICAGO: CITY LIFE
Best example of street business acumen
Organized Street Gangs
Not to be proud, but before the “Crips and Bloods” and all of these other “sets” across America, the first organized street gangs (based off of the framework set in place by Cosa Nostra in Italy and the Five Families of New York) was in Chicago. Almighty Black P. Stone Nation/El-Rukn (1959), Latin Kings (1954), Gangster Disciples (1964), Black Disciples (1958), Vice Lords (1958), Four Corner Hustlers (1968). True, there were street gangs all over the country, but none more organized than ours. What began with Capone and the Chicago Outfit syndicate in 1910 took to the streets of Chicago and took on a life—and death—of its own. (Scoop Jackson)
Best Chicago contribution to LGBTQ history
Society for Human Rights
Most activists aren’t aware of a tradition for gay rights organizations, from ACT UP and GLAAD to PFLAG and HRC, that extends even farther back than the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950. But the country’s first organization dedicated to homosexual equality was the Society for Human Rights, founded by Chicagoan Henry Gerber; its nonprofit charter was granted by the state of Illinois in December 1924. Its history was brief, but its influence enduring. (Robert Rodi)
Best gift to the game
The Killer Crossover
He invented it while on the playground at Eckersall Park on Yates, put it to the test in the Public League while at Carver, perfected it once he got to college in El Paso, Texas, made it lethal and legendary once he got to the NBA. The whole crossover phenom started when Timmy Hardaway touched a basketball. Many have remixed it (Allen Iverson, Philip Champion, Jamal Crawford, James Harden), but none put their signature on it the way Timmy did the original. It’s Chicago’s greatest gift to the game—except, of course, for Jordan when he was in a Bulls uniform. (Scoop Jackson)
Best persistent name For fizzy nectar
(Still) Calling Soda “Pop”
English poet Robert Southey in 1812 wrote in a letter, “because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn, and pop you would go off too, if you drank too much of it.” This was before “soda” was placed in bottles and poured out of soda fountains. “Pop” was all about the sound—and Chicago, if nothing else, is a city rooted in and identified by sound, from music to gunshots, which is why we, more than most other major cities in the country, stay true to the word that defines the spirit. (Scoop Jackson)
Best Chicago-made female skate team
Fro Skate
A group of young Chicago women of color are challenging the hegemony of skateboarding through their collective, Fro Skate. Since its founding by close friends Karlie Thornton, Brianna Beckham and Maya Greene, the group has grown exponentially; meet-ups that once had ten to fifteen in attendance pull in upwards of fifty members of the tight-knit crew. The women use social media to schedule meet-ups, hangouts and just network with fellow skateboarders around the city. Follow @froskate on Instagram and keep an eye out for Froskate at a skatepark near you. (Jake Krzeczowski)
Best Chicago-made charity
Social Works
Chicago’s rap scene has grown with the idea of service to others in the past ten years or so. Chance The Rapper coordinated millions worth of donations to CPS through his Social Works foundation. Next up? Helping Chicagoans and the world help themselves as he embarks on My State of Mind, a mental wellness initiative through a website and app that will provide resources to patients and doctors alike, streamlining the process of finding individualized care in Chicago. (Jake Krzecwoski)
Socialworkschi.org
Best Chicago-made activist
Tuan Huynh
For most, a day job is plenty. For Leo Burnett Lead Creative Tuan Huynh, it’s a vessel to do for others. The son of Vietnamese immigrants, Huynh dedicates every available minute to helping others through endeavors of his own and those in his periphery. He supports, tutors and mentors over 800 students across the city, inviting them into Leo Burnett for first-hand career discovery. Outside the office, he helped develop a creative lab in Woodlawn and established the Pencil Project to provide scholarships for individuals who prove they are “the difference that makes a difference.” (Jake Krzeczowski)
CITY LIFE
Best dancing by a mayor of Chicago
Lori Lightfoot doing the robot with Sheila E. at Market Days
Former mayor Rahm Emanuel majored in dance at Sarah Lawrence College, turned down a scholarship to Joffrey Ballet, is a huge Wilco fan, and sometimes “got down” at events like Lolla and neighborhood festivals. Incoming mayor Lori Lightfoot may not have an academic dance background, and may not “floss” as well as her daughter Vivian showed us during the campaign, but at Market Days in August she took centerstage at Sheila E.’s request and busted a few moves, including the makings of a pretty savvy robot. We hope she can also ace the funky “budget dance.” (Bart Lazar)
Best sign on the Kennedy Expressway
“NO TEXTING. NO SPEEDING. NO KETCHUP.”
Competing for your attention on the evening commute is a collection of signs brought to you by the Illinois Department of Transportation. The best is the to-the-point inside joke, “NO TEXTING. NO SPEEDING. NO KETCHUP.” The runner-up, revealed during the World Cup, reads “BUCKLING UP IS ALWAYS A GOOD GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL.” Enjoy the signs, but please, do not take selfies with them while you are driving. (Tanner Woodford)
Best rebuke of a Mercer-nurtured rabble-rouser
Midwest FurFest refusing Milo Yiannopoulos
Milo Yiannopoulos, a key comrade of the Bannon-Breitbart combine in the days of Mercer family finance, was removed, or “deplatformed,” from corporate social media for his gaudy, inflammatory provocations and his proximity to white nationalist and neo-Nazis. Since then, he’s pled poverty. “I spent years growing and developing and investing in my fan base, and they just took it away in a flash,” VICE reported the British citizen posting in September, “It’s nice to have a little private chat with my gold star homies but I can’t make a career out of a handful of people like that. I can’t put food on the table this way.” The hard-right extremist, who has called himself a “cultural libertarian,” bragged that he had adopted a “fursona” before paying for tickets to attend December’s twentieth annual Midwest FurFest in Rosemont, organized by Midwest Furry Fandom. The group put feet down straightway. “Mr. Yiannopoulos’ attendance at the convention may lead to an inability to provide a safe and welcoming experience for convention participants,” their press release says of the unwanted pest. “Self-registration for our event does not imply a given individual’s presence is condoned or appropriate… He will be barred from registering for this or future Midwest FurFest events.” Could politics use more furries? (Ray Pride)
Best place to hide twenty-three guns
Alderman Ed Burke’s Offices
In January, longstanding Chicago Alderman Ed Burke was charged with attempted extortion in federal court. During raids in November, it was revealed that federal agents removed twenty-three firearms from his offices. Burke’s aldermanic record, ironically, is ardent about gun control, from broadening the gun offender registry to supporting a ban on weapons in establishments that serve alcohol. (Tanner Woodford)
Best citizen during the polar vortex
Candice Payne
For a few days this winter, Chicago was colder than Antarctica, Alaska and the North Pole. With temperatures hovering at twenty-five below, the city’s homeless population was left cold and vulnerable. Candice Payne—a humble and successful thirty-four-year-old Chicago realtor—found a calling during the deep freeze, and rented hotel rooms for eighty of the city’s homeless citizens. Her good deed landed her a guest spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” (Tanner Woodford)
Best birth justice organization
Chicago Volunteer Doulas
Doulas are professional birth workers who provide crucial physical, emotional and informational support to families before, during and after birth. Chicago Volunteer Doulas provided nearly a thousand hours of labor, breastfeeding and postpartum assistance in 2018. The organization focuses services on communities in the city that are most in need, and on families that make less than $50,000 per year. In line with that goal, the group has started a peer doula and workforce development doula program at Logan Correctional Facility. (Kerry Cardoza)
chicagovolunteerdoulas.org
Best way to unite Chicago
Chance the Snapper
Chicago is an alligator-free city. At least until this year, when a resident spotted a four-foot-long creature swimming the Humboldt Park lagoon. Dubbed “Chance the Snapper” in a Block Club Chicago online poll, the reptile became a national news story, drawing thousands of curious residents to the West Side, inspiring custom t-shirts and even a brew: Revolution Brewing’s Humboldt Gator. Chance was ultimately captured by Frank Robb of St. Augustine, Florida. After Robb’s success, he was invited to throw out the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game and to turn on Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. Who knew all we need to do to unite Chicagoans is set a small alligator loose? (Tanner Woodford)
Best city wildlife
The ducks at the Art Institute of Chicago
Forget Brancusi’s “Gold Bird,” the best birds at the Art Institute are to be found in the McKinlock Court. Visit in early summer and you’ll be treated to a parade of downy ducklings accompanied by mama duck. Making their home in Carl Milles’ “Triton Fountain,” the waterfowl family promenades the courtyard and otherwise spend their days wading in the fountain pool, with wings and one leg tucked somewhere out of sight. When you need a break from the encyclopedic collection, make way for ducklings. (Jenny Dally)
111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/venue-rental/event-spaces/mckinlock-court
Best place to witness the crushed bones of the past and the tenuous specters of the future
The Cortland Street Bridge
Ground zero of Sterling Bay’s massive (and still taxpayer-subsidized) development project and highly disputed future home of Chicago’s most inanely named neighborhood—Lincoln Yards (I suppose “Live Nation Green” was deemed too on the nose)—the Cortland Street Bridge (built in 1902) sports one of the most spectacularly destitute views on the city’s North Side, a landscape of rubble awaiting condos, gringo mescal bars and riverfront locations for fast casuals. The contest over this desecrated land is pure Chicago: corruption, racism and unions collide daily in an ongoing struggle of will against capital. The issues are complex, and seem to single-handedly pay Ben Joravsky’s rent. And while the view from this particular bridge may not inspire the pathos that the potential loss of The Hideout does, it feels like a sign o’ the times: another brick in the moat of local history. (Kevin Greene)
Cortland Street between Mendell and Southport
Best warning North Branch is done
The loss of Stanley’s Fresh Fruits & Vegetables
Near the North Branch of the Chicago River between Lincoln Park and Bucktown, at the southwest corner of North and Elston Avenues, Stanley’s Fresh Fruits & Vegetables, family-owned since 1967, did yeoman work on two fronts: each morning buying up produce rejected by chain groceries for cosmetic and other reasons, then bundling bulk quantities to be sold at low, low prices to eager customers in the vicinity (or who came off the Kennedy from farther afield). Modest amenities like Stanley’s disappear suddenly in twenty-first century Chicago, especially when the property is cheek-by-jowl with developers with billions and billions in their banked pockets like Sterling Bay and their corporate vision to wreak billions more via the $5-billion plus Lincoln Yards mega-project, its stadiums and its thousands and thousands of upscale and luxury housing units. Some small business could remain nearby: the Hideout may be allowed to survive as a genteel nod to local ownership, and Exit may still bang unto the dawn, but there is no place for modesty when a plot like Stanley’s 45,877-square-foot property is just sitting there. Stanley’s land will be auctioned on November 19, unless a buyer emerges first. (Ray Pride)
Best place to feel part of the cityscape
The 606
Things have evolved beautifully since the 606—originally known as the Bloomingdale Trail—was a 2.7-mile elevated railroad. Now it’s a destination for bikers, joggers, dog-walkers, artists, designers and the neighborhood crowd place to read your copy of Newcity, eat a slice of pizza while people-watching, experience the greenery and even stumble upon public art. But walking across its twists, turns and breathtaking viewpoints you realize that most importantly, the trail makes you feel like you’re a part of the city as much as the city is part of you. (Vasia Rigou)
the606.org
Best square glimpse of the 1970s Chicago singles bar
David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” holds acrid treasure as a tightening noose of a snapshot of sexual confoundment and consternation in the 1970s Rush Street-Division Street singles scene, but Dennis McCarthy’s “The Great Chicago Bar & Saloon Guide” gives us a ground-level 1978 taste of the still-extant The Hangge-Uppe at 14 West Elm: “Representative of the Rush Street young people’s disco-madness movement. On weekends, they pile into the two-level self-billed “distinctive discotheque,” creating a wall-to-wall mob scene. Holding a drink can be an accomplishment… The design of the place is pleasant enough, but if you go there in the peak hours it doesn’t matter since the scenery is young people dancing, dancing away. Early in the evening, backgammon is popular.” (Ray Pride)
Best bar to crash a truck into
The Continental Lounge
Near West Side 4am retreat The Continental, which boasts multiple vulgar nicknames, as well as “Mistakes,” has nested for thirteen years in a nook of Humboldt Park directly before the twining instruction of Chicago and Grand and the railway yards, far from drink-‘em-up competition. There have been drive-by window shoot-ups by jealous weapon owners in the past, but security’s good, and there are, of course, multiple security cameras. (Another form of crash was the violent hailstorm that stripped the antique sign of its neon tubing for good.) Footage of crashes from the first decade include the late-night flattening of a superb family-owned food truck that parked outside until after the 4am dispersal of leave-taking libidinous and libated customers. Most recently, social media got a gander at a bizarre midday T-boning involving an errant police vehicle rushing the California and Chicago intersection and caving a truck into the storefront, with the result that the interior atmosphere of an exposed-brick 1930s saloon gaining an unlikely trim and spiffy façade. (Ray Pride)
2810 W. Chicago, 773.292.1200
Best way to waste $130,106.15
Ask Jussie Smollett
You may remember Jussie Smollett from “Empire,” a locally shot Fox series on which he played a musician. Smollett was indicted in February for disorderly conduct. Smollett allegedly paid two Nigerian-American men to stage a fake assault on him, then filed a false police report for a hate crime. After much of the drama played out in public, the City of Chicago sent a letter to his attorneys, requesting that he pay $130,106.15 to offset the costs of police overtime needed to investigate the incident. (Tanner Woodford)
Best collective carrying the torch of the Black Panther Party
#LetUsBreathe Collective
Born out of a desire to support Ferguson protesters, the #LetUsBreathe Collective launched the protest occupation Freedom Square and held annual Juneteenth celebrations, in addition to open mics and teach-ins. The collective, which is composed of artists and organizers, opened the #BreathingRoom in 2017, the first freestanding Black-led liberation space since the Black Panthers, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. (Kerry Cardoza)
Best obituaries
Maureen O’Donnell, the Sun-Times
The vivid vernacular and unexpected reveries and simple observation and distillation that is the knack of the obituary writer puts much deadline newspaper writing to shame. The melody of a life well told in a few hundred words, especially of someone you’ve never noticed on a city street, is veined through the compassion and lyricism of the Sun-Times’ longtime keeper of the dead Maureen O’Donnell. The passing of Pilsen’s ninety-year-old “Churro Man” Taurino Brito is archetypal, surveying the neighborhood to learn about a man who sold delicious pastries for over twenty-five years. “Brimming with guava, cream cheese, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry or dulce de leche filling, they’re infused with a cinnamon-dusted taste of Mexico… He’d been a courtly, kind presence in the lives of many Pilsen customers as they grew from childhood to adulthood. Some saw him as a surrogate abuelito, or grandpa.” And of the recent passing of Nancy Hughes, the widow of Illinois filmmaker John Hughes, “When they met at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, she crossed chasms of teen cliques to be with him. And when they were newlyweds with little money or connections, she supported his screenwriting dreams. And whether they were living on the North Shore or in the movie colonies of California, Mrs. Hughes made their homes a refuge, a place immune to shifting Hollywood loyalties and box-office receipts, filling them with good food, lively music and fun card games.” Honor the recently passed via the @suntimesobits Twitter feed. (Ray Pride)
Best way to fold a map
Folded Map Project
Tonika Lewis Johnson started the Folded Map Project as a visual investigation of Chicago neighborhoods. She finds residents living on North and South Side blocks (like 6900 North Ashland in Rogers Park and 6900 South Ashland in West Englewood), introduces them to one another, then takes their photograph. Through this brilliantly simple concept, the project exposes urban segregation and its effects on Chicago residents. (Tanner Woodford)
foldedmapproject.com
Best use of empty lots
NeighborSpace
NeighborSpace is Chicago’s only nonprofit urban land trust that preserves and sustains gardens. Community gardens require work and attention, from property ownership to water, insurance, education, stewardship, planning, tool lending, fundraising and troubleshooting. When the details are tended by NeighborSpace, community groups can focus on what they love—gardening. (Tanner Woodford)
Neighbor-space.org
Best warning Westtown is done
The façade-i-fication of Leona’s on Augusta
Leona’s was a warm, bustling clutch of family-owned restaurants, popularized in the 1980s for cheap Italian food and lots of it, and later known for not-as-cheap, not-as-good Italian food and lots of it. The business imploded a few years ago, leaving in its wake its eccentric white terra cotta Augusta Boulevard location, with a nineteenth-century Victorian two-flat, at least 120 years old, at its center. Until its Leona’s incarnation in 1985, the non-landmarked location had housed Dairy. Before that, Pure Farm Products stood on the site, billed in the 1920s as “Chicago’s only Ukrainian Dairy.” The draws at the dairy included Sunday jazz champagne brunches, dancing and a continental menu. When the demolition was announced, the Our Urban Times website reported that Leona’s was “the only example of the local dairy left in the City of Chicago. People would surround at least three sides of a two-flat, then put a roof over the enclosure and it would become the local dairy.” Elaine Coorens, author of “Wicker Park: From 1673 Thru 1929 and Walking Tour Guide” said to DNAInfo when the sale was announced, “This concept of taking an existing building and building around it to make it a dairy, that was the industry in this city. It is so significant, it’s way more than just a snapshot; it’s the only example left of an entire industry,” While the front story-high terra cotta façade has been preserved, the rest of the plot is filled by a stack of sixteen condominiums “starting at $750,000,” cleverly dubbed “The Boulevard,” boasting “designer kitchens, luxury finishes and private rooftop decks.” No word on the fresh-baked loaves of bread that were brought with menus to Leona’s once devoted following. (Ray Pride)
Best sign of progress of maintaining CTA infrastructure
The Chicago-Ogden Blue Line Entry
The renovation continues, but the swift fix of one of the ugliest, dampest, most depressing subway entrances outside of the Loop, the southwest entry to the Chicago and Ogden Blue Line stop, emerged from decades of neglect in early October to unexpected spiffiness; two other entrances are under reconstruction. A few paces from pre-mayoral Rahm Emanuel’s night boîte of choice, the Matchbox, the subterranean passage belied any improvement or gentrification aboveground with its 1940s-style design left to molder under leaks and stalagmites of rot that offered a truer picture of the state of infrastructure than huge new platforms with soaring roofs and admirable public art. Now, a white mosaic wall is inlaid with a cool blue arrow that rounds the corners toward the descent into the depths. May the vanished filth never return; It’s always infrastructure week when you neglect the truism, “Things fall apart.” (Ray Pride)
Best predictive text on the likely fate of the James R. Thompson Center
In his essential compendium “Why Architecture Matters,” Tribune architecture columnist Blair Kamin wrote, “As ever, the quality of the built world depends on the choices we make… in the end, the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas are far more positive—and powerful—agents of change… Every building is a new piece of the evolving metropolis, a new layer of the ever-changing urban collage. This collective work of art forms an unflinching record of who we are and what we do. It connects us in time and space to those who went before us even as it represents our legacy—for better or for worse—to those who come after.” Those words resound after hearing ditch-and-run plans floated for the James R. Thompson Center since the Pritzker inauguration, to, in the vulture capitalist coinage, “unlock value.” That “spaceship-like building, Helmut Jahn’s James R. Thompson Center… still seems like a brash intruder butting up against the classical dignity of Chicago’s City Hall,” Kamin wrote, but also described it as a structure that explained Chicago’s “timidity” in architecture. “Jahn’s glassy glitter place,” he wrote, “spawned a reaction against risk-taking that turned reactionary, leading to such backward-looking buildings as the Washington library … and the United Center and Comiskey Park.” In the post-Rahm construction era of shiny-shiny and shinier, plus reckless demolition left and right, Jahn’s remains a provocation that could well be obliterated in the service of further momentary profit and consistent with the accelerating anti-preservationist mood. (Ray Pride)
The James R. Thompson Center Historical Society, preservationfutures.org
Best way to leave the city
The North Branch Trail
Hard to imagine, but so much of my summer childhood was focused on leaving the city. Case in point would be the forested North Branch Trail which, until recently, began at Elston and Milwaukee, across the street from Super Dawg. Bikers headed north through the near-city (Morton Grove, Niles) toward a final destination which was urban only in name (Chicago Botanical Garden). (Noel Schecter)
Best car museum
Klaremont Collections
Klaremont features over 300 vintage cars in a 100,000-square-foot facility. Recently opened to the public on select days, you can see a Batmobile; gangster-era cars; a Tucker 1950s “car of the future”; retired racing cars; Rolls-Royces; Lincolns and rarer makes like a Czechoslovakian Tatra and a Swiss-Spanish Hispano-Suiza. Brightly lit and adorned with vintage neon signs for SONOCO, PONTIAC and NASH, this facility is tucked away behind Cicero Avenue’s used-car row, but the cars are definitely not cheap or used. (David Witter)
3117 N. Knox, klairmontkollections.com
Best neon to make your Instagram feed glow
Heart O’ Chicago Motel
The Heart O’ Chicago Motel neon sign has been iconic for a long time, likely since the Edgewater motel opened in 1959. But now, even more so. Avoid falling into the “pics or it didn’t happen”—the mantra of the Instagram era—rabbithole by driving past the motel after nightfall. The magic of the 1960s awaits in the form of a heart-shaped neon sign. Ponder the history behind as well as the right angle to snap a picture. (Vasia Rigou)
5990 N. Ridge, 773.271.9181
Best place to go and watch dogs
Puptown
Puptown in Uptown. The punny name is enough to earn it a nod, but this massive dog park is man’s-best-friend’s urban dream. More than 16,000 square feet of fun is more than you can shake a stick at. And this isn’t your average dog park: they have an annual dog costume contest, fittingly named Howl-O-Ween—the puns continue!—with a community of dog parents ready to clean up or raise funds for upkeep. Plus the entire place is fully gated and fenced, so doggies are free to play to their heart’s content. Go admire some puppers. (Amanda Finn)
4921 N. Marine
Best way to tour the city for the canine crazy
Dog spotting by breed
“You see a lot of small dogs and large dogs in this city,” someone once told me, “but what about all the medium dogs?” I haven’t stopped thinking about that, and I’ve kept decent notes on hotspots for dedicated dogspotters. Buena Park is a floof-mecca for Frenchies and pugs but there’s also a handsome pair of American Eskimo dogs that must be part of a secret neighborhood-specific dog society. Downtown is great for getting a peek at a chihuahua in a baby stroller. Logan Square wins when it comes to friendly faced larger breeds like Wheaten Terriers, and once in Wicker Park I saw a Great Pyrenees mix that stopped me dead in my tracks. Desperate for pup-time? Weather permitting, you can always head to Montrose Dog Beach and live vicariously through the other dog parents or bring your best furry friend for a playdate. (Kaycie Surrell)
Best safety stance by a Chicago team
On July 22, the Chicago White Sox extended the netting to cover all seats in the stadium’s lower bowl, thus providing maximum security to thousands of empty seats. (Corey Hall)
Best organization working to decrease pretrial incarceration
Chicago Community Bond Fund
CCBF organizers look at criminal justice holistically. Since their founding in 2015, the group has operated a revolving bond fund to free folks from Cook County Jail prior to trials as well as working on national efforts to end cash bond and pretrial incarceration. To put their work into larger perspective, by February CCBF had paid bond for two hundred people, with more than a million dollars moving through the bail fund. (Kerry Cardoza)
chicagobondfund.org
Best citizen debt relief under Mayor Lightfoot (to date)
Vehicle Sticker Ticket Amnesty
Observers of the city and its political machinations, including revenue sources, are perhaps unduly hopeful about the potential for evolution and progress under the Lightfoot mayoralty—fare-free public transportation, anyone?—but there are signs that the old way doesn’t have to be the old way. ProPublica and WBEZ reported that the amnesty announced on city sticker arrears, which expired on October 31, could affect a half-million drivers, alongside a prorated city vehicle sticker plan under City Clerk Anna Valencia. We’re talking about an aggregated total of a cold half-billion dollars of debt held since 1990 over the heads of the least likely to be able to pay. ProPublica analyzed records back to 2007 and found that the Rahm Emanuel-sponsored penalty increase “coupled with a pattern of racial disparities in sticker ticketing has exacerbated a uniquely Chicago phenomenon: Thousands of mostly black drivers filing for bankruptcy to cope with ticket debt.” (Ray Pride)
Best Twitter dis of the City Council
“The Aldermaniacs”
Twitter user @LuigiDNapla worked up a fine froth of doggerel in May about city council eagerness to lay down for money:
It’s time for Aldermaniacs.
We give Sterling Bay contracts.
So just listen to our flacks!
Here’s a seven-cent bag tax.
Come to the city council, we will listen to your woes
About developers and cops and fears your businesses will close.
And then we will do nothing – that’s why Troutman called us hos.
I know you’re miffed the city’s TIF-ed, but we don’t like casting no’s.
We’re Aldermaniacs!
We campaign on smear attacks.
Some get caught in criminal acts
Like Ed Vrdolyak’s.
We’re getting to the song’s climax
Our oversight is lax
Some were funded by Rahm’s PACs
We’re Alderman-ee
Will it always be this way-ee?
(The new crop’s a maybe)
ALDERMANIACS! Those are the facts!
(Ray Pride)
Best historic shrieking about Chicago “bohemia”
“Chicago Confidential,” 1950
“If Chicago has anything resembling a bohemian section,” wrote Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose other emissions included “New York: Confidential!,” “it is the Near North Side. Bughouse Square attracts the nuts and the exhibitionists. The made-over flats and the remolded mansions harbor all that is left of Chicago’s artistic and literacy coldly. What was once on the way to being the center of a new school of civilized culture has dwindled to a pocket edition of the remains of atmosphere in New York’s Greenwich Village, with candlelighted tea-shops, a few sawdust-strew saloons where the avante garde reads effusions of its confusions to other would-bes, and the pet drinks are grappo and vino rouge.” The pages rampage with melodrama and the shrieking hysteria of the moment and Lait and Mortimer always protesteth too much: “Such habituals always draw the distorted and the perverted and that mélange of middle-sex jobs which nature started but never finished. As a blind for allowing more serious toleration, the police swoop down now and again on the pathological misfits, but they soon return.” (Ray Pride)
Best historic punch-drunk description of late-1960s Chicago gambling
“Captive City: Chicago In Chains”
Ovid Demaris’ 1969 screamer was sold by sensationalist Lyle Stuart Books as a history of Chicago as “the killing ground, the training school, the pace setter” for crime poisoning “every level of American society.” The ribald, even rabid verbiage teeters to collapse: “A multibillion-dollar-a-year extravaganza, gambling in Chicago makes Las Vegas look like a Saturday night crap game in the rear of Schultz’s delicatessen.” Of course now, book and policy are a state of Illinois franchise, meant to benefit education, yet still prone to predation, such as scratch-offs sold to 7-Eleven-level gamblers without informing them that the pot of marquee prizes is done. (Ray Pride)
Best caution against Wicker Park nightlife (circa 1985)
The two editions of Dennis McCarthy’s “The Great Chicago Bar & Saloon Guide” (1978 and 1985) offer snippets and glimpses of wet, wet Chicago from the gaze of one jumpy publican. Introducing the second edition, McCarthy warned, “the newcomer must realize the city has a fierce territoriality as its historical inheritance… Do not wander into the neighborhoods if you do not know where you are going. Ask…Chicagoans may ask me why I have not listed the Artful Dodger or the Get Me High Lounge. These places are in a neighborhood called Wicker Park, at the beginning of the West Side. The reason is that I have eliminated the West Side completely in this edition. The punk gangsters of this part of Chicago have shown a frenzied interest in shooting people with handguns. They do it at a rate which is not surpassed anywhere in the nation. Sorry, West Side. You are not in this book.” (Ray Pride)
The best warning that Wicker Park is done
The dimming of the Double Door Liquors neon
The sound of the roaring nineties of the Milwaukee-Damen-North intersection has incrementally dulled to the peppiest, poppiest shopping Muzak. (The Crotch has been lopped.) Any denizen, current or former, of the area since the 1990s has personal touchstones of how grime turned perfume and slack became slick. But the epic gesture in 2019 didn’t even come from the buildout of the former 473-person-capacity Double Door space to house a Texas premium cooler and camping and coozie brand that will showcase lifestyle-lifting live performances and other events to elevate their brand beyond an Urban Outfitters for those at middle age holding onto a pocket full of surplus value. No, it’s not all those shows there, like the Rolling Stones secret show, which in the twenty-two years since has grown in claims to an attendance of thousands and counting. No, it’s the fact that city zoning bureaucracy forced the dismantling of the stories-tall 1950s-era Double Door Liquors neon, finally dimmed as “non-conforming” signage and removed before the imperative of occupancy by the new lifestyle product could happen. The sign was successfully stored, but the nighthawk emblem no longer signs and singes the night. (Ray Pride)
Best historic fever dream from a 1928 Chicago rooming house
A suspect text from “The University of Chicago Sociological Series,” Harvey W. Zorbaugh’s “The Gold Coast and the Slum” is filled with suspect yet engrossing, lurid purported testimonies, such as the fever a man who left his wife discovered once removing to a North Side rooming house. “I found myself totally alone. There were evenings when I went out of my way to buy a paper, or an article at a drug store—just for the sake of talking a few minutes with someone,” Zorbaugh reports the man confessing. “Worse, if possible, than the loneliness was the sex hunger. I had had a regular and satisfying sex experience with my wife. I began to grow restless without it… The constant stimulation of the city began to tell, adding tremendously to this sexual restlessness, lights, well-dressed women, billboards advertising shows. It got so posters showing women in negligee or women’s silk-clad legs excited me unbearably. Many times I followed an attractive woman for blocks, with no thought of accosting her, but to watch the movements off her body… A girl in the next house used to undress without pulling down her shade, and I literally spent hours watching her. I had fantasies of sexual intercourse with every attractive woman I saw on the street.” What Zorbaugh saw as “the emotional tensions of thwarted wishes” often led to suicide, he claimed, finding the state of confusion out of the ordinary. (Ray Pride)
Best fresh description of the Chicago Fire
Whet Moser’s “Chicago”
“‘CHEER UP,’ the Chicago Tribune’s editorial began the next day, even though its building, too, had burned to the ground,” writes veteran Chicago observer Whet Moser in his book-length history. “Chicago had been a muddy little town of a few thousand in the lifetime of some of its greatest citizens. To become a city of 300,000 had already involved world-historical feats of building (and braggadocio). It still had its land, lake, and river; it still had its railroads; it still had, to an astonishing degree, its citizens. Chicago would simply have to build itself up again and better still, and it began almost immediately. The first building to go up among the ruins was, reportedly, a real estate office… The myth of a new, even greater Chicago rising out of the Great Fire began as the city was literally still smoldering. And it is not untrue.”
Best existential annoyance on the CTA
Farecard expiration warnings
The kindly Wisconsin voice reminds you day after day, ride after ride, your card might be expiring soon, be ready! So when your yellowed card with the old design is about to pop, you get that shiny new card with its understated geometric pattern. And it says that it expires in March 2038, which is, oh, nineteen years from now? There will be four, there will be five or more announcements, even more than usual, on your trip to work or home that day: YOUR VENTRA CARD MAY BE EXPIRING… Or you might first. (Ray Pride)
