There’s not much to see. You’d drive right by the laundromat, right by the little Spanish grocery, right by the currency exchange. What? Another J.J. Peppers? You’d drive right by that too.
“Inglesia Evangeleo de Jesucristo, Primitiva Pentecostes,” the sign on the little storefront church on Diversey declares. Przeminelo Z Wlatrem by Margaret Mitchell (with Rhett Butler breathing over Scarlett’s naked shoulder) is for sale at the Polonia Book Store on Milwaukee Avenue. Arencibia Clothing has a sign “Precious Bajos. Se Necesitan Revendederes,” and Brzozowski Fashion Clothes next door is holding a “3 dni sale, Platek, Sob e Niedj.” At Diversey and Kedzie, posters wired to the light poles announce a Saint Patrick’s Day party where you could have danced to the music of Ismael Rosa, Jesus Enrique, and the Orquesta Sabori. At Central Park and Milwaukee, more posters, Pepe Wroc with Grzegorz Markowski, Spiew, Ryszard Sygitowicz and Andrez Urny, Gitary, Piotr Szkudelski and Andrezes Nowicki, Bebeny I Bas.
Most of my neighbors spoke English when I first walked this neighborhood. They were white working-class people much like the people I grew up with in Blue Island, but somehow a bit more aggressive, a bit less neighborly, a bit more inclined to mind their own business. My new neighbors smoked cigarettes, followed the horses, and took the benefits of big-city life for granted. Buses that came by every 15 minutes seemed tardy to them, stores open till ten closed too early. They took for granted the 12-minute elevated ride into the Loop, the same as they did Riverview Park at Addison and Western Avenue, the same as the fine stores on Milwaukee Avenue, the same as the parks, the boulevards, and the neighborhood schools so close their kids walked home for lunch. Many of our new neighbors were old-timers who remembered the days when things were, of course, ever so much better, and some of them were very old-timers who claimed to remember open fields and farmland and streets without sidewalks. But most of the buildings in Logan Square were completed between 1880 and 1920–so much for the old-timers who claim to remember farms.
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Those old-timers, whatever their experience of open fields, had certainly grown up in the shadow of the Eagle, Logan Square’s most visible landmark. The minute you step out of the Logan Square subway stop you see it, a 50-foot shaft of pure white marble set right in the middle of the Kedzie, Milwaukee, and Logan Boulevard intersection. People around here call it the Eagle because of the stone eagle mounted on its peak, or they call it the Monument, or simply the Statue, but you hardly ever hear anyone call it by its proper name: the Illinois Centennial Column. This intersection is Logan Square. For over 60 years the elevated line that now runs to O’Hare had its terminal here, and it is here that the present subway daily transfers hundreds of commuters to CTA buses. This is as far north as the Chicago boulevard system goes, although Logan Boulevard continues on east to Elston, and north of this intersection Kedzie continues on to the northern limits of the city as a regular street.
The land here is flat, true prairie. Those stories about farmland are really so. In 1843 a lawyer and politician by the name of Justin Butterfield bought 80 acres of what is now the heart of Logan Square from the government for $1.25 an acre. At the time most people figured the location was too far out from Chicago to ever amount to anything, but old Butterfield must have known. He was a shrewd lawyer/politician who once beat out Abraham Lincoln for a federal job by taking a shortcut to Washington. Little villages and hamlets took shape, places like Maplewood and Pennock and Avondale and Jefferson, all following the Northwest Plank Road, now Milwaukee Avenue. Most Chicago streets are laid out on a grid, of course, so when you see one like Milwaukee or Vincennes or Ogden running off at an angle there’s a good chance it may have been an Indian trail, and later one of the old plank roads. These roads, most of which charged tolls, were literally paved with planks, and sometimes people tore up the “pavement” for firewood. Tolls were still being collected on Milwaukee Avenue as late as 1899 when, in a show of good old American gumption, the citizens of Avondale disguised themselves as Indians and rioted, burning down the tollbooth and murdering the toll keeper. That was Amos Snell, and the least I can do is record his name here.
But all was not innocent in my childhood home. My mother was once locked inside a restaurant refrigerator by holdup men. My father was assaulted outside a tavern on Western Avenue. The poolroom where he tried to make a living was burglarized regularly and methodically. Shadowy strangers followed women on our best residential streets and reached up their dresses. A peculiar man stood across from our Vermont Street apartment and demonstrated the art of masturbation. And this all happened in the good old days before there was crime.
Immediately adjoining my laundromat is all that remains of a house converted into a trendy restaurant called the Ragin’ Cajun, now apparently scheduled for demolition if no buyer is found to rescue it, and that would be a shame. Before the restaurant, this house was the home of one of the oldest residents of our neighborhood, a man named Charlie who spoke of horse trolleys, streets without sidewalks, and empty fields, and kept that house just as it was for all the years he lived in it. Now it is empty, boarded up, a shell.
