The Santa Fe rail yards, abandoned warehouses, and dusty streets near Ashland and the South Branch of the Chicago River seem empty, but just past dawn on this early Sunday morning Santa-Fe Grapes, 2733 S. Ashland, is bustling with customers.
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Alleruzzo, a short, thin man with cheeks glazed purple and pink by the sun, smiles. At 78, the man they call “the Dean of Randolph Street” is still part of the autumn ritual of the Ashland wine-grape market, just as he has been for 66 years. “I started helping my father sell wine grapes, the special grapes grown to be pressed into homemade wine, back in 1927,” he says. “At that time they all came in by railroad cars straight from Lodi, Modesto, Sonoma, and other vineyards in California. We used to sell 20 to 25 railcar loads a day, because all the old-timers used to make their own wine. Now we’re lucky to sell 35 in a whole season.”
Alleruzzo enters his “office,” a cozy trailer parked on the north end of the lot. “Back then all the old Italians, Poles, Germans, and Yugoslavs used to make their own wine, like they did back home. And besides, that was during the days of Prohibition, so a lot of the folks were making bootleg wine.”
Alleruzzo, whose “regular” job is selling flowers at B.A. Florist and Nursery on West Randolph, watches a large brown Oldsmobile pull through the gravel. “Hello young man,” he cries out to a white-haired man.
“It’s kind of like the League of Nations out here,” Alleruzzo says. “We have people coming in that are Italian, Croatian, German, Serbs, Jewish people, Poles, blacks, Hispanics. That’s why I’ve been out here for 66 years. I love the wine. I love talking to all the different people. I could be home watching television, but why should I leave here? This is my life.”
