David Witter

If you could combine the shops and ornate wooden homes of San Francisco with the gaslights, brick courtyards and hidden gardens of New Orleans, add in the Chicago architecture of Louis Sullivan, Harry Weese, and a history of counter-culture activities, you might get a snapshot of Chicago's Old Town.

As a child growing up in Lincoln Park, I remember the magic of Old Town during the late sixties and early seventies. I marveled at Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, The Wax Museum, the world's largest headshop, the go-go girls dancing in the windows and Hare Krishnas chanting on the street corners. Musicians like Miles Davis and Janis Joplin played at clubs like the Plugged Nickel and Mother Blues, and Steve Goodman and John Prine got their starts playing at clubs like The Earl of Old Town.

The Second City stage that spawned John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray is the only true remnant of that era that still thrives, but much of the architecture and atmosphere that survived everything from the Chicago Fire to suburban flight still remains. Today, many business owners, homeowners and artists are uniting to fight yet another challenge to this eclectic urban environment.

In April, the Grossinger auto dealership filed plans with the City of Chicago Zoning Board to build a five-story, 75,000-square-foot "City Autoplex," a mega-mall of cars that would add Cadillac, Hummer, Saab and Saturn dealerships to the current Toyota/Scion car lot. Along with this cement and glass giant, Grossinger has also filed a proposal before the City Council that, "the `Pedestrian Street' designation be removed pursuant to Section 17-3-B of the Chicago Zoning Ordinance from the following street segments: as measured from a point 66.9 feet south of West Goethe Street thence south for a distance of 365.58 feet located on the east side of North Wells Street; and as measured from the intersection of West Scott Street and North Wells Street..."

"The impact on the neighborhood would be devastating," says Chris Donovan, whose family has run the House of Glunz liquor store, at 1206 North Wells since 1888. "For the last fifty years, we have tried to build an atmosphere of shops, sidewalk cafés and entertainment venues all centered around leisurely foot traffic. The removal of the pedestrian designation would endanger this, but that is just the beginning. Then you add in the curb cuts, car traffic from both customers and test drives, and the parking problems caused by this. Then there are other factors," Donovan continues. "With five dealerships you would have five double-decker trailers regularly delivering new cars. Where are they going to park? The whole thing would be a mess."

For their part, Grossinger issued a statement declaring, "The Grossinger family places a high value on the integrity and credibility of the communities that we reside in. As a longtime Chicago business we fully understand our role as a good corporate citizen and neighbor and look forward to working with the residents of Old Town to meet both the community's needs and our business needs. ...Please be assured that we are taking the impact on the community very seriously. Specifically, we are working with Alderman Vi Daley (43rd Ward) to establish loading zones and delivery hours that will have a minimal impact on bicycle, pedestrian and vehicle traffic on Wells Street."

In her book, "Our Old Town: The History of a Neighborhood," author Shirley Baugher chronicles how the neighborhood was established in the late 1830s. Originally a cabbage patch, its early residents included Michael Diversey, William Ogden, William Rand and Andrew McNally. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the neighborhood, but amazingly, the home of Richard Bellinger was spared. The house, at 2121 North Hudson, still stands today.

After the fire, the area was rebuilt by established residents as well as newcomers like sausage king Oscar Meyer. An infamous resident was longtime Alderman Paddy Bauler, whose headquarters was located in a bar on the corner of North Avenue and Sedgwick. An enormous man weighing 300 pounds, Ald. Bauler presided over an empire of graft and corruption that included liquor, payoffs and Gold Coast whorehouses for more than thirty-five years. His famous quote, "Chicago ain't ready for reform," apparently still echoes through City Hall today.

Like much of Chicago, Old Town began to feel the effects of the postwar boom and the flight of families to the suburbs. "During the 1950s, a lot of the great houses in Old Town were broken up and made into rooming houses," Baugher says. "Rents became lower and property values declined."

This devaluation had one positive effect, as a new crop of "beatniks" came to settle in Old Town. "The beatniks didn't necessarily worry about jobs and money but spent their time reading, writing poetry, drinking wine and sometimes doing heroin," says Peter Amft, a world-renowned music photographer who worked and lived in several Old Town locations during the sixties and seventies.

The beatniks helped lure what was to become The Old Town School of Folk Music to open on North Avenue, and as the fifties passed into the sixties, the neighborhood began to evolve into what would eventually become the hippie mecca of Chicago.

"It was the folk boom that made Old Town happen," says Amft, whose photo credits include hundreds of books, album covers, magazine spreads, as well as being tapped by Mick Jagger as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones 1972 Tour. "The school galvanized a club scene, and places like the Fickle Pickle, Mother Blues, the Blind Pig and the nearby Gate of Horn attracted folk musicians like Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bob Gibson and Judy Collins to visit the area. An atmosphere began to develop. One person with a guitar and long hair would sit on a fire hydrant playing guitar. Another musician would come, and soon you'd have a hootenanny."

Another key to the transformation of Old Town was the neighborhood's growing role as the city's center for gay culture. The roots for this began in the 1920s, after Henry Gerber returned from World War I and moved into 1710 N. Crilly Court. Gerber formed a group called the Society for Human Rights, the state's first chartered organization speaking for homosexuals. Although technically illegal, the group met regularly in his Old Town row house. There is no record of any type of harassment until Gerber moved out of the neighborhood, when the police raided his Oak Street apartment and all of the groups' documents were destroyed.

"Old Town was, and still is, a place where gay people own and patronize the businesses and generally behave freely," Amft says. "I remember in 1962 Gene Siegel opened his antique store. He had a great store filled with odds and ends from all over, but he was also a raving queen and never tried to hide it, which was risky in those days."

This mixture of folkies, beatniks and gays made Old Town a natural melting pot for the members of the new flower-power generation who were adapting to the culture that was thriving in San Francisco.

"Old Town became a destination," Amft says. "I would see Janis Joplin dragging her guitar case down the street, Mama Cass on her way to Mother Blues, Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, who were from Chicago, were here. It was a bohemian atmosphere where you would see people with guitars and long hair, a place where you could fly your freak flag, a carnival that didn't exist anywhere else."

This led to a number of businesses that catered to the hippie generation. Places like Bizarre Bazaar, a giant indoor mall that featured fifty-yard rows of fish bowls filled with rolling papers and pot paraphernalia, black-light posters and bootleg records. Perhaps most interesting were the go-go clubs where, like the credits in James Bond movies, you could see the shadows of nude and semi-nude women gyrating under a kaleidoscope of changing lights in the windows along Wells Street. Oglers in cars would tie up traffic for blocks.

The influx of suburbanites and gawking visitors, however, turned the once hippie mecca into a tourist-fed, income-generating theme park. Local residents put signs in their windows saying, "suburbanites go home." And after the hippes left, they did.

"The Wells Street era ended in the late seventies," Baugher says. "It ended because of economics--money got tight and the businesses left. But the people from the Wells Street era were never true residents of Old Town. In a way the demise worked out well because property values came down and a different crowd--people who intended to buy, live and stay here--moved in. They were rehabbers, the first yuppies."

It is into this history, tradition and current environment that Grossinger stepped in April. The company currently operates a Toyota dealership at 1233 North Wells Street, at the site of the former Tower Olds. Although the corner of North and Wells is always hopping, the Old Town "midway" tapers off around the site of the former Bijou Theatre. It is the hope of businesses like the House of Glunz and Salpicon restaurant, as well as property owners belonging to the 1212 N. Wells Condominium Association and the South Old Town Neighbors Alliance, that Wells Street becomes an uninterrupted pedestrian causeway. As the continuing demolition of the Cabrini Green public-housing complex moves this vision closer to reality, they see the autoplex as a giant dam that stops the stream of commerce dead in its tracks.

"Back when my grandfather was here, we were the only shop in what was an industrial neighborhood," Donovan says. "Now, aside from the auto-body shop around the corner, this has become more commercial and residential."

Like hundreds of disputes between neighbors and developers, the decision as to the future of the autoplex will be, as it was back in the day of Paddy Bauler, up to the alderman. In a recent statement to the press, Daley (no relation to the mayor) gave a boilerplate "my position is to work with both sides to come up with something that everybody can live with" answer. She also hinted that a possible compromise might include "only two or three" instead of five dealerships.

But what Grossinger and even Daley may underestimate is that they are going up against a long history that is in direct conflict with the mainstream American value of the automobile as king. Unlike minority neighborhoods on the verge of gentrification, there is already a tremendous amount of money residing in the area where the average town home sells for a million dollars.

"I have nothing against Gary [Grossinger]," Donovan says, "but if you are going to spend millions of dollars on something you should do a little research. This goes against everything the neighborhood has been striving towards for fifty years."

"I believe that this area, with its history and architecture, is quite unique," Baugher says. "If the auto dealership moves in it might start a trend of tearing down smaller properties to build larger ones. If we start losing some of these smaller businesses and homes, they might never come back."

(2005-08-02)

Also by David Witter

Pie-eyed
Three dozen competitors, each standing in front of six half-pound giant slices, are about to begin the Third Annual Bacci World Pizza Eating Championship on West Lawrence Avenue in Schiller Park
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Carnies
It is a cool Saturday night, and the streets around Superior, Chicago and Ashland have been cordoned off for the annual carnival at Holy Innocents Church
(2005-06-28)

My parade, part 1
I was born on June 29, which means that my birthday often coincides with Pride Week.
(2005-06-24)

How does your garden grow?
It's Memorial Day at the Home Depot on Elston and half of Lincoln Park is wandering the aisles and filling their carts with flats of hostas, inpatients and tomato plants named Health Kick and Golden Boy
(2005-06-09)

The Life Aquatic
(2005-05-24)

Last of the Slaughterhouses
(2005-05-03)

Paint by numbers
(2005-03-01)

The Death of Neon
(2004-11-30)

Take me to the river
(2004-05-12)

A moll meal
(2004-02-18)

Steel stomachs
(2003-11-05)

Young Turks
(2003-08-13)

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