May through October, the sidewalk between North Elizabeth and North Noble streets is the communal living room of the 1300 block of West Chestnut Street. ”If the weather breaks early, we`re already outside in April,” Evelyn Napora explained while setting up a beach chair in front of her two-flat that marks the center of the block. All up and down the street, her neighbors were making similar provisions to enjoy the sharply inclined rays of the early evening sun.
”You should be here Halloween,” said Loretta Wenc, seconding Napora`s motion. ”Trick or treaters never make it up the stairs to the door bell. We give them their candy right here.”
As if to demonstrate the physical logic of her thesis, Wenc was sharing a tightly packed staircase with a dozen assorted young people plus almost as many cats and dogs. At the end of the block`s nightly socializing session, most of Wenc`s junior stoopmates will be sorted out and returned to the two-flats and frame houses that are their indoor quarters.
Patches and Stripes, though, are full-time outdoors enthusiasts. The block`s mascots, this alley cat couple beds down for the night underneath an entrance sidewalk that arches over the tiny, below-ground-level front yard of an adjoining residence. Long ago this section of the street was raised up out of the mud once endemic to Chicago`s inner-city neighborhoods, a bootstrapping operation that left the buildings surrounded by a half-story dry moat.
Nor are Patches and Stripes the only residents who can`t get enough of Chestnut Street. Mildred Jrnuszewski found out the hard way how much the block, and its outfront neighborliness, means to her.
In 1950 she married and moved away from Chestnut Street, in the heart of Chicago`s oldest Polish neighborhood, to her mother-in-law`s two-flat on the Far Northwest Side. ”It was a nice building in a good, quiet neighborhood,” Jrnuszewski recalled of her years in exile. ”But it was kind of lonely out there.”
So lonely, in fact, that soon she was tagging along on her husband`s daily commute to Shapiro`s Fish Market in the West Randolph Street produce district. Mornings, Chester Jrnuszewski would drop off his wife at her ancestral block, then retrieve her at the end of his workday. In good weather, he would join her for a few hours of sitting out in front of her parents`
house before heading back to their own home in the late evening.
After five years of this, the Jrnuszewskis belatedly realized that their honeymoon apartment could never be more than a bedroom suburb to them. So they came back to Mildred`s old neighborhood, albeit not at first to West Chestnut Street.
”Nothing was open at the time, and we had to rent over on Iowa,” Mrs. Jrnuszewski said, motioning back over her head to the street immediately behind. ”We had to pay $90 a month, when most folks were paying $18 or $25. But we did it gladly for seven years until dad died and we bought my folks`
place.”
For their mortgage payments, the Jrnuszewskis got a home with a view. Directly across West Chestnut Street are the wide open spaces of Eckhart Park. From early morning on, its playing fields host a continuous series of softball games. Many of the youthful players use the timeouts to run back and forth to their homes on the north side of the street.
The youngest kids have a regular crossing ritual: Hesitating at the curb, they will look over to the adults on the stoops of Chestnut for a signal that the traffic is clear before venturing into the street itself. The block`s dogs pause for a similar okay when they want to cross over to the park in response to nature`s call.
Incidentally, neither kids nor animals feel it necessary to wait for a high sign from a biological relative or legal guardian. Just as on an Israeli kibbutz, parenting is a shared responsibility on a stoop-sitting block such as this.
From his fieldhouse vantage at the opposite end of the ball diamonds, the park supervisor also keeps a watchful eye on the evening`s proceedings. As long as youngsters are playing, he keeps the field illuminated. Once the final game ends, he turns out the floodlights, and for the rest of the night, the park belongs to the young couples who dot the benches that mark its perimeter. Evelyn Napora remembered sitting on those benches 40 years ago when her generation hoped against hope that the darkness hid their courting from the porches and stoops. Napora, who came to the block at age 2, met her husband when his team played in a neighborhood athletic league.
Though he died some time ago, she doesn`t lack for seatmates. She is West Chestnut Street`s recognized Earth Mother, and her beach-chair perch is an early evening lodestone for the block`s young, human and four-footed alike. As part of her nightly ritual, Napora puts down a plate of cat food next to her chair for Patches and Stripes.
Then she sits down, making her lap available to the series of kids who curl up there to report on their day. Part of the time, her lap is taken up by her own grandchildren, who, along with their mother, live in an apartment in Napora`s two-flat. Yet blood lines do not allow them to monopolize their grandmother. When their allotted time is up, she sets down her offspring to pick up a neighbor`s child and give that one a chance to tell what went on at school that day or how preparations are going for a forthcoming first communion.
”We`ve been living together here for so long, it seems like we`re all family by now,” Napora said by way of explaining her nightly succession of young visitors.
At one end, the 1300 block is anchored by St. Boniface Catholic Church. Mondays, the church runs a popular bingo game, and the block`s residents take an evening off from stoop-sitting. Carol Witczak, who lives next door to the church, presides over the game. So Tuesday evenings, Witczak`s first order of businesss is to provide the rest of the block with a complete rundown on the previous night`s winners and losers.
Coming out to sit on her front-door step, she passes that information on directly to the Jrnuszewskis, her next-door neighbors, and Mrs. Jrnuszewski`s sister Stephanie Stawairski, who brings a folding chair over from her own house nearby to form the block`s westernmost cluster of socializers.
The rest of the street gets the news via Witczak`s daughter, Judy Vilard. When she married, Mrs. Vilard and her husband took an apartment at the opposite end of the 1300 block from the house where she grew up. Each day after supper, she walks her young son and daughter over to their grandmother`s house, punctuating their pilgrimage by stopping for a few minutes at each of the several clusters of stoop-sitters dotting the block.
At each resting point, she`ll exchange the news of the day with that group and pick up more neighborhood gossip for distribution. By the time Mrs. Vilard completes her round trip and returns home to put her children into their baths, the 1300 block will share pretty much a common accounting of the day`s events.
At Mrs. Vilard`s corner, West Chestnut Street dead ends into the Kennedy Expressway. Just west of the expressway is St. John Cantius Church, which before the highway cut the neighborhood in two, was only a short walk away. From Chestnut, St. John`s spire is backdropped by downtown`s skyscrapers, and that uniquely urban skyline makes even an accidental visitor want to tarry.
The beauty of their view seems to inspire the street`s older residents with a nightly urge to review their common history. ”Remember Zidic–old man Lowry?” someone starts a conversation by recalling a Jewish insurance man who used to collect premiums up and down the block. ”I saw him the other day. He waved as he drove by in his car.”
”Zidic`s got to be 70 years old by now,” someone else adds, provoking a chorus of anecdotes about the block`s long-ago visitor for whom the women would cook Polish specialities for his lunch and dinner.
Earlier this summer, a Hollywood director saw in the view from the 1300 block a perfect setting for a forthcoming Goldie Hawn movie, and for a week, the street was crowded with a fleet of production-crew vans. Most of the time, though, West Chestnut Street is all but invisible to the larger world beyond its miniature cosmos of cast-iron railings and masonry thresholds.
Years ago this was a solidly Polish neighborhood. But in recent decades, more and more of the surrounding streets have become Hispanic. As a result, the 1300 block is a kind of island of ethnic integrity on the Near Northwest Side, a demographic that reinforces the residents` narrow-lens focus upon their own concrete-and-asphalt world.
The night before he died, Chester Stawairski summoned the family to his bedroom, recalled his wife Stephanie.
” `Bring pencil and paper,` he told our daughter.” she said. ”Then he had her write down that he wanted to be buried in his blue suit at St. John`s with Father Gratkowski coming over from St. Boniface`s to say the mass.”`
Swinging her head from side to side to point out the Alpha and Omega of her late husband`s universe, Mrs. Stawairski paused at each end of that gesture to add an up-an-down motion to send greetings to far-flung neighbors on either side.
Politically, the 1300 block forms the 42nd precinct of the 32nd Ward. As election judges, Napora and Wenc keep the voter rolls up to date by removing stoopmates` names after each funeral mass at St. John`s or St. Boniface`s. But the block`s titular ruler is Jim (The Bull——-) Cortez, as his constituents call him.
This absentee-owner–literally and figuratively–Democratic Party precinct captain earned that cognomen by the predictable regularity of his electoral strategy. ”We never see the guy until about a month before election day,” some of his constituents explained. ”Then all of a sudden he`ll come down the block shaking every hand in sight and promising how right after the voting, we`ll be getting our curbs fixed or the street repaved.”
By light of the street lamps, the stoop-sitter political observers noted, the cracked concrete and crumbling asphalt that marks the trail of their precinct captain`s unredeemed promises was just visible.
Cortez` reign was preceded by that of Larry (The Biggest Bull——- Of Them All). Larry, whose last name is lost to history, is so remembered for having urged the street`s residents not to worry, back when neighboring blocks were bulldozed away for the expressway. Right after the next election, Larry assured them, he was going to get them a footbridge across the Kennedy so they could attend mass at St. John`s.
On a day-to-day basis, Wenc is the block`s de facto monarch. An outspoken woman, she herself is the first to advertise that fact. Wenc likes to boast of the time the police took her to a nearby hospital after she had been mugged:
” `Lady,` the cop said, `Until we put you back there, I used to think that our paddy wagons were soundproof!` ”
During the nightly discussions of forthcoming events at the church, or the Catholic school most of the children attend, Wenc punctuates her stoopmates` comments with her own footnoted corrections.
She also conducts a running eyeball-to-eyeball feud with one of the block`s few newcomer families. A child from that household likes to retaliate for her hostile stares by doing ”wheelies” and banging on his bike`s handlebars with a screwdriver while riding back and forth past her front porch. The young cyclist`s performance is inevitably acknowledged by Wenc with a what-is-this-world-coming- to shake of the head.
Twenty-five years of having to make the long detour that the unfulfilled promise of a footbridge imposed have left the block`s residents convinced skeptics. Their philosophy seems to be: If you can`t see it with your own two eyes, why bother troubling your head about it?
Most nights, conversation revolves around immediate issues: the school, church doings and the older folks` health problems. This evening, the high cost of medical care was topic No. 1. After everyone else had offered examples of how hard it is to keep up with doctors` bills, Wenc resolved the issue by sending her daughter for a visual aid.
”Bring out grandma`s knee,” she called to Lisa Wenc, playing with other children nearby. To her stoopmates, Wenc explained that they were going to see a prosthetic device that recently was removed from her mother`s knee in favor of a newer model.
”Five hundred bucks the surgeon wanted for the new one, and he wasn`t even going to give us back this one,” Wenc announced, holding up the metal-and-plastic knee for her audience. ”I said, for that kind of money, cough the thing up, buddy. I`m going to send it with the kid to school as her science fair project!”
Every once in a while the 1300 block`s psychic isolation is punctured. Pauline Cwiak recalled how in 1943 her family answered a doorbell ring that they had been dreading ever since her brother Andrew had joined the navy.
”The President has asked me to convey to you his deepest sympathy,” began the telegram the delivery boy handed them.
”It told how Andrew`s destroyer had been sunk off Salerno,” Cwiak recalled from the front stoop that had belonged to her parents before her and overlooking the park where she and her brother had played as children.
On a few occasions, the stoop-sitters have gone out of their way to break out of the block-long patriotism they normally wrap around themselves. Over the years, President John F. Kennedy and Pope John Paul have passed on the nearby expressway. Both times, many of the block`s residents gave up an evening`s worth of front-porch socializing to make the short voyage over to the embankment to see history whiz by them.
But that is not a sacrifice they make easily.
A while back, Warner Brother`s advance men went down the street signing up residents to have their homes play cameo roles in that Hawn movie. Some of her neighbors bit at the opportunity, but Wenc said she wanted no part of the deal.
How come?
When you sign on the dotted line, you may get a little richer, Wenc noted, but you also give up more than a little something in return. Across the street, the darkness now hid the park so completely that you might think the games were over for the night, except for the occasional giggle from its courting benches. Down the block, Louie Lisiak was going through his nightly ritual of sweeping the gutter in front of his house before driving off to pick up his daughter as she came off a shift of her job at a nearby hospital.
”If I`d have taken their money,” Wenc said of the brief Hollywood fling, ”They would be able to tell me when I could go in and out of the house. Pretty soon, I`d have to ask some producer`s permission just to come out and sit on my own front stoop.”
