The couple had traveled from Australia-more than 9,000 miles-to see the sights, sounds and spectacle of Chicago: The Sears Tower. Wrigley Field. The Art Institute. The Magnificent Mile.
But there was one place they hadn’t yet seen that they couldn’t leave without visiting. And they were willing to do whatever it took to get there, including taking the CTA (obviously out-of-towners).
So, they popped their heads into a store in the Lincoln Village neighborhood in Chicago and politely asked: “What’s the easiest way to get to Skokie?”
Skokie? people asked. What’s in Skokie?
Bagels, mate. Bagels, they answered.
Fortunately for the pair, Jacqueline Gorell happened to be in that North Side store.
Gorell, a self-professed bagel aficionado and mayor (then and now) of Skokie, happily chauffered the pair to the village and directed them to several eateries where they could satisfy their desire for that donut-shape delicacy.
The coincidental meeting “was incredible,” Gorell recalled of the incident, which occurred almost five years ago.
“This couple wanted to get some bagels and they wanted to see the Holocaust Memorial. Somehow they’d heard of our bagels and wanted some.”
Now, if you’ve (A) never been to Skokie, (B) never eaten a bagel from one of the village’s bakeries or (C) are even a wee bit of a skeptic, then you’re probably having the same reaction as the uninitiated.
But after a visit to Skokie, a community of almost 60,000 off Chicago’s northern border, you’ll completely understand the village’s residents and the many reasons they’ve chosen to live or move there: Parks. Schools. Affordable homes. Diversity. Pumpernickel. Onion. Poppyseed. Blueberry. (And, oh yes, my favorite-cinnamon-raisin.)
Finding a pay phone in Skokie may well be harder than locating a bagel shop. Bakeries and delicatessens dot the village landscape much like skyscrapers and glass punctuate Chicago’s.
My car drive to the first in a series of bagel bakeries revealed that Skokie was a community timidly stepping into the present while firmly embracing its past. Village officials customarily pepper their language with phrases like “older community” and “evolving” when describing Skokie.
It’s easy to see why.
Skokie’s 10.2 miles of streets are filled mostly with brick ranch and Georgian-style homes and three-flats-throwbacks from another time. A Victorian-style home or bungalow can be spied on a side street here and there. And apartment complexes-which now account for a third of the community’s dwellings-are scattered throughout.
On main roads, newer modern buildings and homes stand in stark contrast to the older strip malls built during the village’s boom period, the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Longtime residents say that while physical remnants of that era are disappearing, the community has retained many of the qualities that allow it to feel like the Skokie of old.
They point to excellent village services, including twice-a-week garbage pickup and the plowing of streets and sidewalks when it snows more than two inches. They heap praise on a park district that has located parks within a 15-minute walk of every resident and has activities so numerous it publishes a 47-page booklet quarterly just to keep everyone apprised.
Like the Skokie of memories, the present-day suburb also is a business hub, home to almost 400 industrial companies-such as U.S. Robotics, and Bell and Howell-and 1,100 retail businesses, including the state’s second-largest Marshall Fields department store. In addition, Skokie’s main shopping center, Old Orchard, will expand considerably over the next few years.
Just as important, the village abuts another major business center: Chicago. As a result, Skokie is close enough to downtown-a 15-minute car ride or a trip on the CTA’s Skokie Swift-so residents can enjoy the Big City’s culture, but far enough away so they can avoid its traffic and crime.
Most important, Chicago is far enough away so Skokie residents can keep most of the bagels to themselves.
Being a Bronx, N.Y.-native, civic pride dictated that the first stop on my bagel odyssey be Mitchell Cohen’s New York Bagel and Bialys.
Since 1967, Cohen has operated the bagel business that his grandfather passed on to his father and then to him out of a rather-simple looking store in a tiny strip mall on Dempster. The setting doesn’t matter, though. People come for eats, not the ambience.
Inside, you can-on six or even seven days of the week-find Cohen. More likely than not, he will be standing in front of the store’s monstrous oven baking most of the several hundred dozen bagels his store sells daily. “I’ve got to be here,” said Cohen, whose store is open from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. 365 days a year. “I take pride in what I make.”
What Cohen makes is 13 varieties of bagels, including plain, onion, whole wheat, pumpernickel and egg. He lovingly brings them to life by sticking to an age-old tradition: boiling and baking his bagels. This, Cohen said, gives the bagels a crusty, glowing exterior and a soft, moist interior. The process also separates them from the steamed bagels some supermarkets and other bakeries sell, he added.
“Nine out of ten people have never had a real European water bagel,” Cohen boasted. That’s probably because in recent years the bagel has become as popular as many other breakfast fast foods, sold even by such mainstream chains as Dunkin’ Donuts. As a result, Cohen said, the boiling process has had to be eliminated.
Why all the popularity? Bagels are nosh for everyone, according to Cohen. They’re healthy, filling, easy to handle, can be filled with myriad things-butter, cream cheese, lox-and can be had in a variety of flavors, including chocolate chip, he said.
The interest in bagels has helped Cohen, now besieged by competitors on all sides, to maintain a thriving business. One need only look at the throngs that flock to his store on Sunday mornings to see how thriving. “It gets a little crazy,” he said. “But people are satisfied.”
I bought a sampling, not knowing what to expect. Not wanting to embarrass myself, I waited until I got to the car before I took a bite . . . then another. . . . I slowly was beginning to understand those Aussies.
The shaping and naming of modern-day Skokie began almost 200 years ago.
At that time, what is now a teeming suburb on the outskirts of a major metropolis was a swampy marsh inhabited by the Potawatomi Indians. The first permanent non-Indian settlers arrived during the 1830s. Within 20 years, the residents-mainly farmers-named the site Niles Township, began draining the marshes and farming the land.
In 1888, the settlement was incorporated into a village and renamed Niles Centre. Three years later, the village was renamed again, this time Niles Center. The change did not come about because residents requested it, but because a telephone directory publisher Americanized the community’s name.
Farming became the area’s staple. Twice a week, Chicago merchants ventured to Niles Center to buy produce and wares from the farmers’ market at Lincoln Avenue and Oakton Street, a site that flourished and proved economically bountiful for residents. It also proved to be a magnet for people.
By 1900, more than 500 people made Niles Center their home. The years brought more people, paved streets and trains, including the “L” from Chicago.
As the community’s profile and housing stock rose, realty agents decided the community needed a name befitting its urban status.
Village officials reached out to residents for a new name in 1939 by holding a contest. A large number of entries favored Ridgeview, but residents were at loggerheads. Town elders appointed a committee of 30 residents to settle the question. A committee member suggested an Indian word: Skokie. Translated into English, the word meant “swamp.” Nonetheless, the name stuck and became official in 1940.
Over the next 20 years, few villages in Illinois grew like Skokie. The population bounded from 7,200 to almost 60,000 in 1960. The burst caused such a housing spurt that for several years the suburb topped all others in the state in building permits issued. The growth peaked in 1970 as the number of Skokie residents reached 68,000.
If developers at the turn of the century had had their way, Skokie would have grown five times larger, said Michael Nees, president of the local historical society. Their vision was a community of 300,000 residents living in row after row of brick three-flats.
But the Depression eradicated the capital for the concept, and after World War II the nation had a taste for the single-family home.
Bagels can be traced to the 17th Century.
Polish King John III Sobieski drove the Turks out of Poland, and to celebrate the victory a Vienesse baker concoted the pastry and fashioned it in the image of the king’s stirrups, or beugels. The delicacy quickly spread throughout Eastern Europe and was brought to the New World by immigrants.
Bagels were kept relatively plain and simple until recent years when Americans started experimenting. Take, for example, the unique creation of Kathy and Michael Bretz, former owners of the Chicago-based Simon Brothers Bakery: Fortune Bagels.
You read right, bagels with Hebrew fortunes tucked inside. The product, which the Bretzes no longer make, was such a curio that it landed them a place in history. Well, at least the Genus II edition of Trivial Pursuit.
The Bretzes, who now have a store called The Bagel Factory on Gross Point Road, still are trying to push the bagel envelope, though with a different type of gimmick-variety. Among their 15 flavors are banana nut, chocolate chip and parmesian chive. On the way are a salsa bagel (loaded with the spicy sauce and cheese), a cajun bagel (made with blackening spices) and a hummus bagel.
The couple, with their penchant for creating “new and exciting concepts in the world of bagels,” are labelled by some as heretics.
“Those things are not bagels,” sniffed the owner of a competing eatery who considers bagels an art form. “What they are doing is prostituting the bagel. It’s absolutely horrible. I won’t have any part of that here.”
The Bretzes understand, but respectfully disagree. They say their offerings walk a fine line between traditionalism (since they still boil their bagels) and trailblazing (since they tackle flavors and concepts others wouldn’t even dream of undertaking).
“We try to give the public what it wants,” said Kathy Bretz. “Maybe some of those other places should try something new. Everybody has a right to their opinion. All I know is that here it’s the customer and not tradition that make our decisions to create a bagel.”
Bretz’ favorite bagel, by the way, is a very middle-of-the-road onion pumpernickel.
“We get calls from all over. California. Atlanta. Texas. Florida,” said Lisa Edelson, executive director of the Skokie Chamber of Commerce. “We’re starting to be known for our bagels.”
That wasn’t always the case.
More often than not, when people think of Skokie, they picture a largely Jewish community that gained notoriety by banding together in the 1970s to quash a planned march through the village’s downtown by a group of neo-Nazis. The event was later turned into a TV movie called “Skokie” starring Danny Kaye.
But village officials and many residents are reluctant to call Skokie a Jewish enclave. And with good reason, since the face-and faces-of Skokie have changed in the 16 years since Frank Collin planned his anti-Semetic protest.
Perhaps the place where that change is most evident is in Skokie’s classrooms, where 56 percent of the students speak one of 47 languages other than English at home.
“Skokie used to be known as a pretty homogeneous place,” said Rebecca Gittrich, spokeswoman for Niles Township School District. “That’s not the case anymore. This community is getting more and more diverse by the day.”
That point is best illustrated by comparing the 1980 and 1990 census. The number of African-Americans living in Skokie, for instance, rose from 601 to 1,247 during those years. There are now 2,457 Hispanics living in Skokie, more than 800 more from a decade earlier. By far the largest growing category of minorities was Asian-Americans, who saw their numbers jump from 4,146 to 9,075.
That kind of diversity translates into other kind of changes. The village’s library, for example, has a far-reaching and multiethnic mixture of activities, programs and resources that allow users to attend a demonstration on how to wrap a sari, listen to a lecture on the Soviet economy or browse through their collections of European, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Korean literature.
For their part, village officials say that Skokie was one of the first suburbs to have a fair-housing law, a fair-housing commission and a program specifically encouraging multiculturalism, called Valuing Our Image Concerning Ethnicity in Skokie (VOICES). In addition, the village also sponsors the Skokie Festival of Cultures, an annual summer event that celebrates the foods, crafts and culture of the more than 20 ethnic groups that make their home in the village.
Several thousand people attended the event last year.
“We have avoided the tension that has afflicted other communities,” said Mayor Gorell. “The reason is we are reaching out and trying to absorb new groups.”
Many in Skokie associate bagels with one name: Kaufmann’s, a long-time fixture on Dempster. The store’s namesake is long gone, but the tradition he established remains. “You can’t go to Skokie for bagels and not go to Kaufmann’s,” many a person told us. So we did.
The store, also a simple affair, was purchased in 1984 by Judy and Arnold Dworkin, who have renovated and expanded the business and cultivated a loyal clientele that, the Dworkins say, buys 800 dozen bagels on Saturday and Sunday alone, travels from Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and surrounding suburbs to sample their food, and includes Chicago Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause.
How did Kaufmann’s become so popular? Word of mouth (when those mouths aren’t filled with their bagels, that is).
According to Judy Dworkin-whose customers “must take a number” when they walk in the store-the answer is attention to quality. “We don’t use coloring. We use real eggs. And we use a little sugar. There are very few places that do what we do the way we do. It just seems to work well for us.”
So well that Dworkin said officials of the Hong Kong Hilton requested several dozen of their bagels for their hotel’s grand opening a few years ago. So well that other products they bake, like breads, are used by well-known restaurants such as Shaw’s Crab House and The Eccentric.
So well that you can expect to wait as long as 45 minutes for one of their traditional bagels-poppyseed, garlic, corn rye, sesame seed are some of the standard fare-on a Sunday morning.
The trip, most said, was worth it, though. After leaving with a dozen and sharing them with some collegues, we all agreed.
So, if you ever happen to be up Skokie way and are in need of something to nosh on, just remember: Take a number, be patient and say, “Hi” if you recognize me. I’ll be one wearing a New York Knicks hat and standing behind the couple with the Koala.
