Commissioning a statue of Paul Schoening for the Chicago Historical Society is maybe a bit grandiose.
A modest portrait might be nice, however, preferably in charcoal.
Another option would be a life-size wax model of him in a suitable diorama at the Field Museum of Natural History, perhaps with the dinosaurs.
Certainly something should be done to recognize him properly in at least one of the city’s archival institutions.
After all, Schoening (pronounced SHAY-ning) represents the end of an era, the closing of an important chapter in the history of this great city, one that could be titled, to indicate a paradox of the period, “A Century of Growth and Grime.”
He is Chicago’s Last Coal Man, the owner and sole full-time employee of Gruene Coal Co., 7435 S. Union Ave., which was founded 101 years ago and is now the only coal yard in town.
Needless to say, having Chicago’s retail coal market to himself is not proving to be a gold mine.
Ever since the wide availability of natural gas for heating and cooking, coal has taken some serious lumps in the private sector, resulting in its present status in this area as the anachronistic relic of fossil fuels.
“I’d say I’ve got 8 to 10 customers who buy in big amounts-tons at a time,” Schoening says. “Mostly they’re poorer people who couldn’t afford to convert” their heating systems from coal to natural gas.
An exception, he says, is D’Amato’s Bakery, 1124 W. Grand Ave., whose family owners are convinced that their old-country, coal-fired brick oven enhances the quality of their breads and pizzas.
A few customers go directly to Schoening’s South Side coal yard for small quantities. “I’ve got maybe a dozen who come here and buy by the sack, poor people who still have coal stoves. I fix them up with a 100-pound sack for $8.50.”
Not all that long ago during the city’s Coal Age, there were hundreds of neighborhood coal dealers like Schoening.
The nation’s first dominant energy source was wood from its abundant forests, but beginning some years after the Civil War and extending well into this century, Chicago-and, for that matter, the entire country-depended on coal as the chief means of heating its homes, businesses and schools; cooking the meals in many of its kitchens; and generating the power to light its streets and drive its industries.
Scores of coal yards are listed in Chicago business directories of the 1870s, says Perry Duis, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
By 1881, though few homes or business-es owned telephones, there were 55 listings for coal dealers in the classified pages of the city phone book; by 1900, there were 342; in 1913, more than 800.
The wealthy and the middle-class purchased coal by the ton; the poor could buy only by the bucket or bushel, when they weren’t forced to scavenge along railroad tracks for pieces fallen from coal cars or locomotives.
With the expansion of natural gas after World War II and with city, state and federal legislation against air pollution in the 1970s, the local coal dealer gradually understood how the blacksmith felt.
The 1964 phone book listed 229 retail coal dealers; by 1971, the number had dropped to 133.
Today, the Consumer Yellow Pages has four entries under “Coal & Coke-Retail,” but Schoening’s is the only one still selling the stuff.
Two of the companies are no longer in the business, and a third subcontracts its orders to Schoening, who, as noted, has plenty of time to fill them.
“It’s a hobby for me now,” he says. “I spend maybe 30 hours a month on it.”
A dying industry
Schoening, 45, a mustachioed man with coal-black hair, is in his office at the coal yard. His friend and part-time helper, Bob Bubula, is making the only delivery scheduled for the day (actually for the week) to an apartment building on the West Side that still has a coal furnace.
Through the windows, Schoening can see the 13 bins under the yard’s elevated rail spur, only a few barely stocked with coal.
Once they were all full with different sizes (pea, chestnut, egg, stove) and types (from varieties of hard, shiny anthracite-more costly because it burned clean-to those of soft, smoky, high-sulphur bituminous).
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Schoening says, coal was still hot. He served 175 clients-everything from houses and two-flats to apartment buildings to the Ford City shopping center and the Field Museum-and employed three full-time workers.
“We’d move between 10,000 and 12,000 tons a year,” he says. “Today, we put maybe 200 to 300 tons a year out of here.”
That’s a steep decline. “The bottom dropped out pretty quick,” Schoening says. “And for the last 10 or 15 years, I haven’t had any volume to speak of at all.”
Luckily, Schoening figured out early that dark days were ahead.
“I did a lot of conversions (of coal to natural gas), because I could see I was going out of the coal business,” he says. “Then I moved to Orland Park in ’76, built a house and went into contracting.”
Now he mainly sells heating oil. “I’m also in the decorative stone business,” he says, pointing through a window to a bin containing lava rock for landscaping.
Even when doing other things, the coal yard was his base, and three years ago, he decided to return to the coal game when a dealer who was quitting offered Schoening his customer list and sold him two dump trucks at a good price.
A family enterprise
Maybe coal’s in his blood. His father, Edward, owned Old King Coal near Comiskey Park for years and bought Greune Coal in 1967.
“Greune’s (elevated railroad siding) was a dream for my father,” Schoening says. “It makes unloading easy. You bring the cars on the trestle, open the pockets and the coal falls in the bins underneath.” Ground-level rail spurs, on the other hand, required slow, laborious removal by conveyor belt.
Either way, winters were hard. “The coal would freeze in the cars,” he says. “You’d open the pocket and nothing would come out.
“I remember when I was in my 20s, we’d take five-gallon pails and fill them with fuel oil or naptha, set them on fire and put them underneath the pockets to thaw them out, or we’d get up there with a pick and chop at the ice. It was brutal.”
When it comes to coal, the further back you go, the more terrible the good ol’ days become, and the worst part was the filth derived from the combustion of this dark, solid substance.
Says Harold Platt, professor of history at Loyola University: “By the 1880s, the city was passing its first anti-smoke ordinances. The worst offenders were the railroads and the steamboats because they befouled people at street level as opposed to chimneys.
“The smoke totally blackened clothes and covered houses with soot and ash. It was the downside of progress and technology.”
Merchandisers also were hurt. “In the early part of the century,” Platt says, “Marshall Field’s was losing something like $150,000 a year in soiled goods and redecorating costs.”
Says historian Duis: “Chicago was described as a `two-shirt town.’ Businessmen changed shirts at midday, because their morning shirt would be soiled and speckled with soot.”
Chicago’s `Little Hell’
Even the gas that illuminated street lights and some lighting in homes, Duis notes, was made from coal.
“The official name of Peoples Gas is Peoples Gas Light and Coke Co. The company burned coal to produce gas for the `gas light’ and coke for the furnaces of steel mills. It had a big operation roughly in the area where Cabrini-Green is today.
“That’s what gave this area the nickname `Little Hell.’ It was not because of the living conditions but because of the smoke and fires from those coke and gas plants there.”
The underground tunnels throughout the Loop that flooded in 1992 once transported coal to and removed coal ash from downtown buildings, Duis says.
“When Geraldo Rivera’s memorable TV program on `Al Capone’s vault’ was aired, I laughed,” Duis continues. “Geraldo had discovered the coal vault of the hotel where Capone lived. A lot of downtown buildings had these. Coal would be dropped through a hatch in the sidewalk. I told the show’s producers it was crazy to think Capone would store money there.”
Edward Joyce, director of public relations for Peoples Gas, says advances in metallurgy in the 1920s made long-distance gas pipelines possible and thus caused the change from coal to natural gas.
“The first interstate pipeline from the gas fields in the Southwest reached Chicago during the Depression,” he says. “The first use was street lighting, then cooking, then water heating, then home heating.”
The military’s need for natural gas during World War II halted the distribution of natural gas on the home front, Joyce says, but after the war, the pent-up consumer demand for natural gas was enormous.
“Peoples Gas phased out (coal gas) around 1960,” Joyce says, “and now something like 93 percent of all dwellings are heated by natural gas.”
Today, the city’s biggest commercial coal user is Commonwealth Edison. Roland Kraatz, the utility’s manager of fuel, says the company buys 13- to 15-million tons a year, most of it the low-sulphur kind from Wyoming and Montana, which produces 23 percent of Edison’s output (nuclear energy accounts for 75 percent).
Sight to remember
On a recent Monday morning, Schoening invites a reporter to witness one of his rare deliveries.
He and Bubula are unloading eight tons from their canary-yellow dump truck into the basement boiler room of a weathered, three-story apartment building near Wrigley Field.
The truck’s bed is tilted up at a 45-degree angle, and fist-size chunks are thundering through a hatch and onto a conveyor belt, which is rapidly depositing them through an alley-level window.
Suddenly a passing car brakes to a stop, then pulls to the curb.
The driver gets out and approaches, a smile of wonderment on his face. He can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“A building still burning coal in Chicago?” he says. “Oh wow!”
VIEWS INTO CHICAGO’S COAL AGE
A sampling of writers’ impressions of Chicago during its “Coal Age,” all but the one by Richard Wright appear in William Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis” (Norton, 1991):
Charles Dudley Warner, 1889: “The manufactories vomit dense clouds of bituminous coal smoke, which settle in a black mass . . . so that one can scarcely see across the streets in a damp day, and the huge buildings loom up in the black sky in ghostly dimness.”
Robert Herrick, 1898: “The city is made of man. . . . Brazen, unequal, like all man’s works, it stands a stupendous piece
of blasphemy against nature. Once within its (pall of dull smoke), the heart must forget that the earth is beautiful.”
William Archer, 1900: “The smoke of Chicago has a peculiar and aggressive individuality, due, I imagine, to the natural clearness of the atmosphere. . . . It does not overhang the streets in a uniform canopy, but sweeps across and about them in gusts and swirls, now dropping and now lifting again its grimy curtain. You will often see the vista of a gorge-like street so choked with a seeming thundercloud that you feel sure a storm is just about to burst upon the city, until you look up at the zenith and find it smiling and serene.”
Hamlin Garland, on his first visit from Iowa as a youth in the 1880s: “I shall never forget the feeling of dismay (when I perceived) a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for this, I was told, was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis.” Yet its imposing brawn and swagger caused him to view the city as “august as well as terrible.” In a novel, Garland has a train passenger say to a farm girl making her first visit to the city: “See that cloud? That’s Chicago.”
Richard Wright, 1940 (on his first visit in 1927): “Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal, wreathed in palls of gray smoke.”
Cronon: “Chicago wore its cloud (of coal smoke) like a black halo, and few visitors failed to notice the symbolism. To transform not merely the earth but also the heavens above: this surely was a mark of great human achievement.”
