No, Pat Carlino says, her Lincoln Way Launderette in far southwest suburban New Lenox isn’t named for Abraham Lincoln. “It’s for Lincoln Highway,” she explains. “We’re right on Lincoln Highway.”
The story’s similar at Lincoln West Hospital at 2544 W. Montrose Ave. in Chicago. “It’s named after the area we’re in, because we’re west of Lincoln Avenue,” says marketing coordinator Mercy Zarlinga.
And the reason the 61-year-old structure at 1800 N. Lincoln Ave. on the city’s Near North Side is called Hotel Lincoln has nothing to do with the slain president, according to Martine Bennett of the hotel’s marketing office.
“It’s because of Lincoln Park across the street,” she says.
It is a measure of how deeply Abraham Lincoln is embedded in American life, particularly in the Chicago area, that he becomes, at times, invisible.
His name has been bestowed on so many businesses, public buildings, parks, neighborhoods, suburbs, streets, malls and stores that it is a commonplace on the landscape. It’s so common that, ironically, its use rarely brings the president himself to mind.
Lincoln Park and Lincoln Avenue, of course, are named for the president. So, too, is Lincoln Highway. But, when Carlino opened her laundermat in New Lenox, she named the business for the highway, as a way of helping people remember where it is.
As for the secondhand connection to Lincoln, she says: “Nobody ever mentions it. In the normal day-to-day thing, you don’t think about it, so poor Abe isn’t remembered.”
Even when the connection is more direct, the reference to the man can get lost over time.
Gertrude Roberts, the secretary at the 84-year-old Lincoln Memorial Congregational United Church of Christ at 6454 S. Champlain Ave. in Chicago, was perplexed recently when asked if the church was named for the president. “I’ve never heard anything about it,” she said.
Yet, when Roberts looked into the question, she discovered that, not only was the church named for Lincoln, but, because of the name, its former pastor, Rev. Thomas Ellis, was invited to a Republican National Convention in Chicago 30 or 40 years ago.
In the six-county Chicago region, there are 43 schools with Lincoln’s name, 173 streets and more than 350 businesses. In the city, there are the Lincoln Park and Lincoln Square neighborhoods, and, in the suburbs, there are the villages of Lincolnwood and Lincolnshire.
The name is in such widespread use that, if Lincoln were alive today, he could spend all his time just going to places called Lincoln.
He could buy his food at the Lincoln Grocery at 4605 N. Lincoln Ave., and his booze at the Lincoln Liquor Store at 5216 N. Lincoln Ave.
If his car (undoubtedly a Lincoln) broke down, he could get it fixed at Lincoln Auto Service at 2211 N. Cicero Ave. He could get his shoes resoled at Lincoln Shoe Repair Store at 3357 N. Lincoln Ave.; arrange to blacktop his driveway by visiting Lincoln Paving Co. in south suburban Hazel Crest; and then stop in for nine holes at the Lincoln Oaks Golf Club in nearby Crete.
And, if Lincoln wanted a grindstone or a grinding wheel, he could call up Thomas Boehmke, the owner of Lincoln Abrasives Corp. in Woodstock in far northwest McHenry County.
Boehmke’s firm, founded in 1981, doesn’t use Lincoln’s image in its promotional materials, but it is one example of a company that was consciously named for the slain president.
“He was an example of integrity and honesty,” Boehmke says. “I knew he was a great leader and a good president, and our state is the Land of Lincoln.”
There was another reason for choosing the Lincoln name. “It’s an easy name to remember,” the owner says. “Boehmke Abrasives would not be as good a name to spell or pronounce.”
The sainted Lincoln
Lincoln would be amazed and most likely taken aback at the sort of reverence accorded him and his name today.
In life, Lincoln was a rough-and-tumble politician. True, he had a statesman’s vision and a poet’s sense of language. But he understood the nuances of politics as well as any Chicago precinct captain-better, in fact.
During the Civil War, Lincoln was a figure of controversy, reviled in the South and criticized in the North by those who thought his efforts to put down the rebellion were too harsh or not harsh enough.
All that changed with Lincoln’s death from an assassin’s bullet on April 15, 1865. Suddenly, Lincoln was elevated to the status of national saint. He was a martyr, the spotless embodiment of all virtues.
To keep the memory of the man and his virtues alive, there was a widespread effort, down even to the present day, to name things for the great man. Often, the thing named-Lincoln Park, for example-had nothing to do with what the president had stood for. The park was just a big public space that needed a name.
But, at other times, Lincoln’s name was given as a way of signaling the purpose and goals of an organization. That’s what Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones had in mind in 1905 when he opened a settlement house affiliated with his All Souls Church in the South Side neighborhood of Oakland and christened it the Abraham Lincoln Center.
A major thrust of the center’s work was to foster interracial harmony, said Curtis W. Reese, who took over leadership of the agency in the 1920s.
“It is my ideal for Abraham Lincoln Center,” Reese said, “that it should be a well-balanced community center, featuring an interracial program. . . . Segregation of races in social, educational and religious doings is in my judgment an evil of the first rank and as such should be eradicated as rapidly as feasible.”
The Lincoln Cemetery stories
Yet, in those early years of the century, Lincoln’s name was being used in another context to cloak a move to intensify the segregation of blacks in the Chicago area-albeit not in this life.
There are two versions of what happened.
For many years, Oak Hill Cemetery at 119th Street and Kedzie Avenue in Blue Island had been the burial place of both blacks and whites. But, in 1911, the owners of Oak Hill opened a new cemetery farther south on Kedzie at 123rd Street, and named it for Lincoln. It was to be a blacks-only burial place. And so it remains today.
James Carlson, the executive vice president of the Chicago Cemetery Corp., which now operates Lincoln, Oak Hill and the adjacent Beverly Cemeteries, says Lincoln was opened because “black funeral directors came and asked for a separate cemetery for black people. I guess, in 1911, it was considered the thing to do.”
Not so, says Ernest A. Griffin, the 83-year-old director of Griffin Funeral Home Ltd. at 3232 S. Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago. “The Negro population in the city of Chicago has never been separatist. It’s not something (the funeral directors) sought,” he says.
The real reason, according to Griffin, was to steer African-Americans away from other cemeteries.
“Using the Abraham Lincoln logo made it very easy to sell to the Negro population and develop the burials in large numbers,” Griffin says.
For several decades afterward, many Chicago-area cemeteries refused to sell new burial plots to blacks. As a result, other all-black cemeteries were opened. Such restrictions were overturned by civil rights laws, but Lincoln “is still 99 and 44/100ths percent black,” according to Carlson.
As the cemetery story shows, Lincoln’s name is no guarantee of righteousness.
Consider Charles J. Keating Jr. and his looting of his 29-branch Lincoln Savings and Loan Association in California during the 1980s. He left the institution in such bad shape that it was seized by federal regulators in April 1989, and required a bailout of more than $3 billion, the costliest thrift failure in the nation’s history.
And, of course, in Chicago, there was Lincoln Towing Service Inc. which, during the 1970s, was infamous for its rough handling of illegally-or, in many cases, not so illegally-parked cars and their owners.
Lincoln’s own reputation has taken some hard knocks in recent years as scholars, reacting to the unquestioning veneration of earlier times, have been more willing to focus on the president’s errors and failings.
African-Americans in particular are more aware today of Lincoln’s warts and much less likely than their grandparents to view him as the black race’s unalloyed savior.
“There’s some downplaying today of the significance of Lincoln’s role in the emancipation of the slaves,” notes Vernita Jones, principal at the Lincoln Elementary School at 3420 W. Jackson, one of two schools named for the president in west suburban Bellwood. “There are questions of whether it was more a political move than something he was committed to.”
In fact, officials at the school devote more attention to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders than to Lincoln because 95 percent of the students are African American, Jones says. “The kids can relate to them more,” she says.
Another predominantly black school in Bellwood, originally named for President Franklin Roosevelt, was recently renamed for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Jones, however, says she wouldn’t want that to happen to Lincoln School.
“If you look at our overall history,” she says, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation “was a significant event that changed the course for black people in this country. The act caused a tidal wave.”
Two last Lincolns
If Lincoln were alive today, he’d have to visit the Lincoln Restaurant at 4008 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago and the Lincoln Barber Shop at 206 S. Main in far northwest suburban Wauconda.
While many other businesses called Lincoln ignore their connection with the president, the Lincoln Restaurant revels in it.
Outside is a large sign with a huge color picture of a grim-faced Lincoln, scowling quizzically over the streetscape. The sign is new. It just went up in late December, replacing a black and white image of the president’s face that had graced the outside of the restaurant for all of its 29 years.
Inside, there are more pictures of Lincoln on the walls and several busts. Double-size glass mugs, inscribed “Lincoln Restaurant Chicago,” are on sale for $5.95 each, as are Lincoln-decorated T-shirts ($6) and sweatshirts ($12). The menu is filled with references to the Lincoln era, including omelettes named for Civil War figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson.
“Lincoln, I like Lincoln,” says owner John Athans, who was born in Greece in 1931 and came to the United States in 1951. “He was good for the United States country, and he did a lot of good things for the country. He was too good; they killed him.”
In Wauconda, the Lincoln Barber Shop has been in operation since 1928, but it has nothing to do with the president-though, in a way, it does. It was named for Homer Lincoln, the man who started the business and then passed it on to his son Harmon, now 73.
It is one of the oddities of the Lincoln name that, while it is employed by hundreds of businesses and institutions in the Chicago area, very few people have it. In all of the six-county region, only 63 residential phones are listed to Lincolns, or about one for every six businesses.
“The Lincoln family way back didn’t have that many children,” Harmon Lincoln says of the president’s branch of the clan. That, however, wasn’t a problem in his own family, Lincoln says. He was one of nine children, and he fathered 10 children himself.
Lincoln goes by the nickname George. He says his father, who died in 1951, had a nickname, too. And that’s how the Lincoln Barber Shop ties back to the president.
“My dad’s nickname was Abe. He looked a little bit like him. He had big ears. He just kind of resembled him. That’s the way he always introduced himself: Abe Lincoln.”
