RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME:
A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago
By Richard Lindberg
Cumberland House, 471 pages, $16.95 paper
I never knew I lived in such a bad place.
Sure, Al Capone lived here once, and there was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, everybody knows that. And then there was John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, and Eliot Ness ran a tough-love reform school for all these bad boys.
What Richard Lindberg has done in his new book, “Return to the Scene of the Crime,” is organize Chicago’s crime stories by neighborhood, and when you look at it that way, our fair city’s sordid history is seen in a new way. Lindberg collects all the dark side of Chicago’s history in short pieces of a page or so, and when he gets done he has more than 400 pages of murder and outlaw behavior that blanket the city and suburbs.
Hollywood has maps of the stars’ homes; we have Lindberg’s guide to bodies in the street.
Naturally, the Loop and Near North Side are covered. But so is Rogers Park. Lindberg takes us to 1320 W. Farwell, where William Heirens was arrested for killing 7-year-old Suzanne Degnan in 1946. And to the site of the old Edgewater Beach Hotel, where, on the night of June 14, 1949, a celebrity-stalker named Ruth Steinhagen lured Eddie Waitkus of the Philadelphia Phillies (and formerly the Cubs) to her room and shot him with a .22-caliber rifle. Waitkus was named comeback player of the year the next season.
My favorite is set in my neighborhood, at 18th Street and Prairie Avenue. The Ft. Dearborn Massacre has chilled me since I first learned about it in the required Chicago history class in grammar school. Nuclear war held no terror for me after I found out about the doomed settlers who, on Aug. 15, 1812, made a run for it from the fort, at the mouth of the river, and were confronted by a war party of Indians who slowly emerged over the sand dunes at what is now 18th Street.
I can’t pass the Michigan Avenue Bridge without pausing to stare at the frieze at the south end in which the horrible frenzy is so graphically depicted.
ROLLING ON THE RIVER: The Best of Steve Neal
By Steve Neal
Southern Illinois University Press, 209 pages, $24.95
In his foreword to Steve Neal’s collection of columns from Chicago newspapers, former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois notes that George Will and Neal are the only two political columnists with much of a sense of history. But Will has become dull since he helped Ronald Reagan write speeches and became a flack for the Republicans.
That leaves Neal. Who but Neal would know that Illinois Supreme Court Justice Michael Bilandic is the first ex-mayor since Edward F. Dunne in 1907 to have a post-mayoral career? And who else would tell us without being a show-off?
Neal has written history — a volume on Wendell Wilkie and a forthcoming book on Harry Truman — and his perspective gives his columns legs that most newspaper coverage lacks, a life after the bottom of the bird cage.
The book is organized by personalities and public office, and Chicago mayors have their rightful place, right after presidents and before lesser offices, like governor, senator and other positions that Chicago ward committeemen sneer at as “only national.
Neal doesn’t only write about politicians. There are pieces on boxers, entertainers, clerics and authors. I learned from a piece that originally appeared in the Tribune Magazine that Saul Bellow (like me an alumnus of Tuley High School) used to love the same little branch library across from Humboldt Park where I snuggled after school.
And there’s the story of the time fight promoter Ben Bentley took Sonny Liston to meet Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Liston got bored and whispered, ” `Let’s blow this bum off.’ ” Bentley also grew up near Humboldt Park, but when he met Saul Bellow for the first time, he asked, ” `Who do you write for?’ “
” `I write novels,’ ” Bellow responded. Which sort of lost Bentley’s interest.
Another guy who’s only national.
THE GOLD COAST CHURCH AND THE GHETTO:
Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism
By James K. Wellman Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 257 pages, $21.95 paper
This is an important book, because the Fourth Presbyterian Church is important. Maybe not important in the way it once was, when the congregation included many of the controlling business and social elite of the city and there was no problem that couldn’t be worked out over lunch at the Chicago Club. But important in the sense of understanding Chicago in the 20th Century.
Just as the congregation once dominated the city’s business and political life, the elegant building dominated Michigan Avenue, called Pine Street before the Michigan Avenue Bridge was built. Now it’s a grace note, an elegant counterpoint to the giant shopping street. It’s merely quaint. Picturesque.
The church may seem mysterious to some, but it welcomes newcomers and has massive outreach programs to the community.
James K. Wellman Jr., a lecturer in comparative religion at the University of Washington and a former director of young-adult education at the church, is not setting out to tell us the big story, but he can’t help it. His story (the title is a play on the famous 1929 sociological treatise “The Gold Coast and the Slum,” by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh) is the change in Protestantism’s attitude toward the poor: from saving their souls, while letting them starve to death, to serving their earthly needs but playing down the evangelism.
The staunchly traditionalist pastor Harrison Ray Anderson told his well-fed flock in 1930 that the unemployed should quit bellyaching about the Depression:
” `What we are facing in a wave of depression other people have faced forever, until it is normal with them. To be underfed and cold and to suffer is a normal condition for millions of men. Our definition of depression would be their definition of prosperity.’ “
The current pastor, John Buchanan, is a million miles from that conservatism. At Fourth since 1985, he’s a liberal who pushes for racial justice and has declared the church’s ban on gay ministers obsolete.
A survey in the appendix tells a lot about the modern congregation. The biggest income group — 22.4 percent — makes $50,000 to $74,999. But the second-biggest income group — 14.5 percent — makes $100,000 to $199,999, and 2.5 percent make more than $500,000. They’re not old-time Chicagoans: Two-thirds have been members less than 10 years, and about the same number now live more than 100 miles from where they went to high school. Nearly half have graduate or professional degrees.
Fascinating stuff.
PAUL POWELL OF ILLINOIS: A Lifelong Democrat
By Robert E. Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 229 pages, $17.95 paper
Paul Powell was a lovable old rascal who had been a long-time speaker of the Illinois House and was Illinois secretary of state when he died in 1970. He’s remembered mainly for two things: his statement to fellow Democrats when they got control of the House in 1949 –“I smell the meat a-cookin’ ” — and the $800,000 in small bills that was found in his hotel room after he died.
From that you might get the impression that Powell was corrupt. If so, he was never caught. Robert E. Hartley, a former Springfield newspaperman, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Powell except the one thing we really want to know: where the cash came from. But Hartley can’t be blamed. It’s a mystery.
Maybe even more interesting than where the cash came from is the question of how it got into Powell’s room at the St. Nicholas Hotel in Springfield. Hartley includes speculation that Powell was too smart to keep $800,000 in a hotel room and that it probably had been in a locked file cabinet in his government office and that associates may have taken it to the hotel to be found.
Hartley’s gripping account of old-time politics brings in all the leading characters of the era.
