People walk past Tribune Tower without noticing the 150-some pieces of famous structures and historic sites (the Alamo, the Great Wall of China) embedded in the building. People rush in and out of the Disney Store a few blocks north without bothering to count the 170 or so pairs of mouse ears that cover the exterior, a slick homage to the decorative work of the great architect Louis Sullivan. People shop the mall stores at Belmont and Western Avenues without hearing the echoes of the Bobs, the Flying Turns or the other wonders of what was once Riverview.
Without trying to, the city can hide from us some of its greatest pleasures and embarrassing secrets.
Just a few weeks ago a couple were having lunch in the Atwood Cafe in the Burnham Hotel and talking about how lovely it was and one of them asked, “How recently did this go up?”
Told that the building was built in 1895 and called the Reliance Building and that it had fallen into a shabby state in the mid-1990s before a $30 million renovation renewed its glory, they suddenly remembered all that. Being lifelong Chicagoans, they were understandably a bit embarrassed. The man said: “Funny what you forget, what you don’t see. I’ll never stop being amazed by this city.”
Just below its ever-changing surface, Chicago can be a city at once familiar and unexpected. On the following pages, that is where Tribune staff reporter Charles Leroux, Tribune photographer Phil Velasquez and photographer/author Camilo Vergara take us.
Leroux’s story gives us five portraits in endurance, of places and people who have prevailed over time and circumstances. He calls them “welcome reminders in a turbulent time that not everything goes up in smoke nor tumbles into rubble.”
In a photo essay that follows Leroux’s story, Vergara’s photos capture a different side of town–of places long gone, barely standing or standing as lively if sometimes odd evocations of the past. Most reflect what the photographer calls “a certain kind of hardheaded practicality [that] seems peculiar to Chicago.”
These two men have never met and seem to be searching for vastly different things.
But they obviously share a philosophy that all of us might, every now and then, want to follow: “Look around and be amazed.”
500 W. CERMAK RD.
RIVERFRONT ART CENTER
Chicago happened where it did because the American Indians here shared a great secret with early explorers from Europe: Canoes and their cargo could be portaged from the Chicago River to the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers and, thus, to the Mississippi.
That spelled boomtown for Chicago, especially after construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 put an end to portaging and created the long-sought inland waterway passage from the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Soon warehouses and factories lined the riverbanks along what is now the west Loop. Many produced food products and filled the air with their scents–some of them pleasant, some not. That held true even into the 1920s. When Ben Hecht came to town to work at the Chicago Journal at Madison Street and Wacker Drive, he wrote of the aromatic haze that hung in the air in that area from the coffee roasting and packaging plants.
The building at 500 W. Cermak Rd. was one of those places. With 350,000 square feet spread over seven floors–that’s 10 football fields–it once housed the Thompson & Taylor Spice Co.
Alexander Thompson and James Taylor, both packagers and purveyors of coffee and spices before the Chicago Fire, became partners around 1873. They set up shop in the old South Water Market, where the city’s wholesale food and grocery businesses were clustered.
When their business outgrew its quarters, Thompson and Taylor decided to build outside downtown, along the South Branch of the river. Their factory and warehouse was completed in 1911, expanded in 1917. Architects Chatten & Hammond clad the building in face brick and added geometric terra cotta decorations to create an industrial building handsome enough to serve as a symbol of the company.
The building stands as a great example of the latter days of an era in which barge and rail traffic combined to feed the city’s growth. Railroad cars could run right inside the Thompson & Taylor building from portals in the rear. On the river face, you can see doors that seem now to float in space. They were built to be at just the right height so that a gangplank could be run from them to the deck of a river barge.
Even the bones of the building are reminders of a lost past: The huge timbers that support the structure were hewn from towering old-growth forests that the Midwest won’t see the likes of again.
The company imported spices, processed them, packaged them and sent them out to customers. Thompson & Taylor also dealt in soaps, teas, baking powder and extracts such as vanilla and root beer. Tin collectors prize cans of Thompson & Taylor coffee with a picture of the building on the side.
The company downsized around 1952 and moved to smaller quarters. By 1984, Thompson & Taylor disappears from the phone book. The 500 W. Cermak building and other industrial sites nearby fell largely into disuse. But this reminder of the city’s mercantile might didn’t die.
Real-estate broker Liska Blodgett bought the building 11 years ago and offered to rent workspaces to artists and musicians in hopes that the place could become the focus of a burgeoning cultural scene.
At the moment, it’s a mixed bag. There are lots of artists and craft tenants–painters, sculptors, graphic and fashion designers, photographers, a muralist. There are custom woodworkers such as Atelier Wolfgang, a scratch deejay, a bunch of rock bands including Kim, an all-Asian-female group. There’s rehearsal space for gospel singers and a school called Flats and Sharps, where keyboards and opera are taught. And there’s Steve Mulkerrins, who is an Irish boat builder, and Little Black Pearl, where children can learn how to do mosaics.
But there also are businesses from the wider world–a cable installer, a company that makes bottle labels, a ceiling tile maker, messenger and delivery services, a hair salon, a karate school. There’s storage for a baby furniture company, a company that teaches firefighting techniques, a tax office.
Tenants get a bonus. In various parts of the building, you can still smell which spice was processed there–cardamom in one place, sage in another–scents of history in a building that survives as an enduring cross section of the variety that is Chicago.
BOB ACRI
For longer than some live, longer than most are married, certainly longer than most work, Bob Acri has been entertaining Chicagoans with his fluid piano style. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Acri has played in almost every venue in town and with almost everyone who mattered. He accompanied Ella Fitzgerald at the Chicago Theatre, Harry Belafonte at the Shubert. He played with both Nelson Riddle and Arthur Fiedler at Orchestra Hall.
For 10 years, his trio appeared at the Continental Hotel, and his five-piece band was a fixture two nights a week for five years at the Pump Room. He performed with the NBC studio orchestra here, off and on, for more than a quarter-century. That orchestra once added a large string section to accompany Louis Armstrong.
“Louis sang, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ” Acri recalls, “and when it was over, he looked around at all the violins, rolled his eyes and said, ‘I think I died and went to heaven.’ “
In a long-ago gig at the late, much-missed Mr. Kelly’s, Acri played behind a young singer. “She knew four songs,” he says. “Three times a night for a month, she sang those same four tunes. I said to the guys in the band, ‘I don’t think this chick is going to make it in show business.’ ” He laughs now at his prediction and finishes the story: “That was Barbra Streisand.”
Acri took lessons as a child and got an early start on his professional career. When he was a student at Austin High School–where saxophonist Bud Freeman and trumpeter Jimmy McPartland started out–his cousin, a drummer with the NBC orchestra, asked him to come to a party to play for his boss. “When he heard me play,” Acri says, “he said, ‘Let’s hire him.'”
Acri, a high school sophomore, was 16 years old. That was 67 years ago.
In addition to the NBC gig, he began to play in bars around town. His favorite spot was a tavern across from the Chicago Stadium. He doesn’t remember the name of the place but recalls the princely pay of $5 a night.
“I got a call one time to sub for another musician at a strip club,” he says. “I was just a teen then, but I went. I couldn’t believe the music. It was so hard, sort of classical stuff. What were they trying to prove?”
For NBC, he played every kind of music. “We did classical, Latin, jazz, backed up singers,” he says. “Sometimes these singers would show up without any arrangements. I learned to improvise. The staff singer was Mike Douglas. I told him he should have his own show and, of course, later he did.”
Acri took off four years for military service in South Carolina, then toured with Harry James and Woody Herman’s Third Herd. Then it was home to stay.
At 72, Acri went back to school, studying composition at Roosevelt University. His fellow students were all youngsters who, when they heard about his career, looked on him as another professor. At Roosevelt he wrote a symphony, a flute solo, a cello quartet–“You name it, I did it,” he says–and graduated with honors, getting both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Now, he’s got a grant to perform at veterans’ homes and other seniors’ venues where he finds the audiences enthusiastic and appreciative. “They ask for tunes from the ’40s,” Acri says, “but my son, Bob Jr.–who is a lawyer, my manager and also my drummer–doesn’t like me to do requests. He wants me to play what I like.”
What Acri likes to play is “ballads with nice chord changes, tunes like ‘It Could Happen to You’ or, in honor of one of my five grandchildren, ‘Emily.’ “
Acri, whose fingers are as supple as ever, recently released a CD, “Timeless: The Music of Bob Acri,” on Southport Records. You can sample it on his Web site, www.bobacri.com, which also lists his concert appearances.
“It doesn’t matter if the music is old or new,” Acri says, “it just matters if it’s good or bad.”
THE ON LEONG/PUI TAK BUILDING
Part of the richness of the city is that it has two Chinatowns. The older one around Wentworth Avenue and Cermak Road on the South Side owes its existence to moral reforms enforced by the city 80 years ago. It owes its look to two Norwegians.
Chicago’s Chinese community originally was located in the Van Buren and Clark area of the Loop. In the 1920s, when development started to reach into that area, some community leaders decided to create a new Chinatown. To start the process, they secured some 50 leases on properties that had become available on the fringes of a recently shut-down red-light district.
The business community decided to construct a strong visual announcement of its new presence, a building in the Chinese style of architecture. But there were no Chinese- born architects here. One of the businessmen, however, had hired a firm, Michaelsen and Rognstad, to build a Chinese restaurant in Uptown and was pleased with the result. Christian Michaelsen and Sigurd Rognstad, Chicago-born men of Norse ancestry, took their new commission very seriously and studied texts on Chinese architecture.
“They even studied the meaning of various colors in Chinese architecture,” says Tim Samuelson, curator of architecture at the Chicago Historical Society. “They were able to tap into Chicago’s terra-cotta industry, which could make any shape and color and recall the polychromatic treatments associated with Chinese architecture.”
The two Norwegian-Americans designed not only the three-story On Leong Chinese Merchants Association building but several restaurants in the area as well. The building originally contained meeting rooms for the association and dormitory rooms for newly arrived immigrants. Marking the gateway to Chinatown since 1928, the building became more than an icon; it was the community’s center of power, especially for immigrants wary of or confused by the city’s government. In that role, the building was informally called “City Hall.”
In the 1980s, the On Leong (meaning “prosperity and peaceful conduct”) association was prosecuted by the federal government for gambling and racketeering. The On Leong building was seized by the government, then sold to the Chinese Christian Union Church, which has renamed the building the Pui Tak Center (meaning “building moral character”). The church restored the building and returned it to its original purpose as the center of this community.
THE APOLLO CHORUS OF CHICAGO
For 129 years, major moments of the city have been accompanied by the soaring voices of the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, the city’s oldest musical organization. The chorus sang at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and at the 100th anniversary of that exposition. It sang at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933, and celebrated the dedications of the Auditorium Theatre (with a cantata composed for the event), the Medina Temple, Navy Pier (joined by a 600-voice children’s choir) and Orchestra Hall.
When much of the city was lost to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, musical organizations here were silenced as music libraries and rehearsal halls were reduced to ashes. The Apollo Chorus was founded as a private, volunteer group the next year in an attempt to bring a strong cultural presence to the rebuilding metropolis.
At the start, it was an all-male group with 33 members drawn from the movers and shakers of the city. Women formed an auxiliary chorus in 1876, then were made full members in 1880, giving women a role in the cultural life of Chicago long before they could vote.
Led now by music director Stephen Alltop, the chorus offers a repertoire of classical, sacred and some contemporary works. Among the most popular are Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” Verdi’s “Requiem,” Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and Hayden’s “Creation.” Its most-performed work is Handel’s “Messiah,” which the chorus first featured at Christmastime in 1879 and has sung 202 times since then.
The current chorus is made up of 170 voices drawn from the entire metropolitan area and a wide range of occupations and ages. Prospective members are auditioned by a committee and returning members are re-auditioned every four years. “The members are all experienced choral singers,” says board member Sara Pearsaul. “They need to be able to sight-read music for Dr. Alltop’s rehearsals, which are pretty fast paced.”
The Apollo Chorus offers three programs a year. Its next program is the Cathedral Concert Series, featuring contemporary and classical sacred music, on Feb. 24 and March 3 at St. Peter’s Church, 110 W. Madison St. For ticket information, call 630-960-2251.
THE HOUSE OF GLUNZ
Louis Glunz emigrated from Germany to Chicago in 1879 and went to work at the Wacker-Birk brewery, little suspecting that both his name and one of the brewers’ would still be fixtures in the city more than 120 years later. Charles Wacker’s name persists on Wacker Drive, while Glunz’s is out front on one of the oldest stores in the city and one of the oldest wine merchants in the nation, the House of Glunz.
In 1888, Glunz left the brewery to open a bottling and distributing business on the southeast corner of Wells and Division Streets, putting up beers for several makers. In 1890, Glunz became the first distributor of a Milwaukee beer outside that city, starting a relationship with the Schlitz Co. that continues today.
When the business moved to its present location at 1206 N. Wells St. and began to sell wines, Glunz and his wife, another German immigrant, moved into quarters at the rear of the shop. Louis Jr. was born there.
In a 1975 interview for this magazine, Louis Jr., who since has died, recalled that he was taken into the business “as soon as I was born. When I was little, I ran away all the time. My father put a dress on me so I’d be embarrassed to be seen outside on the street. Then I’d have to stay in the basement and bottle.”
His father would have preferred to continue making deliveries with the wagons pulled by horses and mules stabled behind the store. But one day Louis Jr. borrowed the family car, a 1912 Model T Ford, took it to a body shop on Wabash Avenue and had it converted to a delivery truck.
A 1902 price list, found in the back of an old safe, shows the shop offered 29 kinds of mineral waters, sarsaparilla and several other sodas, along with beers–Prima, Perfecto, Ulmer Malt, Salvator, Wiener, Zacherel, Hygeia–that now are merely memories. A 12-bottle case of 1888 Lafitte Rothschild wine was a now-laughable $18.50.
Christopher Donovan, 32, the great-grandson of Louis Glunz, now runs the retail wine operation owned by his mother, Barbara Glunz. Her brother Jack owns the beer distributor side of the business while her brother Joe is in charge of wine distribution and runs the Glunz Family Winery in Grayslake. Begun about 10 years ago, the Glunz label is on, among other potables, a raspberry wine fortified with brandy.
Donovan formally entered the business just last summer but has been around the wine shop since he was a kid. “I would come in to polish the antique furniture,” he recalls. While there he would marvel at the huge carboys in the basement in which wine vinegars, which Glunz no longer sells, were fermenting.
The store survived Prohibition by selling sacramental wines to the Roman Catholic Church and medicinal brandies. It also supplied beer-making equipment to individuals who could make, legally, small amounts for personal use. When public housing went up just to the west, making the neighborhood distinctly non-oenophile, the store survived largely on the strength of Louis Jr.’s personality.
“He was so charismatic,” Donovan says, “that customers came from all over the city and beyond to sit in the tasting room and talk about wine with him.” That was the room in which Louis Glunz Jr. was born. Another room in the shop has become display space for Italian wines and for Louis Jr.’s collection of wineglasses.
“People come in here all the time who tell me that they bought wine from my father or from my grandfather,” says Donovan. “This is such a great place.”
