Sidewalks: Portraits of Chicago
By Rick Kogan, photos by Charles Osgood
Northwestern University Press, 243 pages $32
A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream
By Rick Kogan
Lake Claremont, 118 pages, $10 paper
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” playwright Arthur Miller once said. Rick Kogan, who writes for the Tribune, is a city talking to itself–this city, Chicago. Like his late father, Herman, he has become our local Boswell, a serendipitous chronicler of the nooks and crannies and curious characters that can turn the very act of living here into an adventure.
This year, we’re lucky enough to have two books by Kogan that contribute to the history and mythology of the city. They make me–a native Chicagoan now living in the emotionally colder climate of New York–homesick. They should make anyone who lives in Chicago get off their duff and explore a little more.
That doesn’t mean you have to rush out to the Billy Goat Tavern to get loaded. But you might, say, stop at 636 E. 35th St. and behold the forlorn tomb of Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” who debated Abraham Lincoln. No Douglas, no Lincoln. No Lincoln, no America as we know it. Kinda gets you thinking.
Which is part of what Kogan and talented Tribune photographer Charles Osgood manage to do in “Sidewalks,” a beautiful coffee-table collection of their columns by the same name in the Tribune Magazine. Even when tinged with sentiment, their peripatetic journeys through the metropolitan area (and occasionally as far away as Michigan) consistently impart some knowledge, perspective and even a bit of wisdom. Not bad for a single picture and a few hundred words on each subject.
Where was the nation’s first skyscraper? (135 S. LaSalle St.) How did R.J. Grunts get its name? (From the table noises of a girlfriend of the co-founder’s.) Why was Chicago dubbed “the Windy City” when it’s only the 14th windiest in the country? (That’s what New York papers called Chicago promoters of the 1893 World’s Fair.) When did Chicago become the best city for winter biking and the worst for bike thefts? (No real answers, but that’s OK.)
The book is like a big Chicago party with people and places and pets–alive and dead–who may not be storied but have stories inside them. You meet Thomas Gaither, who raised two children selling 60 or 70 bags of nuts a day on the westbound exit ramp of the Eisenhower Expressway at Laramie Avenue. And Samuel Eberly Gross, the turn-of-the-century builder who changed the face of residential Chicago while originating the idea behind the story of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” And “Big Kitty,” a 15-foot-tall foam cat encountered first as a piece of local color and then, vandalized, as a sign that “the line between mischief and cruelty remains frighteningly thin.”
You learn where to slurp tasty Swedish blueberry soup, find a Yorkie-Maltese puppy and visit a gentlemen’s club in the suburbs. (Try Stone Park). Where to eat soul food peach cobbler, commemorate the 3 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge and win free music lessons in exchange for turning in a handgun.
You may run into someone you’ve seen before in Bughouse Square or the G Boutique or even a friend or two from childhood–in my case, Colin Cordwell, proprietor of the Red Lion Pub, and Jack Kearney, bumper sculptor.
There’s surprising local history: the innocence of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in the starting of the Chicago Fire; the disaster of the steamship Eastland, which rolled over and killed more than 800 people on the Chicago River in 1915 (a young George Halas was supposed to be aboard but overslept); the fate of the brick wall at 2122 N. Clark St. where Al Capone’s men lined up Bugs Moran’s gang and launched the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
But just when the collection feels in danger of slipping into a Baedeker’s guide, Kogan changes gears. He meets a man on the beach with a bird on his shoulder, or wanders into an auto-parts warehouse where no one wants to talk and finds himself reminded that “there is an honesty and dignity in what too many of us might now deem ‘old-fashioned’ work as we make our way through the increasingly icy world of American commerce.”
When Kogan isn’t driving around town with Osgood, he can often be found at the Billy Goat. This Chicago institution, now in several locations, is hardly in need of more publicity. But “A Chicago Tavern,” an 118-page valentine, is a wistful, funny and surprisingly sturdy little vessel for keeping Chicago afloat in our imagination.
In New York you’re in finance, or journalism, or fashion, or some other industry that is so big you never manage to connect with the other worlds. In Chicago, the circles are smaller and more concentric. This makes for a richer social life. And so it’s only fitting that the story of the Billy Goat is the story of Chicago immigration, Chicago entrepreneurship, Chicago journalism, Chicago sports and Chicago politics all wrapped into a capsule history of the city in the 20th Century.
To make the history seem current, Kogan writes in the present tense, which takes a little getting used to, but works. When you hear a “guy walks into a bar” (or a “Frank Sinatra walks into the Goat”) story, it helps if time itself is standing still, waiting for John Belushi to shout “Cheezborger!” Tales of pitchers poured on Mike Royko’s head after his 16-inch softball team wins a 1974 championship should by all odds taste like stale beer. Here they go down like nectar from the gods of newspapering.
The story begins, of course, with Bill Sianis, who comes from Greece nearly a century ago to work in the stockyards made famous by Upton Sinclair. (See, that present tense thing is contagious). He becomes a paperboy, a trolley-car hustler and, by 1934, the owner of a failing tavern on Madison Street across from the Chicago Stadium.
One morning that summer a baby goat falls off a truck and limps into the tavern. Sianis, sensing a hook, collects goats in the back yard, grows a goatee and changes the name of the bar, and before long a succession of columnists has a ready angle on a slow news day.
The Stadium (where the Bears in 1932 play an NFL championship game on an 80-yard indoor field) brings lots of business, and the place becomes known as “a perpetual Halloween.” When the Republican Party gathers for its 1944 convention, Sianis puts up a sign saying “No Republicans Served Here,” assuring that angry delegates will pack the bar demanding to be served.
Forty-seven years later, a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, shows up at the Billy Goat (now on lower Michigan Avenue) looking to have a burger with Royko. He wants to know where the legendary columnist sits. Royko writes in the next day’s Tribune:
” ‘The country is going to hell in a hand basket, and the president of the United States wants to know on what part of the bar I rest my elbows? Or forehead?’ “
Royko wasn’t always the most charming man in person, but it’s hard to exaggerate how much he influenced Chicago and a generation of young reporters, including me. He was the greatest American newspaperman of the second half of the 20th Century, though his friend Kogan avoids the superlatives in favor of simply reinserting him into his natural habitat, which he happily shared with a goat.
The story of how Sianis and his goat were turned away at Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series is now lore. P.K. Wrigley said it was because the goat smelled. After the Cubs lose the Series to the Tigers, Sianis sends a telegram to Wrigley: ” ‘Who stinks now?’ ” Five years later, Sianis offers to lift the curse that local journalists say he must have placed on the Cubs if Wrigley will apologize for snubbing the goat. Wrigley does, but the Cubs keep losing.
And they maintain their no-goat policy all the way until 1984, when manager Dallas Green invites Sam Sianis, the founder’s nephew and colorful current proprietor, to bring his pet to the park. Of course the lifting of the curse on the Cubs doesn’t work, perhaps because, as Royko insists, its origins lay not in Wrigley’s policy toward goats but in his attitude toward blacks.
Kogan ranges afield to tell more stories of Royko (who dies in 1997), of Don Novello (who originates the “Saturday Night Live” skit with help from Belushi, whose father ran an Albanian place in Royko’s old neighborhood called the Olympia Diner), and of Chicago’s other legendary watering holes, like the late Riccardo’s, the “Montmartre of the Midwest.”
A half-century ago, Chicago boasts 7,000 taverns. Now there are fewer than 1,250. Kogan looks at the shot glass half-empty, bemoaning the loss of the romantic egalitarian spirit of a good tavern that treats everyone the same. The Billy Goat, he writes, “function[s] as a sanitarium and sometimes even as a home.” I take his point, though he doesn’t mention the fathers who spend more time with their kids, and the wives who go unhit, in a society that drinks more sparingly. Life in the city is more stable, less fun.
But still compelling, if you know where to look. The cover of “Sidewalks” shows a picture of flat rocks at Belmont Avenue and the lake where people have inscribed all manner of words that represent various ways of saying, “I was here.” Kogan aptly describes these messages as “a collective and gentle cry in the urban wilderness.” So, too, this bar and these books. They say, “We were here.”
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Jonathan Alter is a senior editor and columnist for Newsweek magazine and the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”
