When you learn that the three college kids in an old Toyota Corolla are scouring this marginal neighborhood on a quest, you might think you’ve dropped into a dangerous narrative.
Then one of them, Serhii Chrucky, says, “There it is.”
The driver, Jacob Kaplan, pulls over. Chrucky gets out. He’s got a camera in hand, and he photographs, from several angles, an old street sign on the West Side.
Looking at it, you wouldn’t think much of Chrucky’s photographic subject, this rusty identifier of Oakley Boulevard, located just north of Lake Street. But it is, says Kaplan, a “remnant of when the boulevards were maintained by the Park District,” and it will soon be featured on a Web site devoted to such urban vestiges, perhaps on the “Odd Signs” page.
Kaplan, Chrucky and friend Corinne Aquino spend quite a few Sundays and Mondays tooling around Chicago looking for hints of the city that was here before; the yellow-and-black street signs that were a Chicago trademark before the generic green-and-whites took over; the old brewery-owned “tied houses” — bars that would sell you, say, a Schlitz and only a Schlitz. The “Fire Insurance Patrol” stations, from the days when the public fire department had a private counterpart.
Then they post what they’ve learned to Forgotten Chicago, a site Kaplan had envisioned for years and which they got up on the Web in November.
“The animating principle is to kind of show people areas of the city they haven’t seen before,” says Kaplan, 23, a part-time collegian and full-time drugstore manager who lives in Rogers Park. “We want to inspire more interest in Chicago’s built environment.”
Driving with them is like taking part in some bizarre treasure hunt in which the gold shines a different color.
“Ghost ad,” says Aquino, a 20-year-old studying architecture at Harold Washington College.
Pardon?
“I said, ‘Ghost ad,'” she says. “Those are a dime a dozen.”
Ghost ads — mostly old billboards painted directly on brick walls for the likes of Marigold Margarine, Nate’s Drive-in, Legion Ice Cream — no longer excite these three, although they do merit a section on forgottenchicago.com.
But now, unless it’s an exceptional example of what the site labels “The ads of yesterday … today,” Chrucky, 23, a photography major at the University of Illinois at Chicago, doesn’t bother to photograph it anymore.
He has an analogy for their driving jaunts: “It’s like when people go out with a metal detector on the beach.”
It’s that depth of knowledge, however arcane or fusty, that’s winning fans for Forgotten Chicago. Bill Savage, who teaches Chicago literature at Northwestern University and co-edited the 50th anniversary edition of Nelson Algren’s novel, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” couldn’t be more enthusiastic.
“This is the stuff that makes the Internet more than just a porn delivery system,” he says. “This is the equivalent in my mind of a scholarly journal in some ways. I can’t overemphasize how important this site is. I send my students to it all the time.”
Savage cites, from memory, several Forgotten Chicago items that have taught him things, including an entry on Algren’s old Wicker Park house, at 1958 W. Evergreen Ave. In the stained glass above the door, there is a lovely “97,” a remnant of Chicago’s old, irregular street-numbering system, mostly eliminated in 1909.
‘Missed’
“I’ve stood in front of that house with my student groups, and I never knew what that number was, never thought about it,” Savage says. “They’ve helped me see these fragments of the past in the cityscape. A great book or a great Web site helps you see what’s right in front of your eyes that you’d missed.”
Kaplan became interested in such things, he says, as a kid growing up in Rogers Park. He attended Whitney Young, a magnet high school far from his neighborhood, in part because he wanted to be able to ride the “L” every day, and from the interest in the “L” developed the broader interest in what he saw from it.
Chrucky was a friend at Young who developed his own architectural interests while spending his teen years living in the Little Italy neighborhood. They became friends with Aquino, thrilled to be in Chicago for college after growing up in Aurora, after meeting her at a party.
Heading north on Humboldt Boulevard, Aquino says, “Isn’t your leaner coming up soon?”
She’s referring, it turns out, to a remarkable brick three-flat that no longer stands at 90 degrees to the ground.
They’re on the way to a bridge over the Chicago River to photograph some old and “odd” streetlight poles that seem to have guides in them for wiring, Aquino says, “I don’t know if I’m losing my touch or something. But I have not seen any old addresses in like two weeks. I feel like I’ve lost a friend.”
On their outings, though, they tend to work more from a checklist than serendipity. Today’s targets also include, in Uptown, an old trolley-bus turnaround and a couple of old-style Jewel supermarket storefronts bearing a once-trademark white ceramic tile facade. In the space between the front seats, there’s a beat-up American Institute of Architects “Guide to Chicago.”
Kaplan pulls over at Oakley and Armitage, where there’s a Schlitz tied house with a Schlitz ghost ad on the back that Chrucky wants to get a picture of.
The site took some of its inspiration from Forgotten New York, probably the granddaddy of such city sites. It conducts occasional flesh-and-blood tours in good weather, something Forgotten Chicago also hopes to do this year. (They’d also like to do a Forgotten Chicago book.)
Kevin Walsh, who runs forgotten-ny.com, says he at first asked Kaplan and crew to change their similar name, but then became a fan. “I like what they’re doing,” he says. “I just wish they would update it a little more.”
Part of a trend
Lowe, a New Yorker, took his first look at the Forgotten Chicago site recently and compared it — and a similar wave of urban preservation efforts, particularly among young people — to their “standing on a corner like Tom Paine giving a broadsheet of Common Sense.”
The movement is, in part, a reaction to recent prosperity, he says. “Because of the economic boom, so much has just been torn out of cities,” says Lowe.
“People never thought it would come home to them, and suddenly they walk down to the corner drugstore and deli and bar, and they’re all gone and there’s a huge new soulless building that’s gone up.”
Kaplan and Chrucky are less analytical about their interest.
Opening up minds
“I just like old infrastructure and the fact that it still hangs around,” says Kaplan. “I like showing people stuff they never thought about.”
“I like the design, the look of the old things,” Chrucky says. “People see this stuff connected to memories.”
Plus, he adds, “I want it to be a great way to waste time at work.”
Heading north on Racine Avenue, suddenly Aquino lights up. Seemingly without turning her attention from the conversation in the car, she’s spotted an old street address — 780 — in the art glass above the door at what is now 3135 N. Racine Ave. Her friend is back.
Kaplan turns the car around. Chrucky gets out to take some pictures. And another piece of Chicago gets pushed toward the remembered column.
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sajohnson@tribune.com
Favorite finds
See street numbers and other remnants of a Chicago that no longer exists. PAGE 8
