In December of 1966 I was a 15-year-old
high school sophomore who had just joined the University High School (Iowa City)
chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society. And thanks to a
family trip to Chicago, I had the opportunity to visit the SDS
national headquarters. We were staying with family friends in Elgin,
so I took the Milwaukee Road commuter line to Union Station. I should
have simply taken the West Madison bus, but I wanted to ride the L,
so I walked up to Clinton and Lake and boarded the Lake Street L. I
wasn't familiar with the “A” and “B” stops, so I just got on
the first train headed west.. It happened to be a “B” train, so
it went right by the Ashland stop, which would have put me within a
few blocks of the SDS headquarters. I got off at California Avenue,
much farther west than I needed to be, and in the heart of the West
Side ghetto. I walked south to Madison Street, where I paid another
45 cents to board an eastbound Madison Street bus.
Chicago was one of America's most
segregated cities, and the neighborhood around Madison and California
was a solidly black and poor one. Strangely enough, I don't remember
any stares from riders on that Chicago Transit Authority bus, even
though I must have been the only white person on board. I vaguely
remember a couple of blocks where most of the residents looked poor
and Asian—perhaps a northerly extension of Chinatown. But I got off
the bus at or near Ashland and found my way to the second floor of a
nondescript building on the north side of the street.
My visit to SDS headquarters was
anticlimactic to say the least. Carl Oglesby wasn't there, nor was
anyone whose name I knew. There was a a harried-looking young woman,
busy at her typewriter, who had no time to talk. I looked around the
lobby of this, the headquarters of the most prominent radical student
organization, which could have been mistaken for a dentist's waiting
room, took a few pamphlets, and went back downstairs to catch the
West Madison bus back to the Loop.
In those days, West Madison was Skid Row. A few blocks east of Ashland most people on the street were
white. Most looked middle-aged or older. The street was lined with
taverns, cheap restaurants, and Single Room Occupancy hotels, all of
which catered to people down on their luck. The Starr Hotel, which I
passed but don't specifically remember, was infamous because just a
few months earlier, Richard Speck, who had murdered eight student
nurses, was found there. Nearly fifty years later, memory has become
a blur, mixed with later scenes of Chicago streets, and appears to me
as a sort of Ashcan School image, with ghostlike figures in drab
overcoats standing on the sidewalk or walking in and out of the
taverns and flophouses.
I got off the bus at Canal Street, near
the majestic North Western Station, and walked the two blocks south
to Union Station and the commuter train to Elgin.
Recently, while on a layover between
the Lake Shore Limited from Elkhart and the California Zephyr to
Galesburg, Illinois, I had a few hours to kill, so I decided to
wander west from Union Station. I walked west on Jackson until I came
to a small one-block park. It made sense to head north, and after
walking a couple of blocks on Adams, I turned north toward Madison.
It was, as I expected, no longer Skid
Row. The transition from downscale to upscale had begun in the early
1980s with the opening of Presidential Towers, which was built on the site of the Starr Hotel. The taverns and
flophouses were gone, replaced by condominiums, trendy restaurants,
day spas, dog grooming salons and boutiques. Instead of middle-aged
men down on their luck, there were beautiful young men and women,
their skin tanned, oiled, and glowing. I imagine that many of those
Skid Row denizens of 1966 bore tattoos that were mementos of service
in the Pacific. In 2015 I noticed a young woman sporting an
artistically designed armband tattoo that probably set her back a few
thousand dollars. It was certainly more tasteful than the “Death
Before Dishonor” inks of the World War II era, but surely less
genuine.
There was one holdout from the Skid Row
days—the shuttered Phil's Tavern, which appeared to be on the way
towards demolition or renovation. In any case, this single reminder
of the street's past would soon be gone or turned into another
upscale establishment. Pete Anderson, of the blog, Pete Lit,researched the name and location of Phil's Tavern, and found nothing
except for a Google Street View image from May, 2014, showing the
building with a shingled awning obscuring the sign. That probably
accounts for the sign's easy readability. “Based on the drab
exterior and the tiny size of the building,” Anderson writes, “it's
probably safe to say that Phil's used to be a nondescript,
hole-in-the-wall dive, perhaps dating back to the era when this
stretch of Madison was the city's skid row.”
Closer to Ashland the neighborhood had
become less trendy, but was still no slum. The block where the SDS
headquarters had been was now greenspace. But there was one other
interesting holdover: the Palace Grill and Sandwich Shop near the
corner of Madison and Ogden Avenue. The building appeared to be new,
but its owners had preserved the weathered neon sign proclaiming the
place had been around since 1938. It had adapted to the changing
neighborhood, offering sandwiches on ciabatta bread and a complete
line of official Chicago Blackhawks merchandise.West of Ashland I
could see the gigantic United Center, where the Blackhawks and Bulls
played, looming ahead. It was time to head back to Union Station.
It's easy to ridicule the Young Urban
Professionals, or Yuppies (the term has been around since the early
1980s, if not before). Still, I have to remind myself that they have
chosen to live in the city. They're living in lofts, condominiums,
and apartments, and not in McMansions built out in the exurbs, where
farmers recently were growing corn and soybeans.
The West Side has more than its share
of slums, but this stretch of West Madison was no longer one of them.
It's hard to feel nostalgia for Skid Row. But the place did serve a
purpose. The down-and-out are still with us, and the SRO hotels,
which gave them a relatively safe place to stay, are mostly gone.
They're completely gone from the old Skid Row.
In the world of 1966 there was still a
profit to be made from the down-and-out, and while the owners of the
SROs weren't always admirable men, they did provide a service that
today's entrepreneurs don't. And cash-strapped social service
agencies aren't in a position to fill the gap. Nor are charity-run
shelters such as the Pacific Garden Mission. So yes, one can mourn
the loss of Skid Row, if only because it made life a little more
bearable for the poorest among us.
Photo Credits: Pete Anderson (Phil's Tavern)
Associated Press (Starr Hotel)
www.chicagofoodplanet.com (Palace Grill)
