Never a City So Real (7 page)

This is, indeed, a place where the world can seem topsy-turvy. Once, a man accused of double murder chose to represent himself and told the jury that he turned himself in after hearing he was wanted on the TV news. Only problem was he had also argued that he had been in custody at the time of the murder. Nonetheless, the jury acquitted him.

Of course what you see in this building is a rather small but influential corner of the city; and, it can be a very nasty corner. The street gangs, in particular, wield enormous influence. Symbols of their power—pitchforks, six-pointed stars, and crowns—are everywhere, etched into courtroom doors and courtroom benches. In 1988, when forty-one-year-old Jeff Fort, leader of the El Rukn gang, and four of his generals were tried for the murder of a rival gang member, Willie “Dollar Bill” Bibbs, the court took extraordinary security precautions, including the construction of a pillbox in the hallway where a deputy sheriff sat armed with a machine gun. They also placed snipers on the rooftop and escorted the judge home each day after court. (Fort was convicted and sentenced to seventy-five years; he was already in prison, serving an eighty-year sentence for directing a terrorist-for-hire plot on behalf of Libya.)

I ask Lyon whether, after twenty-five years of trying cases in which someone has taken the life of another, often in a quite brutal fashion, her work hasn't tainted her view of humanity. She replies that it hasn't—that in fact she'd been buoyed by periodic displays of nobility, including the time the mother of a murdered prostitute told Lyon that she didn't want her daughter's killer put to death because, she said, “I don't want to be like him.” Later in our conversation, however, Lyon tells me that if there's one lesson she's learned at 26th Street it's that “the line is thin and anyone can cross it. Anyone. I used to think ‘I'm a nice, loving person. There's no way I could ever commit a violent act.' But you do this long enough, you know anyone can kill. Anyone. Under the right circumstances. If you understand that, then maybe you have a little more appreciation for the freedoms you have here. It isn't someone else's problem.”

I meekly suggest to her that maybe her perception of the world
has
changed some—or, at least, that it's different from those of us who are not at 26th Street on a regular basis. She doesn't exactly deny it. Instead, she tells me the story of a friend in private practice who once told Lyon that he didn't feel like “a real lawyer” except when he was at 26th Street. “I know what he meant,” she tells me. “When I walk into that building, I feel like I'm coming home. It's hard to explain exactly.”

It Takes All Kinds

When I first moved to Chicago in 1983, I rented an apartment in Wicker Park, a neighborhood of modest redbrick apartment buildings and wood-framed family homes, although on Pierce Avenue there's a row of majestic Victorian houses built at the turn of the century by German merchants, the nouveaux riches of their day who were looking to make a statement that they'd made it. When I arrived, the area was in transition, an amalgam of old Germans and Poles, young Hispanic families, and young white artists. The places to hang out then were the Busy Bee, a Polish coffee shop that served pierogis and potato pancakes, and the basketball courts in the park from which the neighborhood derived its name.

I lived on a street shaped like a boomerang, just across the street from the basketball courts; even on weekday afternoons, I could usually find a game there. I was single then, and lived on the third floor of a three-flat, a narrow redbrick building that was warmed by built-in gas space heaters in the middle of each kitchen. (They're still common in the city's older buildings.) The single heater's pencil-thin flames were hardly enough to warm the four-room apartment, and by early winter a sheet of ice would form on the inside of my windows. It would get so cold come January that I'd move my mattress to the kitchen floor, next to the heater. There were three of us in the building. On the first floor was a guy who ran a bike repair shop out of his apartment, and just downstairs from me were two men in their twenties who spent their days shooting up heroin and their nights looking for ways to finance their habit—which at one point included crawling through the transom above my back door and relieving me of my rather feeble stereo system and record collection.

Soon after I arrived, I learned that Nelson Algren had lived down the block, where he had written
A Walk on the Wild Side
and carried on his transatlantic affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Two years earlier, friends of Algren (he died in 1981) had convinced the city to change the name of the street to Algren Avenue, but residents complained vigorously, not because of any distaste for Algren but because the change of address would pose too much of an inconvenience: It would mean changing their licenses and insurance policies. It was a measure of Algren's stature here (or lack of it) that the residents won, and the city returned the street to its original name, Evergreen Avenue. Algren, I suspect, wouldn't have been terribly surprised by this turn of events. He always felt unloved by the city that served as his muse, and in his later years he moved to New York, where he hoped that he might be embraced and appreciated. (Algren's not the only well-known writer who has moved through Chicago; the city's best often leave, or simply pass through: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht.) While in Chicago, Algren had written of the city's underbelly, of its dispossessed, its prostitutes and junkies, its hustlers and con artists. He lived life hard; he was a drinker and a gambler. His lustful, prickly ballad to the city,
Chicago: City on the Make,
may be the best thing ever written about this city (along with Carl Sandburg's collection,
Chicago Poems
), yet it didn't find an audience here until Jean-Paul Sartre translated it into French, and it won overseas acclaim. And while he writes in the poem that “You can't belong to Chicago,” he clearly loved this place. Listen to him on riding the El:

By nights when the yellow salamanders of the El bend all one way and the cold rain runs with the red-lit rain.

By the way the city's million wires are burdened only by lightest snow; and the old year yet lighter upon them.

When chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and
arc-lamps all are dimmed.

By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and
the sun goes by on the wind.

By nights when the moon is an only child above
the measured thunder of

the cars, you may know Chicago's heart at last.

There is a monument to Algren. It's an unremarkable fountain, eighteen feet in diameter, set in a small triangular park where three major thoroughfares meet: Ashland Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, and Division Street. It is an intersection of the new and the old, of the rich and the poor, of the lively and the lifeless, of the artists and the artful. The park is a refuge for drifters and day laborers, the very slice of the city Algren wrote about, and, indeed, engraved at the foot of the fountain is a quote from
City on the Make
: “For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.” But the neighborhood is changing, and in the mornings young men in gray suits and young women in white blouses and somber skirts merge here to catch the bus or the El downtown. The Busy Bee, once the anchor here, is gone, replaced by restaurants that require reservations and bars so well lit you could read a newspaper in them. Families have razed old homes and built anew. After all, neighborhoods in Chicago change direction regularly; in another part of town, for instance, you have Mexican-Americans occupying Pilsen, which was originally a community of Czechs and was named after Plzen, the second largest city in Czechoslovakia. But in Wicker Park it's unclear who the insiders are and who the outsiders are, and so you have Spring, one of the city's posher, trendier restaurants, at one corner of the neighborhood, and Polska Restauracja Podhalanka, which has been around for twenty years, at another. It's as if the neighborhood is simultaneously moving both backward and forward in time.

 

Robert Guinan is an artist whose inspiration, like Algren's, comes from the street, from the people who are seen but not heard, and for that reason I had wanted to meet him. He suggested that we rendezvous just a block west of Triangle Park at Rite Liquors on Division Street, the bar where he had spent many years drinking and sketching. This is Algren's old turf. I waited beneath the tavern's tired-looking green awning, watching its collection of neon signs—
BUDWEISER, GO BEARS
, a green shamrock,
DRINK STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE
—toss flickers of light on the cracked sidewalk. A thick-legged elderly woman entered Rite Liquors, and I could hear a voice from inside announce good-naturedly, “Here comes that dancing gigolo.” “What?” the woman growled. “What y'a say?” The man and his friend chuckled. Then a man who was missing a good number of teeth and wearing a T-shirt that read
LICK IT SLAM IT SUCK IT
came up and offered to sell me a sledgehammer. It was wrapped in electrical tape and looked as worn as he did. When I declined, he flung the mallet over his shoulder and tried the other customers in the bar, who turned down his offer as well.

Rite Liquors is like a spinster among the young and the beautiful. Directly across the street are two new stores: Smack, a clothing boutique, and Bamboo Nail Spa. There's a Starbucks on the corner, and down the street a sushi bar and the Smoke Daddy, a rib joint (which despite the fact that it is relatively trendy has some of the best ribs in the city, along with live blues bands). But Rite Liquors refuses to give ground. Patrons, mostly men, still beat the bar's owner to work, waiting under the awning at seven a.m. for the doors to open and for the beer and whiskey to flow.

“It's still here.” The voice has a warbly quality to it. Guinan, who at sixty-nine is slightly built and light-footed, has sneaked up behind me. His face, which looks alternately dour, amused, and baffled, is almost cartoonish-looking in its pliability; Guinan has the expressiveness of a mime. Guinan was once a regular at Rite Liquors, where he would come to sketch two patrons in particular. One was a young blonde bartender, Dorota, who had come from Poland just a few years earlier, and who complained to Guinan that his sketches made her appear unhappy. (The bartenders at Rite Liquors still tend to be recently arrived young Polish women.) The other was Loretta, an African-American woman who had worked in a commercial printing facility for years until her hands mysteriously broke out in a bad case of eczema. She was on disability when Guinan met her, drinking to fill the void in her life. Embarrassed by the unsightliness of her hands, she wore black leather gloves, which made her look exotic among the young men in torn leather jackets and the old-timers in frayed shirts.

Guinan hadn't been here for a number of years, but little has changed; the place is still owned by Michael Liacopoulos, who came over from southern Greece and purchased it from a Jewish man in 1982. As you walk in, there's a liquor store to the left, and to the right, running the length of the seventy-foot store, is a narrow, handsome bar made of oak. A thirty-five-year-old Budweiser clock hangs over its center; a nineteen-inch television sits at one end. A pool table is in the rear. The clientele, at least during the week, is a melting pot of Ukrainians, Poles, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans; on weekends, the young professionals and artists—the recent arrivals—come to play pool. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Liacopoulos serves his patrons a turkey dinner.

Guinan and I take a seat at the bar. “Used to be packed with mailmen before they went to work,” Guinan tells me. The local post office is the bar's neighbor, and while the postal workers come in less frequently, they still appear for the occasional shot and a beer. Guinan was reluctant to meet me here because in the early 1990s, a local weekly at Guinan's suggestion had written about the bar, and what was written—that it was a dive—angered the tavern's owners. This is the first time he's been back since that article, but all seems to have been forgiven: Liacopoulos greets him warmly. Guinan orders a Zywiec, a Polish beer, and—although he says he's stopped smoking—pulls out a pack of Marlboros. “I'm smoking now just 'cause I'm in a bar,” he explains.

For nearly thirty years, Guinan drank and smoked and sketched at taverns around the city. He painted prostitutes and junkies, recent immigrants and blues singers. And he ventured out into the streets as well. He met an aging jazz piano player, Emile, who because of his musical prowess was known as the King of Clark Street; one of Guinan's paintings is of Emile sitting in his home, shoulders hunched, stomach flabby, playing his piano naked. Another of his subjects was Sister Carrie, an evangelist, who could usually be found at the Maxwell Street Market on Sunday mornings, jumping and shaking as she sang and banged on her tambourine. He captured people riding the El, sleeping and gazing out the window. He painted two boys climbing out of Lake Michigan under the shimmering light of street lamps. There's one painting in which, like voyeurs, we peek through the windows of the Fine Arts Building downtown, watching lithe young ballerinas in leotards and tutus practicing their routines. He drew a portrait of Mike, who ran a small dry cleaners that had become a neighborhood gathering spot, and he painted the women who used the back of Mike's shop to clean vegetables. He sketched the regal-looking African-American poet Margaret Danner, and boxing night at the Union League Club, where men in white shirts and ties and women in evening gowns watch young black and Hispanic men pummel each other to the mat.

Guinan does everything from small pencil sketches to large oils, some of which sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars. Taken together, his work, which has been compared to Edward Hopper's, comprises an astonishing collective portrait of the city. Where Hopper painted with strong, luminous colors, Guinan's work is muted and filled with extraordinary detail. In one portrait of Sister Carrie at her home, you can make out the mismatched, makeshift drapes covering the window and the ripped, layered linoleum on the floor. Dressed in her white domestic's uniform from the hotel where she worked, Sister Carrie sits erect in a fragile-looking wooden chair, her tambourine in her lap. You can sense her economic struggles and her strong bearing. The
International Herald Tribune
once wrote that Guinan portrays “a world of desolate dignity.” An art dealer I spoke with said of Guinan's work that it feels familiar—not the artistry, but the people and places. There's an intimacy about his portraits that lets you feel that you know, or think you know, his subjects.

Guinan's work, as you might have gathered, is quite popular, although not in Chicago, where he's virtually unknown. But in France.

Guinan is originally from upstate New York and served a three-year peacetime stint in the army in Tripoli and Ankara as a radio operator. There, he fancied himself a Toulouse-Lautrec and sketched local peasants, imitating Toulouse-Lautrec's nervous brush strokes, which he later abandoned for a more disciplined, naturalistic style. He arrived in Chicago in 1959 to attend the School of the Art Institute, and a friend took him to Maxwell Street, an introduction that altered his life. Maxwell Street may have been one of the most exhilarating, industrious, and productive open street bazaars in the world. Begun in 1874 by Jewish merchants (in the same neighborhood as Manny's), it gradually became a hodgepodge collection of Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans. (In its later years, the kids I knew from the West Side referred to it as Jewtown, even though by then most of the merchants were black.) On Sunday mornings, blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf played on the sidewalks, plugging their amps into the adjacent apartment buildings. Old men sold weathered
National Geographic
magazines, used picture frames, rusted tools, and assorted hardware such as nails and screws. On occasion, you could find new clothes and phonographs, though it was best not to ask where they came from. Samuel and Raymond Popeil, who eventually went on to invent the Veg-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman, honed their salesmanship techniques at Maxwell Street by hawking kitchenware. Street vendors barbecued Polish sausages and pig's-ear sandwiches over fires set in city trash cans. “It was like being in Turkey or Libya,” Guinan says. “This open street market, all the ruckus.” He produced from that time a series of paintings that captured the market in its last days, solitary figures peddling their merchandise, and yet despite the fact that its end was near, there's a joy and liveliness to these works. They're among my favorites.