CULTURE
A Tree Grows on Burling Street
By Scott Jacobs
Just before Thanksgiving, CBS 2 ran a little snippet in the evening news about a developer in the 1900 block of North Burling who was temporarily blocked by local residents from cutting down a 100-year-old silver maple tree in front of his new mega-mansion.
Anybody but me would have chuckled at the report and moved on. But I remember that tree because, when I came to Chicago, my first apartment was on that block.
Burling today is Chicago’s new Astor Street. “Gazillionaires’ Row,” The Chicago Tribune calls it, a place where Chicago’s wealthiest families are tearing down the 2-flats to build $20 million and $30 million homes --and now, a $40 million French Revival mansion that will span seven lots.
Settled by German and Hungarian immigrants at the turn of the century, Burling Street never amounted to much beyond another link in the middle class grid of Chicago neighborhoods. Hard working Europeans in the 1920’s gave way to hard working Puerto Rican and African-Americans in the 1950’s. Then, in the 1960’s, they too started to move on, pushed out by a younger crowd of white professionals, clinging by their cheap rents to the western edge of a hip nightspot called Lincoln Park.
When I arrived in August 1972, it was a moonless night and all the streetlights were out. I had driven down from Milwaukee to take a new job as a reporter for The Chicago Sun-Times. All my worldly possessions were packed in the back of my little red Toyota. As I carried my boxes upstairs to my new apartment, there was an eerie silence on the street. The only signs of life were little eyes peering out from behind curtains watching me move in.
I didn’t know what to make of my new neighbors until I woke up the next day to read the lead story in The Sun-Times: “Girl Shot on Street of Fear,” the headline screamed followed by an account of a drug deal gone bad, you guessed it, just across the street from me.
I do not know if there was any better job in America in the early 70’s than being a reporter in Chicago, nor did I care. Chicago was then in the throes of its last newspaper war with four major dailies – The Sun-Times, The Tribune, The Daily News and Chicago Today – turning out round-the-clock editions aimed at cannibalizing each other’s readership. Local TV stations were expanding their 15-minute 6 o’clock news briefs into full-fledged newscasts -- emboldened by a new technology called video. And an earnest group of English majors from the University of Chicago were starting to publish a free weekly called The Reader.
I was 22 years old at the time, the newest recruit in editor
Jim Hoge’s attempt to fill the Sun-Times with young reporters
who could give his struggling tabloid a competitive edge. He had already promoted
a young University of Illinois grad named Roger Ebert to be its movie critic;
and turned a ne’er-do-well newspaper journeyman named Tom Fitzpatrick
into a columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 account of the SDS
Weatherman “Days of Rage.”
I came to Chicago from Harvard via The Milwaukee Sentinel (Hoge always
liked his Ivy types.) He recruited me by taking me to lunch at the Tavern
Club. Over strawberries and cream, he offered me $12,000 a year to come work
for his paper. This was a 50% bump in my salary, so there was little doubt
I would accept. But I was hardly his best find. My deskmates in The Sun-Times
newsroom that first year were Bob Greene, Paul Galloway (perhaps the
best writer of us all), Eleanor Randolph, Roger Simon, Andy Shaw and Mike
Flannery.
Every morning, Greene would conduct -- with his typical aplomb -- “Love Hour.” This was his way of reminding me about my pitiful attempts to find a girlfriend in a new city. He was constantly offering to set me up with the perfect girl – the most memorable being a 6’ 6” Amazon who ran a pregnant women’s clothing store – then grilling me on my scores.
Every night after the last deadline passed, I would join my colleagues on an excursion into the Bermuda Triangle of journalism – Riccardo’s, O’Rourke’s and the Old Town Ale House – so named because they were tavern hangouts with cascading closing hours. Many great journalists were lost there; and, occasionally, a few were found.
As impressed as I was with my colleagues, the most memorable character I met that year was my downstairs neighbor, Sarah Nance, a divorced nurse with three children who looked like Catherine Deneuve and acted like she was Simone de Beauvoir.
Sarah lived her life without a dime to her name. But she lived it to the fullest. She was a bohemian at heart, having grown up in a Czech family on the southwest side. She was beautiful, smart and funny – not a bad combination – with a flair for adventure that no one could resist and invariably got her in trouble.
She was most at home in the kitchen. She could make out of nothing in the refrigerator a meal everyone heartily enjoyed. Her sister Mary lived across the street and was a frequent guest. So too was a heroin-challenged drug user down the street named Capp (for his astrological sign Capricorn) who often volunteered to babysit her children – and sometimes showed up. And on more than one occasion, her boyfriends (including Ebert, briefly) paid her rent, bought her food, and otherwise provided for the care of her children.
It’s hard to look at Burling Street today and see much of what it was like back then. Halsted Street, only a block west, was then considered the western edge of civilized Chicago. Most of the storefronts were boarded up, except for Gepperth’s Meat Market, a butcher shop from the old days, and Manhandlers, a meat market of an entirely different kind for Chicago’s secret gay community.
At the north end of our block, the city’s misguided urban renewal program had turned a four block square area of homes into a vast wasteland of broken glass and dirt clumps we called “The Prairie.” Today it is called Oz Park. Waller High School, one of the worst in the city, sat on its southern edge. A steady stream of students from Cabrini-Green walked to it along a corridor that passed by my house.
Today, Waller has been re-christened Lincoln Park High School, one of the best performing in the city, and Cabrini-Green’s public housing students have been re-directed to a Near North Academy closer to the CHA projects.
There were times when I thought we were all living in a gypsy world. I remember one afternoon when Sarah’s kids -- ages 6, 8 and 11 -- found a gun in the alley behind the house. The cops showed up and went door-to-door looking for the owner. Sarah called me at work.
“Can you maybe get them to stop? They’re scaring my kids,” she said. Before I could explain my job did not include halting police investigations, she blurted out, “I put it in the garbage can. I only got it because my ex was getting out of jail. Somebody must have gone through our garbage. Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?”
There was always some piece of Sarah I would never know, but that only made life on Burling Street all the more exciting.
On my first Thanksgiving in Chicago, we put on a feast worthy of Ben Hecht and Harriet Monroe in their heyday.
Ebert bought the turkey. Hank DeZutter brought over a cooked goose he’d prepared himself. Anyone who arrived early was given a task in the kitchen, and anyone who arrived late crowded into her little living room. Hank Oettinger, the inveterate letter-writer who agnostically filled all the editorial pages in all the papers, settled into the only easy chair. Sydney Harris, the kindly photographer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, played on the floor with Sarah’s kids.
At one point, it seemed like O’Rourke’s closed and its patrons had been poured out into Sarah’s living room. Jay the bartender was there. So were Jim and Micaela Tuohy, Karen Conner, Paul McGrath, John McHugh, Ed McCahill, Nancy Day and G. Bob Hillman. So many now famous names it’s hard to include them all.
Sarah was in her element, flitting about offering up her famous “ants on a stick” -- celery with raisins and peanut butter in the grooves. She would serve and gossip and laugh and move on. When it was all over, she turned to me. “That was a pretty good party, wasn’t it?” she asked. Like she had just thrown a party, but not attended it.
Nothing good ever lasts. In 1974, Sarah fell in love with the barbell magnate next door. I followed a bad instinct and moved further west with them to an even more dangerous neighborhood called Wicker Park. We pooled our money to buy a former rooming house under the el tracks on Caton Street and moved in. Sarah and her three kids, Bob and his four English mastiffs, and me. But that’s another story.
When they take down that tree on Burling – as I’m sure they will – the memory of those days will be 34 rings in from the outer bark. It’s not like that tree was watching me come of age in Chicago. It was just the sentinel on watch at the time looking out for us in reckless times.
But the new homeowners on Burling Street will have something else to worry about. What happens to the spirit of the girl shot on the street of fear once it is unleashed from its wooden tomb?
