I mourned my friend the way I met him, with a sentimental journey to the West Side.
We were students at the University of Chicago 60 years ago. No sooner were introductions made than Marshall Ansell offered me a guided tour of Lawndale. Actually, he didn’t so much offer as insist upon it. Likewise, news of his death in far-off Sweden recently impelled me to retrace our steps through a neighborhood roughly bound by Roosevelt Road and 22nd Street, Western Avenue and Cicero Avenue.
Marshall had grown up there, while my family moved away shortly after I was born. I knew it chiefly from visits to grandparents, aunts and uncles. We’d go back for a bar mitzvah or wedding and increasingly for funerals. To Marshall, that was like a tourist saying he knew Paris. What right had I to claim to be a West Sider? Still, my fib would be forgiven by walking its streets with him.
By then, Lawndale was a black neighborhood. But had you shut your eyes and listened to Marshall’s narrative, you might miss that.
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At our first stop, a gargantuan apartment building on Independence Boulevard, he noted that it was dubbed “Castle Garden,” after an immigrant reception center on New York’s waterfront. So many kids lived in the building when he was a boy that they had their own softball league. Boys and girls called Yuddie and Hershel, Rifka and Gittel, played hide-and-seek in its maze of gangways.
Their places had been taken by children whose families were seeking refuge from the Jim Crow South — much as Yuddie’s and Gittel’s had fled the anti-Semitism of czarist Russia, then left the neighborhood when blacks arrived.
But on that occasion, Marshall saw only the playmates of his youth. He was looking not with his eyes but with his heart.
After our visit, Marshall moved to Sweden. But on periodic visits to Chicago, his first order of business was for us to have another look at Castle Garden. Those weren’t my only trips there.
My byline on stories about neighborhood life made me willy-nilly a tour guide for nostalgic West Siders. Lots of neighborhoods inspire loyalty, but Lawndale’s alums have a preternatural passion. Perhaps that is because we remember it as neither rich nor poor, religious nor secular, but all things Jewish rolled into one.
Its umpteen congregations reflected every variety of Judaism and every rung on the social ladder. One was known as the politicians’ synagogue. It was the precinct captains’ favorite. On Sundays along Douglas Boulevard, soapbox orators preached every -ism. You could choose between socialism and Zionism, or opt for socialist Zionism.
Binding those disparate strains together was a virtually religious loyalty to the Democratic Party. The late Bernard Neistein, a local ward boss, explained to me that the vote totals were so lopsided that his minions surreptitiously marked a few ballots for Republicans, just to make it look legit.
The range of experiences Lawndale provided meant that nearly every alum had a hallowed memory. Once a woman from Los Angeles called me, saying she wanted to show her high school to her husband, who hadn’t grown up in Chicago. The concierge at their hotel discouraged her, saying the neighborhood had changed, but a mutual friend suggested I might take them.
As we pulled up alongside Marshall High School, a police sergeant approached the car with a look on his face that said: “This better be good.”
“Good afternoon officer,” I said. “This woman graduated from here eons ago and would like to take a picture in front of it.” You could almost hear gears turning as he processed the request, then nodded. After snapping a photo and as I loaded the couple back in the car, the officer said: “Now quick, get out of my life.”
The woman asked if we could stop where she had lived, and seeing that it had become an empty lot, sighed deeply. Then she segued into a description of the house that had stood there: “Over there was my bedroom. It was behind the kitchen.”
She was gesticulating toward empty space.
Afterward I heard she said that our hour on the West Side was the highlight of their trip to Chicago. Like Marshall at Castle Garden, she had seen what she longed to see — not with her eyes but with her heart.
I thought of the two of them on my recent visit to Lawndale, and how objects can live on in memory after they’re physically vanished. I was mulling over the possibility that Castle Garden was gone — leaving me to say Marshall’s kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over one of the neighborhood’s numerous empty lots — but it was in fine shape, and I soon knew why.
A man named Mike came along, pushing a pail and wringer with his mop. He was the building’s maintenance man, and by telling him Marshall’s story I became a resource.
“You’re Jewish?” he said and put me on the phone with a friend. The two had differing interpretations of the Passover story. The Old Testament resonates among black church members. My Hebrew School days are long behind me, but my explanation seemed to satisfy them
“What did you say your friend’s name was?” Mike asked. “Don’t worry, I’m going to keep this place nice and clean.”