My beefs with “progress” are spiraling out of control.
Bulldozers used to level my childhood memories maybe once every other year. Now those sites are continuously imperiled. I dread turning a corner, fearing to see a high-rise or town houses on a landscape where decades ago I cut through gangways and hung out on back porches.
I recognize that change is inevitable. I dig what Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
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But why must the Greek philosopher’s axiom govern the Chicago River?
A houseboat colony lined its North Branch when I went to a nearby grade school in the 1940s. Some alums supposedly lived there, but I didn’t know if that was true. But I fantasized about growing up as close to the high seas as was possible in Albany Park.
Standing on the Montrose Avenue bridge, I imagined Tom Sawyer on one houseboat. On another was Becky Thatcher, his girlfriend in Mark Twain’s novel. A piling, I imagined, was inscribed with a heart enclosing their names.
In real life, their landlubber neighbors considered the houseboats an unsightly infringement on property values, and most were gone by the 1960s.
Not far downstream is another of my emotional landmarks. We called it Bicycle Paradise, but now it’s the nicely manicured Horner Park. Then it was a wild tract of land along the Chicago River, pockmarked where clay had been dug up for an abandoned brickmaking factory.
Overgrown, it was visually akin to jungles of Southeast Asia. Pedaling up and down its rugged terrain gave my buddies and me a glimpse of what older brothers and uncles experienced as GIs in World War II.
I resisted the urge to regale my grandsons with tales of Bicycle Paradise when their parents took them to a purpose-built version at a forest preserve.
“Sounds nice,” I could have said. “But imagine what it feels like to duck a branch while guessing how deep a water-filled hole is.”
But I held my tongue, knowing that one generation’s nostalgia is boredom to the following one. I learned that on a sentimental journey to Maxwell Street.
When my grandparents lived in a tenement, the street was covered with pushcarts loaded with used goods. My bar mitzvah suit was bought at Gabels store, because he and my aunt Hilda came from the same Old World village.
So did his brother. But they’d quarreled and had a brick wall built that made two stores out of one. Lest a customer confuse them, the brother who measured my inseam advertised on the radio: “Label Gabels, in the middle of the block.”
Six decades later, I was in a trendy restaurant on what had become a gentrified street, listening to a waitress’ spiel. One of the day’s specials wasn’t kosher. “I don’t think my grandmother would have served that for Shabbat dinner,” I said gesturing toward the renovated building across the street.
The waitress said not a word. After she took our order, my wife observed: “That young lady hadn’t the faintest idea what you were talking about.”
So standing next to perfect strangers I try hard not to blurt out, “What a desecration!” How would they know Washington Square Park on North Clark Street was once littered with empty wine bottles? If they did, wouldn’t they think its well-tailored look a mark of progress?
In my mind, it’s still Bughouse Square, a wondrous open-air forum I discovered in my high school years. It was a magnet for adolescents mentally fleeing middle-class conformity.
With an orange crate for a forum, it hosted advocates of free speech and free love, prophets of vegetarianism and anarchism, evangelists and atheists. Should a heckler interrupt the speaker, one of the old-timers would shout back: “The rule here is one damn fool at a time!”
I also mourn the South Side jazz club where I went with University of Chicago buddies who’d heard that “a pretty good singer was there.” Billie Holiday’s voice and the lyrics of “Strange Fruit” have haunted me ever since.
So many other beloved greasy spoons, corner taverns and musty used-bookstores are gone that the impact of something Red Skelton said finally hit home.
Once the toast of Hollywood and Las Vegas, the baggy-pants comedian played the college circuit at the end of his career.
We sat in his dressing room after one appearance. Hearing I was from the Tribune, he shared fond memories of Chicago.
Is such and such still standing, he’d ask?
“I’m afraid it’s not, Red,” I’d reply.
After several such exchanges, Skelton observed:
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“That’s the thing about progress. It’s not sentimental.”