Normally, I wouldn’t even give a fleeting glance to a sightseeing bus tricked out to look like an old-time streetcar, but this was different. When I read an article about the faux trolleys running on the Northwest Side to encourage Christmas shoppers to buy local, you could have knocked me over with a proverbial feather.
I felt the overpowering tug of my old neighborhood.
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Seven decades ago, I rode real trolley buses. A cross between a streetcar and a bus, they rolled on tires rather than along train tracks but were powered by trolley poles that tapped into electricity flowing through overhead wires.
The thought of trolleys running near Albany Park triggered images of trolley buses filled to standing room only. My family lived by the Sacramento Avenue stop.
The impulse to hop aboard a fake trolley was quickened by the season. Yuletide is ecumenically sentimental. For me, Christmas tree lights and Salvation Army bell ringers awaken yearnings akin to those Marcel Proust felt.
In “In Search of Lost Time,” the French novelist revives a memory of munching on a madeleine, a spongy cake, dipped in tea: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, a something detached with no suggestion of its origin.”
My madeleine is the electric trolley. Unbound by time or space, its memory anchors me to Albany Park.
The attraction of one’s old neighborhood is felt even by former residents who think they’ve insulated themselves against its lines of magnetic force. My father, for one, banned Yiddish from our family’s kitchen table because it echoed his old neighborhood of Lawndale, an immigrant community with streets where English was virtually a foreign language.
When I was older and a visitor from Sweden arrived at my front door on an evening when my parents were over for dinner, I had a sinking feeling. He’d grown up in Lawndale and was still passionate about the West Side. He saw something I’d written about his old neighborhood and wanted to drop by while he was in Chicago.
I expected he and my father would clash. They did but not over whether nostalgia was humanity’s boon or bane. They heatedly debated whether Puddy’s card parlor was on the east or west side of Homan Avenue near Roosevelt Road decades earlier.
I think the magic of the old neighborhood is rooted in its link to childhood when life’s possibilities seem infinite.
Perhaps because childhood is followed by the disillusionments of adulthood, I’ve seen old neighborhood loyalties preserved in unlikely venues. Like a dude ranch in Israel, of all places. The proprietor of the ranch graduated from John Marshall Metropolitan High School on the West Side during Israel’s war of independence. He went to Israel to join the fight for a Jewish state, stayed on and established a resort offering trail rides near the Sea of Galilee.
The corral was marked with Chicago street signs announcing “Independence Blvd” and “Douglas Blvd,” which had previously stood at that intersection in Lawndale. On the registration desk was a scrapbook, its cover decorated with a trolley christened “A Street Car Named Roosevelt Road.”
Its pages were divided into columns labeled “West Side Address ” and “Boyhood Gang,” and recorded under “Current Address” were tony suburbs of Chicago and Los Angeles.
“Traveling by horseback, you don’t very get far in space, but you seem to go way, way back in time,” Yehuda Avni, the proprietor told me.
A desire for a similar means of time travel recently set me on a Proustian quest. I hoped to find a trolley outside of what had been the Farkus grocery store. I recalled the owner’s son adding up a customer’s purchases on a brown paper bag.
I also checked near the site of Burke’s Carbonic Gas or some such name. The children of the household were Penelope and Nicholas — or Penny and Nickel, as they were known in the yard at Bateman School.
Turning north, I looked in vain near the store where my mother selected a chicken to be slaughtered. Ditto the bagel restaurant that had metamorphosed into a Palestinian grocery.
I went home irked that someone had purloined my memories. Retrieving the newspaper where I read about the trolleys made me doubly dejected; I got the day wrong.
I stewed about that for some time before deciding it could be a blessing in disguise. Who knows how Proust felt upon biting into another madeleine? Not me. I barely cracked Proust’s seven volumes. But maybe a madeleine wasn’t as wonderful as he recalled.
Supposing I’d found that ersatz trolley. The scenes framed by its windows could have run roughshod over the images running through my head,
This way, my old neighborhood memories survived the bus ride.
My Albany Park will forever be “something detached with no suggestion of its origins.”
Ron Grossman is a Tribune reporter.
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