A contretemps has emerged within Polish Triangle, which does not refer to uszka, delicious three-sided dumplings, but to Chicago’s historic West Town plaza bordered by Division Street, Ashland Avenue and Milwaukee Avenue.
The dispute is over the proposed location therein of a public, ahem, convenience.
The Polish, or Polonia, Triangle once was the cultural heart of Chicago’s so-called Polish downtown. Almost every major Polish organization in the United States was headquartered here. This particular patch was the center of Polish America.
The recent idea to stick a restroom there hardly was the Polish Triangle’s first brush with controversy.
There was much mishegoss over a 1998 proposal to name the plaza after the great Chicago scribe Nelson Algren, who moved to the Polish Triangle in 1940 but whose love of writing about the seedier aspects of the neighborhood in masterful works like “Never Come Morning” and “The Man with the Golden Arm” (which became a film starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak) did not please the more conservative factions of the Polish diaspora. As a compromise, a fountain in Algren’s honor was placed in the middle of the plaza.
Said sad attraction is not exactly comparable to Buckingham Fountain.
The rim is damaged and the paint thereupon peels. When we went by there the other evening, the whole plaza looked down at heel. To the west, Division Street, once known as the Polish Broadway, is hopping with restaurants and free-spending customers. But Milwaukee Avenue, the Northern border of the plaza, mostly is boarded up or covered with harsh metallic grates, even as that street thrives to the west, having been reinvented as the Hipster Highway, the epicenter of bike-lane Chicago.
Alas, a casual current visitor to the plaza would learn little or nothing of the Polish Triangle’s long and complicated history.
On the south side of the Triangle, though, the longtime operators of the Polish American-owned Chopin Theatre pay homage to their venue’s long history with Polish art works and the Polish pale lager Żywiec dominating the concession stands.
Proprietor Zygmunt Dyrkacz says he is far from pleased at the prospects of opening the Chopin’s doors each day in front of a new restroom, aroma and all. They have reasonably suggested another location be found, say further west along Division, where all the bar-hoppers prefer to be, or perhaps set underground or made part of the nearby Division Street Blue Line station. “Our efforts to improve this corner often feel Sisyphean,” Dyrkacz, a learned man, says. We can see why a toilet was not on his bingo card.
So while there is a place for public restrooms and we all have to go, we’ll lend our voices to the effort to keep the bathroom out of the Polish Triangle. It’s a historic spot and deserves not just to be pee-free but to get spruced up so a Polish American Chicagoan, or one of the many who derived thereof, can feel some pride of place.
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