Reading and Walking Uptown

by Donald G. Evans

Literature is a portal into place, at least that’s how I use it. When I land in an unfamiliar city, I seek out the bookstores. I find author birthplaces and statues and museums. I’ve done a few literary pub crawls. Sometimes, I go to the libraries. These adventures bring me into contact with various neighborhoods and interesting people, and organically I start to get a feel for spatial relationships, as well as collect ideas for other outlngs (not necessarily with a literary peg). I make friends. I learn some history. It’s a way to get to the core of a city, and then expand outward.

This past Saturday, June 28, was a near-perfect day for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s three-hour Uptown Literary Walking tour. It was sunny and maybe a touch hot (85ish), but we found some shade and resting places along the way. About 30 of us divided into two groups. We met at the Margate Park Fieldhouse, and most of us finished at Big Chicks for a post-mortem discussion and drink. In all, we walked about four miles—10,000 steps by my pedometer—though with 25 stops we never went too far in any one stretch.

I know Chicago, of course. It’s where I was born and raised, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, and the place I consider home, even while temporarily living in Champaign or Syracuse or South Amana or London. I know Chicago better than I know any other place, and that’s never going to change. But it takes an occasion, or maybe an effort, to get me below the surface of my everyday life. It requires a reason for me to do those things or visit those places that I take for granted, because they’ll be there tomorrow or the next day or the next year. I mean, who among us does the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel or the Willis Tower Skydeck, except when we’re entertaining out-of-town nephews or cousins or work colleagues?

Uptown. I know it, but I don’t know it. I’ve got friends there, but never lived there myself. I’ve sampled the bars and the theaters and restaurants, but never much repeated those visits. I’ve driven and walked the main drags, but never traveled up and down all the side streets. I’ve never gotten inside Uptown.

This tour changed that, at least to a small degree. Just as with my travels, this tour was a way to start at the core and expand outward. It was a

way to learn history, make friends, and figure out how various parts connected. Many of us devoted time and energy preparing for the tour, and then executing it; naturally, our investment yielded even higher returns. I hope, though, that everybody on the walk got that sense of getting inside Uptown. I also hope that, like me, everyone got a sense of a neighborhood that nurtures and benefits from a tremendous literary life. In the end, it’s that respect for the authors and their work that drives the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame to explore and preserve that history.

Robert Loerzel, a longtime resident of Uptown, is as fine a detective as he is a writer. He digs into the property deeds, the censuses, the old newspaper clips, the business licenses, the archived ephemera. He talks to people. He gets to know the subjects. He reads all the books. As one of our guides, Robert shared—sometimes only to debunk—the colorful myths, put everything in a tight historical context, and taught us a great deal about the neighborhood he knows so intimately. We kept running into business owners and street vendors who knew him. CityFiles Press is taking pre-sales for Robert’s new book, The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace, which comes out in a month.

John Lillig, another of our tour guides, knows more about Chicago literature than most anybody—that’s just for starters—and then he relentlessly pursues those connections between the source material, the authors, and the places. John told us eloquent and concise stories about the Pegasus Players and Studs Terkel, among others. I’m always impressed with how much John seems to know by heart—the literature, especially, but also the geography. I do know that he studies. He takes care to make sure that he’s informed enough to provide everybody the details that bring us back to a time when, for example, a tiny apartment in a monstrous brick building housed the future director of The French Connection.

Speaking of Studs, this tour gifted us Adrian Marin. He showed up to walk with us, and only in the space between stops did we learn that Adrian was one of the producers of the Emmy-nominated HBO short documentary Studs Terkel: Listening to America (2009) and is the archivist for the Terkel Estate. Also: a longtime Uptown resident. And here we were, telling Adrian (who’s been practically camped out there for years) about the Studs Terkel Castlewood Terrace home. We did manage to coax Adrian into telling us about the Chicago Public Library’s Bezazian Branch, a place we just happened to be passing and for which Adrian holds a great deal of admiration.

These tours are like that. Smart, invested people show up. Somebody has to take the lead—we try to share that responsibility among several of us—but often our “guests” know more than anybody. Amy Yee was another luminary who walked along with us. Amy is the author of Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents. (Michael Antman wrote about the book for our blog, when it won a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year prize). She’s a respected journalist, including lengthy stints covering foreign affairs, and currently reports for the Chicago Sun-Times. I won’t go into all the impressive people that joined us last Saturday, for fear of leaving some out, but I will mention: John D’Emilio. As we stood in front of the legendary LGBTQ+ scholar’s home, this fit, quiet graying man sauntered over to the curb, and listened, arms crossed. "Sure, fine," I thought. "registration is closed, but no harm." Little did we know, as we stood on West Ainslie Street talking about The Great John D'Emilio, that the fit, quiet, graying man was…. The Great John D'Emilio. Thank God somebody recognized him, at which point it was just a matter of letting John tell us about John.

Then there’s Barry Jung, Chicago’s most valuable volunteer and an endless resource of Chicago’s history, especially as regards the neighborhoods. Barry had a plan when he retired from R.R. Donnelley, namely to spend most of his time helping out cultural organizations like our own. He volunteers to clean the Chicago River, sort books for library sales, pour drinks at beer festivals, usher at film marathons, and on and on. I rely on Barry for editing, event planning, book pickups….and, in this case, to be our second tour guide. Barry is constantly doing things to make our city a better place, and in the process absorbing invaluable knowledge.

We made it to all the places on our tour. We got to the Uptown post office to look at the W.P.A.-era murals of Carl Sandburg and Louis Sullivan. We positioned ourselves at the edge of St. Boniface Cemetery to tell the story of Theodore Dreiser's famous musician brother, Paul Dresser, and how a Wabash River boulder wound up marking his gravesite. The estimable Dr. Carmen Arellano met us at St. Augustine College to share her knowledge about the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium and the old Essanay Studios. In visiting important homes, like that of Margaret Anderson, as well as historic institutions like Preston Bradley Center, we grew familiar, maybe even comfortable, with Uptown as part of us.  

Associate Board member Gus Weise, along with summer interns Katelyn Evans and Anushka Dabhade, all took on some research and writing, took some photos and videos, and assisted with some of the tour guide stuff. Margaret Flynn took on the heroic task of making an Uptown Literary Walking Tour app to organize our route, frame our narratives, introduce our docents, and generally provide all the content useful for our purposes or the purposes of those wanting to navigate this in the future. Margaret even broke the tour into several different maps, to give people the option

of doing longer or shorter walks. We’ll keep updating and upgrading the content. So much is already there, though. Margaret also created the app for our South Side Literary Bus Tour this past spring. Margaret is starting to take on clients through a small venture called Digital Cues—she does “App Creation and Data Collection Workflow Design and Development.” Track her down if you’ve got a job you want to discuss or price out.  

We’re trying, as part of the mission of these tours, to craft unique, close-to-definitive narratives for our Landmarks page and apps. (Robert and John wrote a great deal for this one). We’re trying to create extensive reading lists for each tour and each stop on the tours. That, plus we’re trying to make the tours worthwhile, or maybe even special. Sponsors like The Book Cellar, Eckhartz Press, Swanson Real Estate, and David Berner (Garden Tools, on presale now) help this project keep going, as do optional donations, like we got from Michael Burke and some others.  

Every time we do a tour—and this held true last Saturday--we learn more and more about Chicago, its writers, and the places in which literature has been born, nurtured, and created. We’re collaborating with others invested in absorbing as much as possible about Chicago’s neighborhoods, iconic places, important writers, and the intersections of all that. And, over time, we’re making it available to everybody interested.

I’m very much looking forward to the next one. The Gold Coast? Chicago Journalists? Oak Park? V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago? Hyde Park? For me, it’s like reading a book—in some ways, I didn’t want this Uptown tour to end, but then again I relish the opportunity to choose the next one.

Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and a short story collection, as well as editor of two Chicago anthologies. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.