George R. R. Martin's Student Apartment
George R. R. Martin's Student Apartment
932 W. Margate Terrace, Chicago, IL 60640
George Raymond Richard Martin won four Grammy Awards for his Game of Thrones series, which ran from 2011-2019 based on series of fantasy novels, A Song of Fire and Ice. He earned two Emmy Awards for his role as producer of Beauty and the Beast. He also won a Hugo Award and made the Nebula Awards long list for science fiction short stories he published in magazines. Margate Park is where his career as a published story writer began.
The son of a longshoreman in Bayonne, N.J, Martin had never been outside the New York area until he arrived at the Greyhound station for his freshman year at Northwestern University. Elizabeth Canning Blackwell wrote a piece for Northwestern in November of 2015, prior to Martin receiving Medill’s Hall of Achievement alumni award. In it, Blackwell relayed the story of how Martin, as part of a high school assignment, researched the career prospects of a fiction writer, only to discover that his anticipated wages would be about $1,200 per year. He decided journalism would be more practical and NU gave him a chance to escape Bayonne. “Chicago might as well have been Shanghai for all I cared,” Martin is quoted as saying. “For me, it was a wild, exotic place.”
In 1970, at the age of 21, Martin graduated summa cum laude from the NU Medill School of Journalism. The following year, he published his first short story, “The Hero,” in Galaxy Magazine, and in 1974 won his first Hugo Award for his novella Song for Lya. Martin lived in Margate Park through most of his student and early post-graduate years, from 1965 until 1976. He made a little money selling short stories and organizing chess games. He also worked as an AmeriCorp Vista volunteer. Martin ate at a nearby greasy spoon diner, Don’s Grill, where he got ideas and wrote while drinking coffee.
Martin shared his third-floor Margate Terrace apartment with a revolving cast of other students. The students paid $150 per month for the three-bedroom apartment, which in 2019 was listed for $354,900 as an 1,800 square foot, two-bathroom refurbished condominium. According to Jonathan Ballew and Mina Bloom, writing for Block Club Chicago, “When they would host parties, visiting musicians would often ask Martin what instrument he played. To which he would respond, ‘the typewriter.’ ” Block Club Chicago wrote about realtor Keller Williams Chicago’s Game of Thrones themed open house.
In the early 70s, during his time living at Margate Place, Martin developed a relationship with Lisa Tuttle, an internationally popular science fiction writer. Martin considered Tuttle one of his life’s most important friends, despite the fact that she married somebody else. Martin’s girlfriend and future wife, Gail Burnick, lived in Margate Place for a few months, until, in 1975, she and Martin moved to their own place at 938 W. Argyle Street. (There were usually around five people living in that three-bedroom apartment, so it was cramped). George and Gail lived on Argyle Street until 1976, when Martin moved to Dubuque, Iowa to teach writing at Clarke College. The two divorced in 1979, after which Martin married Parris McBride. Argyle Street was his last Chicago address.
Martin devotes a whole section of his personal website, including pictures, to Chicago.
A Game of Thrones, a high-action story set in a medieval-inspired kingdom, was published in 1996. Over the next 15 years, Martin published the next four installments. The five-book series (two more are planned) won wide acclaim and readership, ranking among the bestselling titles in the United States and internationally. To date, more than 90 million copies, in 45 languages, have been sold. In 2021, Martin signed a new HBO contract that makes him one of the wealthiest science fiction producers in history. Time Magazine called him “the American Tolkien.”
In October of 2019, Martin received the Friends of the Chicago Public Library’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award at the Isador and Sadie Dorin Forum on the UIC campus. In advance of that fundraising dinner, ABC published a story about Martin that included his reflections on Chicago and its influence on his now-famous stories.
"That was my freshman year at Northwestern and that was a life-changing kind of event,” Martin told ABC. “It just started snowing and it just didn't stop. It was definitely in the back of my head when I wrote some of those scenes along the wall in Westeros, where the snow is very heavy and the men of the Night's Watch are getting buried.
