Studs Terkel's Last Chicago Residence
850 West Castlewood Terrace
Author and critic Studs Terkel lived in this 3,600 square-foot 1911 home until his death in 2008. He shared the home with his wife Ida until her death in 1999. After that, he shared the house with his adult son Dan and later caretakers. Royalties from his 1967 bestselling debut book, Division Street, afforded Terkel the opportunity to buy such a lavish home.
Castlewood Terrace, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as of March 18. 2022, is a cul-de-sac street and was also, reportedly, once home to Groucho Marx, Mary Pickford, and a number of other dignitaries.
Born in New York in 1912, prolific writer and historian Terkel moved to Chicago with his family when he was a child and stayed in the city for the rest of his life. He attended law school at the University of Chicago, but after failing his first attempt at the bar exam decided to change careers. He worked in the Red Cross after being rejected from the military, and also found a job with the Federal Writer’s Project and took several gigs as a radio actor (often playing a dramatic villain). This led to many other jobs in the radio world, earning his own program called The Wax Museum in 1945. Inspired by his childhood in the hotel his parents ran, the Wells-Grand Hotel, the program consisted mainly of real-time interviews. He went on to launch and star in a television show, Stud’s Place, that ran between 1949 and 1952, when it was cancelled due to Terkel’s leftist beliefs. He returned to radio shortly after, running a show that went through many names and lasted more than 40 years before ending in early 1998. The show contained music, but was most famous for Terkel’s dynamic interviews. Throughout this time, he also published many books, with a focus on chronicling oral history of the working class and people surviving the Great Depression. Terkel spent much of his life in Uptown Chicago and deeply valued its diversity, both in his life and his work. He also released two autobiographies, the first in 1977 and the second in 2007. Studs Terkel remained politically active throughout his life, speaking about class and racial issues in his books (notably his 1992 book Race) and interviewing figures who were politically outspoken such as Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan, and Big Bill Broonzy. He remained in the city he loved until his death in 2008.
Barbara Farmilant, in a May 4, 2018 Chicago Community Trust excerpt of author Alan Lake’s series of Chicago-area home cook profiles, said, “Studs Terkel was our neighbor. He’d be out there in his red socks, smoking a cigar… He’d take the bus everywhere, talk to everyone on the street. He loved to hear stories but was nearly deaf. You could hear the Cubs games blasting on his TV all down the street. Once he got locked out of his house so Ed [my husband] climbed through his second-floor window to let him back in. They came over for dinner once and I made chicken, cornbread stuffing and some sweet potato pone. A real Southern meal. Studs really liked the pone and asked about its story.”
According to TimeOut, the Kuskes, former residents of Castle Terrace, reported in 2011 that Terkel regularly attended their block parties in the neighborhood. He famously did not drive, and was a big fan of utilizing Chicago’s public transit system, usually the bus. His first neighborhood in Chicago as a child was near Ashland Avenue and Flournoy Street, which is where the UIC campus is now. His family’s Wells-Grand Hotel was a close walk from Washington Square, colloquially known as Bughouse Square. He regularly visited the Newberry Library nearby to read books and listen to speakers, which shaped his work as a writer and oral historian. He agreed to have his ashes spread around Bughouse Square after his death.
In his memoir Studs Terkel’s Chicago, he said of Chicago that “Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.”
He also said, “It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.”
