Club Boogie Woogie

Here we have another photo of a different club from the book Neighborhoods Within Neighborhoods. This time it is Club Silhouette that is being spotlighted by this picture of Boyd Kelly and his band circa 1940. Much like Club Detour, Club Silhouette was indeed another club in Rogers Park in which those lost patrons of the 1930s and 1940s could get down and boogie woogie with the likes of Maurice Rocco ("the indestructible boogie woogie man"), Kay Dare, Sarah Vaughn, Lurlean Hunter and many more. Names largely forgotten by the masses but remembered by those with style, grace and a damn good memory or knowledge of the musical culture of the World War Two age.

Unlike Club Detour, Club Silhouette did not suffer from botched robbery attempts or barroom brawls, at least none that I can find that has been documented. Located just doors down at 1555 Howard Street, Club Silohouette did suffer a fatal fire in 1938 that badly burned an employee and slightly injured the owner of the club and attached liquor store. However, it seems that the club was able to overcome this tragedy and move on throughout the 1940s.

If you are interested in reading more about the golden ages of Rogers park and Howard Street which was a gateway for the North Shore, a few articles on the net are well worth noting including Vanessa Nichols' Howard Street Comes Alive, The Broken Heart of Rogers Park and Sandy Goldman's wonderful Howard Street-A Helluva Street. On that last note, all of Sandy Goldman's articles are a must read for a first perspective of Rogers Park at that time. This is the kind of stuff I live for.

"That's life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you"

Due to an electrical shortage in my work-hood yesterday, an update of the blog was not possible. Never fear, I am back in action here to bore you again today with Club Detour, once located at 1511 Howard St. in the Rogers Park neighborhood. The photo is from one of my favorites books on the area Neighborhoods Within Neighborhoods.

As mentioned before Howard Street was bustling once upon a time with a myriad of shopping choices and many night on the town clubs featuring all sorts of musicians from swing to jazz. Club Detour was one of the multiple spots to be seen and heard during that era where everybody who was anyone or anything just wanted a gay old time. Although, they probably would refrain from phrasing it that way today.

I have no idea what Club Detour was named after but it is not a coincidence that the post World War Two era saw a boom in film noir movies that were dark, twisted and scrumptiously entertaining. One of these films was in fact called Detour. Detour is a low budget gem of a film noir starring Tom Neal and the late great Ann Savage (who just recently passed away on Christmas Day) in which Neal's character hops a ride with a guy who mysteriously ends up dead. Logic of all unlogic, instead of going to the cops and saying "Hey, look, this guy just died. I don't know what happened," he steals his identity and picks up what has to be one of the most psychotic female characters ever in a 1940s film who knows the truth and ends up blackmailing and sucking him into a world that could only be a dream. Sound like fun? It is if you suspend disbelief of all reality that requires you to make sense of the storyline.

If I was a betting woman I would bet that Club Detour probably was not nearly as fun as the film. Although, according to the Chicago Tribune in 1944 twenty-one cases of whiskey were stolen and in 1946 a bartender was shot during a botched robbery attempt. I don't know if these troubles is what closed down the club because by the late 1960s it was a Federal Shoes. There is a long travel distance between whiskey and shoes. Hmm, I think I am going to hitchhike.

A Case of Scotch

Nightclubs in Chicago in the 1930s, 40s and 50s must have been a real treat. It wasn't always about rump shaking music and drunken stewardship but good dance, good big band era music and good old fashion fun. I have no idea who these people are or where they were or even whether they were from Chicago or not. I bought this photograph a while ago at Edgewater Antiques and have just now gotten around to posting it.

Nightclub scenes in movies such as The Thin Man series and the Fred and Ginger titles have always enthralled me. The huge orchestras playing all sorts of music, some of my favorite being those with Spanish beats, the lovely art deco-ish rooms, the fancy suits and feathery dresses alike and the characters with wise crack dialogue are fundamentally intriguing to me. Chicago was no stranger to the nightclub scene. There were many hotels such as the Hotel Chicagoan and the Blackstone that offered glorious rooms with French furniture and Tiki themes and many opportunities to get down and party. There were also many smaller, less luxurious but equally as nice clubs where neighborhood people were once the sole support of these institutions. Ballrooms like the Aragon also hosted wonderful parties. Alas, those days are mostly gone and all we have left are the photos.

Can you imagine these four must have had a wonderful time that night because they look happy and they are well dressed. It is an innocence you rarely see anymore. Perhaps innocence is not the right word. After all, my favorite scenes in The Thin Man involve all the jokes surrounding Nick and Nora Charles' drinking; like the scene where they return home to find a party going on at their house with everyone smashed or nearly so, "Oh, Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people."

No one could beat drinking like Mrs. Charles. In the beginning of the film there is a scene where she meets up with Mr. Charles in a nightclub and says "How many drinks have you had?"

Her husband replies "This will make six martinis."

You would think as a lady of the 1930s Mrs. Charles' response would be of shock and even level headed-ness. Instead she says to the waiter "All right. Will you bring me five more martinis, Leo? Line them up right here." That, my friends, is Nora Charles, my hero. Perhaps the folks in this photo are a lot like the Charles clan.

The Ghost Ad Mysteries Solved

Kind readers were able to decipher the faded words in the ghost ads from a few weeks ago. The first one was identified by BWChicago as Edna's and it is still is business as Channel 7's trusty hungry hound recently mentioned Edna's in last week's soul food segment.

Also readers Brian and Noah were able to make out the word Keysters for a bar on Pulaski that is now called Paddy Mac's which is reviewed and remembered as Keysters on Yelp.

Thanks to all who have much better eyes than little old me.

Palace of the Past

A very good article popped up in yesterday's Chicago Tribune (with the new lazy format, who knew that was possible!) about North Lawndale and future plans to save the Castle Car Wash, which I photographed last autumn. Who knew that a little gas station would become the next little engine that could in terms of saving commercial architecture.

Palace of the past-- mecca of the future? - Officials see tiny castle, Route 66 lore as a way to revive North Lawndale
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Author: Antonio Olivo, TRIBUNE REPORTER

As castles go, the building isn't much, with its crumbling turret and boarded windows on a forgotten stretch of Ogden Avenue in North Lawndale.

But neighborhood leaders see the former gas station and carwash as a palace from a past when their struggling West Side community thrummed with music and industry along the famed Route 66 connecting Chicago to California.

A year after the castle-shaped structure was built in 1925, Ogden Avenue became part of the nation's first interstate highway, befitting a neighborhood that was home to Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s headquarters, a blossoming jazz scene and the heart of Jewish Chicago.

Today the musty brick building stands as the sole reminder in the city of Route 66. Like hundreds of other historical gems in Lawndale, it serves as a backdrop to the violence and despair that have dominated the neighborhood since rioters set fire to it after Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination.

Now community leaders see the tiny castle and Route 66 lore as a way to get residents and outsiders to think about Lawndale as more than another place beset by crime and poverty.

"This is an amazing asset," said Charles Leeks, a local director for the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services, a citywide group that is considering joining with others to buy the Castle Car Wash property and convert it to a tourist center or something similar. Efforts are under way to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places, which would protect it from demolition.

"We've got a narrative here that we can continue to build upon," Leeks said, citing the 2,000 greystone buildings in Lawndale that are at the center of a citywide restoration project. "We've got to change how people perceive this neighborhood."

Consider some characters in that narrative.

Amid the century-old greystones and scores of Jewish synagogue buildings still standing, a young Benny Goodman launched his career with rooftop garden gigs at the Jewish People's Institute, now the Lawndale Community Academy on Douglas Boulevard.

Later, Golda Meir lived in the neighborhood, attending Zionist meetings that led to her role as prime minister of Israel.

And King lived on Hamlin Avenue in the mid-1960s, overseeing a new urban civil rights movement in Chicago. Near where his run-down apartment once stood, clubs wailed with a tinny new "West Side sound" of blues generated by the likes of Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy.

"Those were some times," said veteran blues guitarist Jimmy Dawkins, 72, a pioneer of the West Side sound. "Roosevelt Road was full of life."

Meanwhile, the castle building quietly operated as a Route 66 filling station until it closed in the mid-1970s.

Its quirky architecture was probably a gimmick to compete against other gas stations on a thoroughfare lit up by car dealerships and scores of other auto-related businesses, said historian Dave Clark, who is part of the building's preservation efforts.

"It seemed to work; he was in business for over 45 years," Clark said.

After the riots, the gas station shut down, joining Sears and other large employers in a mass exodus worsened by the closing of Route 66 in the early 1970s.

For a few years, the building was a carwash. Then it, too, went under.

Now owned by a Bridgeport tow-truck operator, the castle sits idle amid a patchwork of vacant buildings and new development, in a neighborhood where luxury town homes are built across from crumbling apartments and foreclosed houses.

As with any respectable castle, this one is still in proximity to local royalty.

For instance, a few Ogden Avenue clinics pay homage to Belle Whaley, known as "the first lady of Lawndale" for the decades she spent feeding the neighborhood's poor and elderly before she died in 1990.

Dawkins lives a few blocks away. He's happy to share stories about such characters as Big Bill Hill or Left-Hand Frank who helped make Lawndale a blues mecca.

"That's all gone now," he said recently, staring out a McDonald's window at subsidized apartments that stand where a 12th Street blues hall once packed in large crowds.

Like many in Lawndale, Dawkins said he grew tired of the constant crime and left after nearly 50 years. But he said something about the neighborhood's character lured him back.

"I couldn't stand it," Dawkins said. "I missed this scene so much."

The same happened to Sherita Harris, who has managed to find her own form of the castle even while the ailing economy has forced others to lose theirs to foreclosure.

As a girl, Harris fell in love with the single-family greystone across 15th Place from her family's home.

Eventually, she left, married and began shopping for her first house. She remembered the greystone and -- $216,000 later -- now lives in the rehabbed house with her second husband, Shayon, and daughter Katlin, 9.

A vacant lot is what's left of her childhood home, which deteriorated and was demolished.

Harris, a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier in Lincoln Park, says she often smiles to herself when friends express wariness about visiting her in Lawndale.

"They say, 'Oh, you live over there?'" Harris said. "When they come over, they ask, 'Do they have any more of these buildings?'"

A Bachelor's Candy and Roses

While our new president is being inaugurated, we are enjoying yet another much not needed dusting of snow. I think these pictures taken from the book Chicago's South Shore are more than appropriate since they showcase the friendly white flakes that I hate so much and wish they would go away into a vortex of hell never to be seen again. In case you didn't understand that, let me spell it out, I hate snow. We have already had more than enough this year. Last year I bad-mouthed snow and karma came and kicked my ass. Oh, well, I still hate the stuff. Kids love to play and think it is the most loveliest substance in the world. Adults dread the impact it has on their cars and getting around because us adult almost never get any snow days. Well, unless you are a teacher of course.

In these great photos we have some of the businesses located around 79th and Colfax: Patricia Dress Shop, Cunis' Candy Shop and Rosenblum's Drug Store located at 2552 E. 79th Street. Rosenblum's was run by Roger Lewis Rosenblum who happened to be a pharmacist by day and a song writer by night! Yep, he was getting down and getting boogie during the 40s by writing popular songs titled "One Dozen Roses." A 1942 Chicago Tribune article describes Rosenblum as "...A kindly, bespectacled bachelor 49 years old" He drew inspiration for his songs "While working around the store, selling cokes to the high school kids and milk of magnesia to the older patrons." His other hits include "When I Was A Dreamer and You Were A Dream" and "You Can Take Me Away from Dixie, but You Can't Take Dixie Away From Me." Phew!Sounds like titles scattered on some odd oldies CD with weird advertisements on late night TV a la Amazon Women On the Moon.

The drug store business was also an all in the family affair for Mr. Rosenblum. He also had a brother named J. Leslie Rosenblum who was a druggist with his own pharmacy at 7060 Merrill Avenue. His other brother Philip was a doctor at Michael Reese Hospital. So far no hints that either Leslie or Philip followed in their brother's song writing footsteps.

The Trib asked Mr Rosenblum why he was still at bachelor at nearly fifty. His response? "Well, there was a girl once-but that's a shadow of the past. Let's not dig up any old memories; let it suffice to say I am not carrying a torch. I like all the ladies nowadays."

Delia Frocks

Delia Frocks was an upscale dress shop located at 1640 W Howard street in Rogers Park. This lovely photo of the lavender ladies of Delia's come from the interestingly stellar book Neighborhoods Within Neighborhoods. We have blushed and gushed about Howard Street before which featured many nightclubs, many theaters and many dress shops like this once upon a time.

Does anyone refer to dresses as frocks anymore? It is very rare to find a dress shop as elegant and personal as Delia appears to be. It just looks so much like a fancy stage at a banquet. perhaps that was the intention. This photo was taken in 1940. Unfortunately, by 1955 Delia frocks became known as Mort Gibian Bootery. Boots are certainly fashionable but no where near as exciting to me as dresses.

A Greener Jewel

I saw this contemporary ad in last Sunday's Tribune Magazine and noticed the vintage Jewel buildings blended in with the new and modern green format to show a great historical perspective of the Jewel Tea Company's long and fruitful history in Chicago. We have seen these photos before most notably on Pleasant Family Shopping's excellent written archives and profiles of the Jewel company. It's nice to see a company embrace their own historical significance and heritage instead of black-sheeping away all the old photos in a dusty basement archives.

My mom and dad were always big Dominick's fans but for a time back in the early 1990s they shopped at Jewel on a regular basis. Sometimes it was the one located on the corner of Lincoln and Foster which became an Osco and much later on a CVS. Other times it was the one in the Howard and Western shopping center that closed in the late 1990s because a modern new Jewel-Osco down the street was kicking major butt on the little Jewel-Osco in a shopping center that once had Woolworth's and now has Unqiue's Thrift Store and a Dollar Tree. Occasionally it was the one at Lawrence and Central (pictured above) built in the late 60s and always much more different than the other Jewels even though today as an adult I still can't pinpoint exactly why.

I always thought of these smaller Jewels as severely small and outdated. This was usually why i loved going to Dominick's because the locations we went to were always much bigger. Little did I know that as a grown-up I would come to appreciate that outdatedness.

Long Live Mr Hagen

Amidst all the bungalows, 50s homes and mid century modern colored blocks in Portage Park, we have Hagen's fish at 5635 W Montrose. Hagen's Fish has been an institution in this community selling fish since 1946. It just so happens that I had a picture of this sign I took last summer and one of the founders Bennett Hagen passed away this week. The wonder obituary that appears in the Tribune is posted below.

Sadly as fresh as hagen's fish may be, I doubt I will ever get my father to actually like the critter. He won't even set foot inside a Red Lobster.


BENNETT HAGEN: 1918-2009 - Ran Hagen's Fish Market - Wisconsin native turned Chicago store into family business that's still thriving
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Author: Trevor Jensen, TRIBUNE REPORTER
Bennett Hagen, the son of a Great Lakes fisherman, came to Chicago as a young man intending to learn a different trade.

But before long he turned back to what he knew best, and in 1946 he and his brother Don opened Hagen's Fish Market in the Portage Park neighborhood. The shop is now in third-generation ownership and stands as a throwback to a simpler time, a small neighborhood store where for more than 60 years fish has been cooked in a smoker Mr. Hagen built, and fried in a batter he concocted.

Mr. Hagen, 90, died Friday, Jan. 9, after suffering a heart attack at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said his grandson-in-law Scott Johnson, who now runs the store with his wife plus another of Mr. Hagen's granddaughters and her husband.

Mr. Hagen grew up on Washington Island, Wis., at the northern tip of Door County, working on his father's boat, which fished for chub, lake trout and whitefish.

He left the island for Chicago in the 1940s with plans to try something new. He quickly took to city life and helped start Atonement Lutheran Church in the Galewood neighborhood. To earn money, he worked on the crew of fishing boats that still operated out of Chicago.

His brother Don was a bookkeeper for a local fishmonger and saw that the retail fish business made money. With financial help from their father, the brothers and their wives opened Hagen's at 5635 W. Montrose Ave. in 1946.

The store's specialty from the beginning was fish cooked in a smoker. At first it was outside, but later it was made part of the store so Mr. Hagen didn't have to go out in the cold.

Anglers can bring in their catch to be smoked, and fish and shrimp are fried up to order for customers to take home in paper bags.

Bob Anderson took a part-time job at Hagen's while a high school student in the late 1960s. On his first day, Mr. Hagen stood him in front of three, 100-pound crates of chub, with directions to scrape out the insides of the fish so they could be smoked.

"I'm thinking, 'How quickly can I get out of here?'" Anderson said.

But Mr. Hagen was a patient teacher and, needless to say, a whiz at cleaning fish.

"He had an incredible knack of showing you how to do it the right way," said Anderson, who stayed at Hagen's for 11 years and is now in the seafood brokerage business.

Mr. Hagen was also a persuasive salesman. If customers came in unhappy with something they had purchased at Hagen's, he'd inevitably direct them to another product he thought they might like, and they'd leave happy, Anderson said.

"Bennett would never give money back," he said, chuckling.

Don Hagen died in the 1960s, and Mr. Hagen retired in 1982. By then, the shop was in the hands of his children, who later passed it on to his grandchildren.

Retirement allowed him to spend more time on Washington Island, where he kept a home on family land and relished long summer days on the surrounding waters, fishing.

Mr. Hagen is survived by his wife of 67 years, Phyllis; a son, Allen; a daughter, Charlene Breede; two other brothers, Raymond and Loren; five grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

MK Cleaners

A few years ago, I had to bail a relative out of Cook County Jail on 26th and California. While not my idea of a fun day, I had no idea how frustrating the whole action would be. Apparently, bailing someone out of jail is not as easy as it looks on Law and Order. Anyway, driving back from the south side, I saw this great sign on Kedzie and Madison. MK Cleaners has definitely not been seen in years. the store where this sign is located is now something else entirely, not even a cleaners. I finally got a chance to go back and take a photo of this a few months ago. Last year I featured some great cleaners signs and their mid century modern buildings. While not exactly mid century modern, the MK sign is in a very attractive older structure, the same one that holds this ghost ad from a few days ago.

Alas, MK no longer lives. It was ousted by all the cleaners that promised service in an hour instead of three. But the sign is still in our dear hearts.

When the Hungries Hit...

...Hit the Red Barn!

In 2008 I talked about the little known chain of local suburban burger joint/ice cream parlor Prince Castle/Cock Robin which drew numerous comments with our wonderful dear readers who shared many fantastic memories. This year I hope to re-create the same effect with this once nationally known chain, one that is long gone but never forgotten: Red Barn.

When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, in between sharing fries at Wendy's (we went to the one at 55th and St. Clair next to a Shell gas station both of whom are still there) and good old fashioned banana splits at Dairy Queen (the delightful walk up one in Euclid), my dad would sometimes go to Red Barn which was down the street from said Wendy's. On a visit to Cleveland in 2005, I had mostly forgotten about Red Barn because as a small child the only thing I could remember were the red and white candy striped uniforms of the workers and the salad bar. My dad's face beamed when he saw the old Red Barn still standing, the rustic farm creature painted a ghastly, generic shade of royal blue and serving your local Chinese food cooked by non-Chinese people I'm sure. Out of all the McDonalds, Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, etc floating on every corner back then as well as now, the only fast food chain my father remembers fondly and still asks about today is Red Barn. On the trip four years ago he wondered what had happened to it (not knowing it also had locations outside Ohio where it all began) and I set out on a quest to find out.

Started in the 1960s by a man named Harry Barmier, the chain grew in the 70s by their catchy little jingle and cute little mascots-Hamburger Hungry, Chicken Hungry and Fish Hungry-that attracted the kiddies (Oddly enough I don't recall them much even though I was one myself!). Owned by a company called Servomation and then Motel 6, the chain faced neglect by the 1980s and franchises slowly started to close one by one, the last one gone by 1986. Despite attempts made at rejuvenation in the late 1980s, the chain was far from where it had once stood at four hundred locations in twenty states.

Red Barn was quite innovative for its time serving burgers, chicken and fish at a time when most chain fast food places did not diversify past what they were known for (read: Arby's = roast beef, KFC = chicken, McDonald's = burgers, Long John Silvers = fish, etc). They added salad bars and tried to attract the health conscious among us.

There are many wonderful memories shared on Barnbuster's website (which includes an awesome collection of photos and memorabilia) as well as various retail groups and message boards. Red Barn was a place where families met to eat good, quick and affordable dinners. Where teens had a blast on their first jobs. Where groups met to hang out and have fun because it was the place to be if you wanted to be seen. Where kids hurried over on their bikes because they could taste the fries already. Where dads took their daughters to bond and still talk about twenty-five years later.

I took these photos of the former Red Barn located at 5415 N Harlem a couple of months ago while stuck in traffic in the area. Last week I also got a chance to see (but not photograph) a former one at 9030 S Ashland looking sad, deserted and lonely on an otherwise busy street. I believe that the one located at 5219 N Lincoln is long gone as that stretch of Lincoln bears no buildings that resemble barns. Although some of the new trendy condos could be barnyard animal offspring. The 1967 Tribune ad gives only six locations but I seem to recall reading somewhere a while ago that there was also one on Lawrence and Austin that was torn down years ago. If anyone has more info on the Chicagoland or other outer Illinois locations feel free to comment or email me and for all those no matter what part of the country you come, from who definitely remember the Red Barn, your memories are always welcome.

Key Something

Here is another interesting ghost ad found on Pulaski, north of Addison. I can't tell whether it is an ad for a restaurant or a product or service. The only words I can make out is key. Last I checked you can't eat keys.

Restaurant Ghost Ad

Ghost signs are always a sign of the past. Sometimes they are well preserved and other times you can hardly see as is the case with this one located on Madison and Kedzie. Some are fancy-schmancy advertisements while others not so much. Here is an ad for a restaurant/diner that I am sure is long gone. If anyone can make out the name of it, that would be perfect for my old eyes.

The Pedemode Shop

Pedemode Shoes for Women was started by Julius Grossman in New York and what a lovely pair of shoes one could find there as enticed by this wonderfully illustrated ad from the 1926 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Pedemode Shoes's Chicago location extended to 76 E. Madison. Once upon a time, that side of Madison offered shops with windows decorated with tasteful women's dresses and well coordinated men's suits.

Pedemode fell out of favor after the roaring twenties and eventually 76 E Madison became other shoe pallaces. there was Alfred J. Ruby Inc in the 1930s. Then Alfred moved away and Archlock Shoes moved in during the 1940s. By 1950 Archlock moved to another location on Michigan Avenue and 76 E Madison became home to the first Brooks Brothers location that same year.

Buy Skinner's Satins

William Skinner and Sons is not exactly a Chicago institution but it lists our fine city along with New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Massachusetts in this 1926 Vanity Fair ad. Ah, with all those cities, what a tangled web of satin Skinner's weaves. I am not sure if the mention of Chicago means there was a plant here or that it just sold it's products in Chicago. One thing can be said though, I'd love to get my hands on some of their past products!

A New Year of Past and Present!

Happy New Year to all!

Bright Lights Dim Beauty of Chicago is ready to embark on another year of old and new photos, wacky vintage ads and interesting tales of uninteresting people. Just kidding. They are always interesting people.

Let's start with aerial photos of, what else, Chicago! These pictures come courtesy of the book Chicago Then and Now which I received as a birthday gift about a month late. The first view is a 1936 look at the Civic Opera Building and Merchandise Mart and other art deco masterpieces of the 1930s. The present view shows of course Chicago's most famous landmark, the Sears Tower which was added in 1974.

I'd also like to take the time to thank all the people who have commented on or visited and went through all the trouble of reading this site in the last year. It is your thoughts, memories and helpfulness that keep me going. I also would like to thank those who have sent or emailed me material as well as corrections and clarifications. There is an amazing group of people out there and I can't wait to hear from more in the new year.