Let me see? Which street? This is kind of a setup for any Chicago kid, especially so for any lover of Nelson Algren, and of his streets on what to me, sout’ west sider that I am, was the unknown and unloved North Side. There will be a Nelson Algren birthday party in a few weeks, and I remember the first of those, long ago, but also long after Algren left Chicago, angry, to move to Paterson, N.J., to research the murder trial of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. The neighborhood ladies, in beehive hairdos, were the sponsors of the party, which was held each year on Division Street, in the Bob Shop, which, once I became worldly enough to go north, was one of my favorites. The proprietor, Kate Smith, introduced us to the music of the genius Ken Vandermark, and so much more neo-bop, and of course, was always open to a party, hence the Algren birthday celebration (Algren lived around the corner on, I believe, Evergreen). So we would file in, and give the Polish ladies (people thought Algren was Polish because of the neighborhood he lived in and the characters in some of his best stories, but he was Swedish, and he had a grandfather who was a self-proclaimed rabbi) our $5, and listen to French gypsy jazz bands and Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson’s sometime lover, impersonators. This year the party will be held in the Steppenwolf Theater, and Matt Damon will be there … this is what Algren wrote about in his little book Chicago: City on the Make. Chicago literature is a literature of nostalgia, streets, and the story of loss and decline. Of course, there is no reason to write more about Division Street, because Studs Terkel has already done it. And Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld and the Tuley High bunch, with Nietzsche or Aristotle in their pockets, told stories on and about Division Street, their do-wop the spontaneous translation of “The Waste Land” into Yiddish. And not much is left, anyway, that is, left in the Chicago sense of as it was in the lost good old days. The Russian Baths are still on Division Street (read about them in Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift), and until they turn into condominiums, you can still go to the banya, though the last time around we were given anejo tequila in a fancy bottle instead of borsht and vodka with our massages. After the soak, the bar Zakopane is still there down the block, and the conversation is still in Polish, so it is not as if Chicago has made it all the way.</p>
<p>Studs, of course, leads me straight back to the South Side and Studs Terkel’s namesake, Studs Lonigan, and his creator, James T. Farrell. He was the one who actually walked my streets, and, more or less at the same time, the streets of my father. Once when I was still a kind of graduate student, working for the College of the University of Chicago, a friend of mine working in the university’s development office was assigned to pick up James Farrell from the airport, what my father and Mayor Daley both always called O’Hara. The real Farrell, who was my dad’s, and my, nearly favorite author. He was back for the dedication of a stained-glass window in Rockefeller Chapel installed in honor of Teddy Linn, the English teacher who inspired Farrell to write the first story about the character who would become Studs Lonigan. My friend arranged for me to meet the author as he walked from the Quadrangle Club to the bookstore to buy a new typewriter ribbon for the novel he was writing his 70th, or so as he traveled. He signed my paperback copy of one of his Danny O’Neill novels, A World I Never Made, and we talked, and I asked him about Algren. He told me how he once saved Algren maybe he even said he saved Algren’s life when he was threatened by some CPA thugs (Farrell was a Trotskyite by then, and Algren was a more orthodox communist who had, apparently, strayed). He said some nice things about Algren’s writing, at its best, and then we talked about the White Sox, which he loved, and I loved, and, as it turned out, Algren loved. I came to know later, and this is such a relief, that Algren himself started on the South Side, around 71st Street, and he moved north to the land of the Cubbies. In one of his stories he tells about moving to the new North Side neighborhood and going out to play ball, and when each kid took the identity of his favorite Cub, Algren was asked who he was, and he could only think of White Sox by then, Black Sox. That is the kind of mistake you don’t make on our streets without paying the price.