Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [93]
Crilly Court and other picturesque streets in Old Town, and the atmosphere of Bohemianism to be found in its coffeehouses, art fairs, and folk-song gatherings, compel many people to call it the Greenwich Village of the Midwest.
To appreciate the charm of Old Town, stroll in the vicinity of its social center, which is North Avenue and Wells Street. You will find poetry-reading and folk-singing at such colorful spots as Oxford’s Dram Shop and Coffee House. Or you can look in on art classes at the Old Town Art Center. The Old Town Art Fair, held here each year, is one of the Midwest’s leading outdoor art exhibits. More than forty thousand persons attend annually. At the same time various Old Town residents’ homes and gardens are open to the public.
For a contrasting view of Chicago’s past, seek out a few of the places associated with its earlier immaturity and shame: 2131-33 South Dearborn, for example, where the most sophisticated bordello in America, the Everleigh Club, once stood; the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue, under whose marquee notorious John Dillinger was fatally shot in an FBI trap in 1934; and North State Street at Superior, where the chipped stone in one wall of Holy Name Cathedral is a reminder of the Prohibition era gang war that broke out when florist-hoodlum Dion O’Banion was gunned down among the lilies in his North Side flower store.
O’Banion, as students of Chicago crime will remember, not only had a thriving floral shop, but also a lucrative North Side trade in homemade alcohol at five dollars a gallon. One day in 1924, as he was arranging bouquets and wreaths for the funeral of Mike Merle, deceased leader of the Sicilian Union, three men strolled into the shop. They greeted O’Banion as if he were an old friend. As O’Banion extended his hand, he was shot three times. His funeral, featuring a ten-thousand-dollar silver-trimmed coffin and flowers by the truckload, was probably the gaudiest in Chicago history. The procession to the cemetery, in which thousands took part, included several brass bands. It was the social event of the year.
But Scenic and Historical Chicago are far from being the city’s only absorbing aspects. There is also a part of our civic personality which many outsiders do not realize exists, yet it reaches deep into the heart of the city – Cultural Chicago.
Of its many embodiments, the Art Institute is among the most famous. One of the great art institutions, it is noted for many priceless collections, especially its French, Spanish, early Dutch, and American paintings. Included are twenty-nine Monets, eight Gauguins, and one of the most celebrated single canvases in existence, El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin. But the Institute is more than an outstanding repository for art treasures. It also houses two specialized libraries, the novel Thorne Miniature Rooms, the largest private professional art school in the nation – its enrollment is over 5,000 – and a widely respected drama school whose Goodman Theater numbers among its alumni José Quintero, Geraldine Page, Karl Maiden, and other well-known theatrical personalities.
Then there is the Chicago Natural History Museum, one of the four most prominent in its field, with its prehistoric dinosaurs, Races of Mankind display, a five-thousand-year-old chariot which is the oldest wheeled vehicle in existence, and other rare items depicting the story of civilization. The stuffed figure of Bushman, the Lincoln Park Zoo’s famous gorilla, is also exhibited here.
There are the Shedd Aquarium, with ten thousand fish and reptile specimens; the Adler Planetarium, first of America’s “Theaters of the Sky”; and the most entertaining of all American museums, the Museum of Science and Industry, founded by Julius Rosenwald. A full-scale, “working” Illinois coal mine, the captured Nazi submarine U-505, historic airplanes, a Santa Fe steam locomotive, the fabulous Colleen Moore dollhouse – these and hundreds of unique “do-it-yourself” exhibits attract 2,500,000 persons annually