Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [15]
“Cost a nickel apiece. Sell it for a buck ninety-nine. Not bad,” one of them replies.
The retired plumbing supplier shrugs. “Cost me twenty cents,” he says.
The former deputy police superintendent gets the pacifier to light up. “Cute,” he says. “But how do you turn this thing off?”
“Got to squeeze it.”
I’m sitting a few tables away with Manny’s owner, Kenny Raskin, who looks over at the bearer of the pacifiers. “He’s been banned from here twice,” Raskin tells me. “He swears a lot and starts arguments with customers. But his brother convinced me to let him back in.” Raskin shrugs. “Eh, I don’t like to have enemies.”
Indeed, over the years Manny’s has become neutral turf. During one stretch in the late 1980s, Raskin recalls, there’d be a group of First Ward politicos seated at one table, many of whom were under investigation for organized crime, and then a group of plainclothed detectives from the organized crime unit sitting a few tables away. “They’d talk to each other,” says Raskin. “They were friendly.” Manny’s is a political hangout, for politicians of all denominations, which in this fully Democratic city represents, some might say, the paragon of tolerance. On a recent election day, U.S. Senate candidate Dick Durbin brought his family here after he’d voted. Mayor Daley comes in occasionally (matzoh ball soup and corned beef sandwich), though he usually sends an aide to pick up his lunch. Harold Washington, when he was mayor, preferred the baked short ribs, and often he’d come in toward closing when the restaurant was empty to meet with constituents and advisers. The present governor, Rod Blagojevich, who lunches here regularly, signed his minimum-wage bill at Manny’s. And the former governor, George Ryan, a Republican, came here for lunch when he was wrestling over whether to commute the sentences of death-row inmates. While he was chewing on his corned beef sandwich, his cell phone rang. It was Nelson Mandela, urging him to clear death row, which Ryan did the next day.
Manny’s is in a neighborhood that used to be predominately Jewish, but that is now more commercial than residential. It’s a quick cab ride from downtown, in a neighborhood of small clothing and shoe stores, just a few blocks away from the city’s once bustling Maxwell Street Sunday market. It’s been around since 1945, when Raskin’s grandfather, Jack, opened Sonny’s, which he soon changed to Manny’s, after his son. When Jack died in 1993, his funeral procession received a large police escort because the then-chief-of-police (chicken noodle soup and grilled American cheese sandwich) was a regular customer. Raskin, who sports a goatee and mustache, has put on a bit of a paunch over the years, which he explains is due to his habit of “nibbling” in the kitchen. “You grab a potato pancake,” he tells me, “or the corned beef, or take a piece of French bread and hollow it out and stuff it with a couple of meatballs.” His favorite meals, he tells me, are the beef stew and oxtail stew, both original recipes from more than half a century ago.
A group of middle-aged women makes their way down the cafeteria line, ordering their breakfasts. Raskin gently waves. City inspectors, he tells me, gathering for their inspection of the newly rebuilt Soldier Field, the stadium where the Chicago Bears play. “I hate it,” he says, “ ’cause I feel like I’m under constant scrutiny.” And, indeed, a few weeks later one of them had him adjust one of the sneeze guards on the service line.
A pacifier flies through the air, from the retired plumbing supplier to another friend. “What d’ya think?” the pacifier salesman hollers. Heads turn. Raskin smiles. “Once every couple of weeks,” he tells me, “I have to tell him to shut up.”
The first place Brenda and Millie ever took me to was Edna’s Restaurant, where the minister tried to pick them up. It’s in a tough part of town. But as I would learn, Edna Stewart, the restaurant’s owner, is a tough woman. Edna is sixty-six, and her curled hair has turned gray. She sports large rectangular-shaped eyeglass