Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [21]
There’s much history here. The Pilgrim Baptist Church, formerly a synagogue (in this city of ever-changing neighborhoods, churches adorned with stars of David are a common sight), was designed by Dankmar Adler, whose father was the synagogue’s rabbi, and Louis Sullivan, with a helping hand from a young Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked for Adler and Sullivan’s firm at the time). Some consider it one of the most beautiful Sullivan interiors. The peaked-ceiling structure boasts exquisite ornamentation, organic forms juxtaposed with geometric designs. It’s also here at this church where the blues musician Thomas Dorsey pioneered modern-day black gospel music. (Dorsey authored “Precious Lord,” which has been recorded by a divergent cast, from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash.) A mile south was the old Chess Records’ storefront where the Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil, played a Little Walter recording, “Juke,” and conducted an early version of test marketing, placing a speaker in the corner doorway to see if people at the adjacent bus stop responded. And there’s Meyers Ace Hardware, once the site of the Sunset Café (which later became the Grand Terrace), a hotbed of jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. Earl Hines and Cab Calloway performed here regularly as did Louis Armstrong, who titled one song “Sunset Stop.” Musicians still come by the hardware store often, since, as one once said, “This place is as sacred to jazz musicians as the Wailing Wall is to Jews.” The store’s owner was once offered ten thousand dollars for a mural in one of the back offices, past the screwdrivers and furnace filters; it depicts a trio of musicians and a sultry singer whose head is cut off by wood paneling. Another time, twelve German trumpet players came here; each purchased plungers, and had the store’s owner sign them.
In the 1960s, when white establishments opened their doors to blacks, many of the businesses in Bronzeville suffered, and most eventually went under. The community is undergoing a revival, in large part because of a thriving black middle class committed to staying in the city and rebuilding this historic neighborhood.
Milton Reed has come to the parade in the hope of earning some money by drawing profiles. The previous summer, he told me, he made more than three hundred dollars, charging seven dollars a portrait. A line had formed in the morning, and it never let up. Reed and I reach the corner of King Drive and Muddy Waters Drive (the city has so many honorary streets, many named after obscure personages like Daniel D. “Moose” Brindisi and the Reverend Frenchie Smith, that it’s lost count), and Reed has me purchase two milk crates at a dollar apiece, so he can have a place for him and his subjects to sit while he sketches. “Let me get to work,” he announces, although there doesn’t seem to be much work to be had. No one has approached him. I use one of the crates as a platform so that I can see the parade over the crowd. From a nearby vendor, Reed orders himself a small container of rib tips, then worries it might get his hands too messy, so instead asks for a Polish sausage. I holler for him to get me some of the jerk chicken. The food is plentiful, as are renegade vendors whom the city, on this occasion, traditionally chooses to ignore.
I first met Reed in 1999, while visiting a woman in the Stateway Gardens Public Housing complex, which was then a collection of eight seventeen-story high-rises. He was in the living room of my hostess, where he was painting a gold-trimmed black panther on the cinderblock wall. He had a forty-ounce bottle of Colt 45 beside him, and he was so completely engaged in his work