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By Root 217 0

Avenue, which is seven miles southwest of the Loop, the city’s hub—a rather long distance, given the import of what occurs here. It is, as one lawyer told me, “an island unto itself.” Many people assume that the building was intentionally placed far from the center of things to keep the riffraff away from downtown, but in reality, it’s the result, ironically enough, of questionable dealings. This strip of land was once owned by Anton Cermak, a Bohemian immigrant who was elected mayor in 1931, and while Cermak was president of the Cook County Board, he sold the land to the county, presumably for a profit. (Cermak was assassinated in 1933 while standing next to President Franklin Roosevelt at a political rally in Miami, Florida. It’s fairly well accepted that the lone assassin had meant to kill the president, but many Chicagoans believed—and still do—that Al Capone’s successors had ordered Cermak’s murder because he intended to crack down on the mob so that he might assert his own control over their illicit operations.)

When someone new moves to Chicago, one of the first places I steer them to is 26th Street. It may well be the most consequential building in the city. It is certainly the liveliest. A lawyer once told me that he found working there addictive—that although he would periodically try cases in the more rarefied atmosphere of the civil courts, he always found his way back. There have been times I’ve gone to 26th Street for a particular trial and ended up spending the day there, wandering from courtroom to courtroom and eavesdropping on conversations in the hallways, like the one a woman was having with her friend on a cell phone. “He got himself a good lawyer,” she told her friend. “He got himself a Jew lawyer. The man is mad.”

Andrea Lyon is a mad lawyer, which, as the woman on the cell phone intuited about her friend’s attorney, probably explains Lyon’s success as well. In nineteen capital cases, she has saved all of her clients from the electric chair. Lyon is an outsized figure: six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and sturdily built. “What does size matter?” you might reasonably ask. But in such a macho environment, trust me, it does. Lyon began practicing in this building as a public defender, in 1978, and at the time she was one of only a handful of women lawyers here; there were no women judges at all. In those early days, one judge stubbornly referred to Lyon alternately as “sir,” “gentleman,” and “Mr. Lyon.” “At first I thought it was a slip of the tongue,” Lyon recalled. “But it became quite pointed. I’d pretend I had this little tape recorder that I’d turn on in the morning and it would say, ‘This is your problem, it’s not my problem. This is your problem, it’s not my problem.’ ” It calmed her down—and Lyon, by her own admission, occasionally needs calming down. One colleague recalls the time a prosecutor, during a break in the courtroom, called Lyon a vile name: Lyon responded by grabbing him by the collar and nearly lifting him off his feet. (It was this reaction, Lyon believes, that finally earned her the respect of her male colleagues.) When I mentioned Lyon’s name to a judge, he smiled. “She can heat things up,” he said.

Another story that has long made the rounds—and that Lyon confirmed for me—is that many years ago, when Lyon was in law school in Washington, D.C., a man tried to mug her while she was walking home late one night. But when he grabbed her by the arm and reached for her purse, Lyon responded by slugging him and knocking him to the ground, breaking his jaw. “I couldn’t leave him there bleeding,” she said. “So I called an ambulance. I’m such a public defender.”

Lyon, who now works out of DePaul University’s Law School (in the Loop), where she operates a clinic that handles primarily capital murder cases, invited me to join her one morning at 26th Street, where she had to file two rather routine motions in two separate cases. Cases are called at nine-thirty in the morning, so it’s best to get there early to find parking. As you pass through the metal detectors (which have turned