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By Root 184 0

that Nelson Algren had lived down the block, where he had written A Walk on the Wild Side and carried on his transatlantic affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Two years earlier, friends of Algren (he died in 1981) had convinced the city to change the name of the street to Algren Avenue, but residents complained vigorously, not because of any distaste for Algren but because the change of address would pose too much of an inconvenience: It would mean changing their licenses and insurance policies. It was a measure of Algren’s stature here (or lack of it) that the residents won, and the city returned the street to its original name, Evergreen Avenue. Algren, I suspect, wouldn’t have been terribly surprised by this turn of events. He always felt unloved by the city that served as his muse, and in his later years he moved to New York, where he hoped that he might be embraced and appreciated. (Algren’s not the only well-known writer who has moved through Chicago; the city’s best often leave, or simply pass through: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht.) While in Chicago, Algren had written of the city’s underbelly, of its dispossessed, its prostitutes and junkies, its hustlers and con artists. He lived life hard; he was a drinker and a gambler. His lustful, prickly ballad to the city, Chicago: City on the Make, may be the best thing ever written about this city (along with Carl Sandburg’s collection, Chicago Poems), yet it didn’t find an audience here until Jean-Paul Sartre translated it into French, and it won overseas acclaim. And while he writes in the poem that “You can’t belong to Chicago,” he clearly loved this place. Listen to him on riding the El:

By nights when the yellow salamanders of the El bend all one way and the cold rain runs with the red-lit rain.

By the way the city’s million wires are burdened only by lightest snow; and the old year yet lighter upon them.

When chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and

arc-lamps all are dimmed.

By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and

the sun goes by on the wind.

By nights when the moon is an only child above

the measured thunder of

the cars, you may know Chicago’s heart at last.

There is a monument to Algren. It’s an unremarkable fountain, eighteen feet in diameter, set in a small triangular park where three major thoroughfares meet: Ashland Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, and Division Street. It is an intersection of the new and the old, of the rich and the poor, of the lively and the lifeless, of the artists and the artful. The park is a refuge for drifters and day laborers, the very slice of the city Algren wrote about, and, indeed, engraved at the foot of the fountain is a quote from City on the Make: “For the masses who do the city’s labor also keep the city’s heart.” But the neighborhood is changing, and in the mornings young men in gray suits and young women in white blouses and somber skirts merge here to catch the bus or the El downtown. The Busy Bee, once the anchor here, is gone, replaced by restaurants that require reservations and bars so well lit you could read a newspaper in them. Families have razed old homes and built anew. After all, neighborhoods in Chicago change direction regularly; in another part of town, for instance, you have Mexican-Americans occupying Pilsen, which was originally a community of Czechs and was named after Plzen, the second largest city in Czechoslovakia. But in Wicker Park it’s unclear who the insiders are and who the outsiders are, and so you have Spring, one of the city’s posher, trendier restaurants, at one corner of the neighborhood, and Polska Restauracja Podhalanka, which has been around for twenty years, at another. It’s as if the neighborhood is simultaneously moving both backward and forward in time.

Robert Guinan is an artist whose inspiration, like Algren’s, comes from the street, from the people who are seen but not heard, and for that reason I had wanted to meet him. He suggested that we rendezvous just a block west of Triangle Park at Rite Liquors on Division Street, the bar where