Tag Archives | Chicago

Oh, I love the night life

A parade of stars once swept through the doors of 610 N. Fairbanks Court in Streeterville. Lines formed around the block to see the likes of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Bob Hope performing at the Chez Paree supper club.

Continue Reading

Happy 91st, Lee Balterman

He photographed the world, but Chicago first and best and only on film. On a cool morning back in May, my good friend Jerry Pritikin invited me to meet legendary photographer Lee Balterman. My hour spent in Balterman’s apartment, crammed with five-foot-tall wood file cabinets containing his life’s work, gave me a front row seat […]

Continue Reading

What we remember

As regular readers of this blog know, I grew up in Chicago on North Central Park Avenue across from the grounds of the Municipal TB Sanitarium. Entirely hidden by a border of towering trees and overgrown shrubs, the TB Sanitarium was such a mysterious place I barely noticed the other large, fenced-in parcel of land in the neighborhood. The signs on […]

Continue Reading
Cardenal

Baseball’s Been Bery Bery Good to Me

I am dreading Opening Day. I haven’t lost my eternal optimism but this will be the first baseball season my father won’t be calling me to ask,  “What time are the Cubs playing?” or “Are the Sox playing tonight?” or “What station for the Cubs game?” or  “Did you see last night’s game?” Before cable, […]

Continue Reading

Forbidden Places–Epilogue

As mentioned earlier, I uncovered the history of Chicago’s Municipal TB Sanitarium but learned little about the purpose it served. Guest blogger Dr. Gilberto Gonzalez, a retired general surgeon, offered to fill in the blanks for me. Dr. Gonzalez trained at Mercy Hospital in Chicago for three years, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium for one year (1961-62) and […]

Continue Reading
marquee

Convergence

Two blogs I follow have posts up on old Chicago movie theaters. They’re worth checking out. Inside Stories from a Hollywood Outlier Blueprint In addition to the theaters mentioned in these blogs, I also remember, not for their architectural significance, but for the movies they screened, the Davis, Edens, Old Orchard, Lincoln Village, 400 (was that the name–on Sheridan?), […]

Continue Reading
100_1713

Forbidden Places–Part Two

The Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium on Chicago’s far north side once was a place that frightened neighborhood children and once was a place of misery, as a physician wrote in a comment to my earlier post. Today, it’s a very accessible, much-treasured public resource serving many people and many purposes. Most of the original buildings were demolished, but […]

Continue Reading

Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes