In a previous post I recalled Chicago Daily News (and Sun-Times) columnist Sydney J. Harris and my fondness his weekly columns titled “Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things.” I’d like to close out 2011 with a post in a similar vein, without elaborating on the fact that now we all learn things “While […]
It took a while, but self-described vinyl junkie and Roosevelt High School alum Mike Wolstein tracked down which Chicago public school was memorialized in rock and roll history.
For more than 40 years I’ve been passing this building. How did I not see, not admire, those sharp, clean lines and angles jutting outwards from the corner of Kimball and Ainslie?
From Montrose to Peterson, Kedzie to Pulaski and far beyond, generations of Chicago kids knew Ned Singer’s Sports.
Guest blogger Charlene (Powitz) Gelber recalls Central Park Avenue in Hollywood Park. It was really like the country, because we had the TB sanitarium on one side and the Boys Parental School across the street. There were no houses across from us and it was beautiful.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know milestones of this magnitude are few and far between in the history of Hollywood Park.
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.
It’s not New York, it’s not a diner, it’s not an image of urban loneliness, but Allan Zirlin’s photograph of Segal’s Shoes at the corner Lawrence and Sawyer reminds me of Edward Hopper’s painting, Nighthawks. Zirlin shot this photograph out a car window sometime in the 1950s.
Social athletic clubs like the Regular Fellas had all but disappeared by the time I started my freshman year at Von Steuben High School in the fall of 1970. Many of us, especially if you were the oldest child in the family like I was, had no idea these clubs had once made up a […]
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 […]
