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.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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?), […]
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 […]
One day years ago, as I rode my bike through the old Chicago neighborhood known as Wicker Park, I glimpsed at what looked like Hebrew lettering on a brick building with a blue cross. I stopped to investigate and discovered the building formerly housed Temple Beth-El.
It’s fascinating finding old landmarks on the Google map of Chicago. When you see, for example, Herzl Junior College, well, that’s a whole chapter of Chicago history.
Today, there’s Meetup.com, a website that captures the independent-minded spirit and organized chaos of a university without walls program.
