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Seventeen thousand four hundred and twenty-four steps from my door. It's not so far, count it off sometime and you'll see.

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4229 Kenmore

When I moved to Chicago in the fall of 2009, my Grandmother was very excited. She's always excited when I move, and so I didn't really put it together at first.


My grandparents are from the rural midwest, a place called New Riegel, and, more distantly, from another relatively small spot on the earth, Luxembourg.

They had the same last name before they met, and then they had my mother, and then she me; and so, I now have the privilege of enjoying simple and wonderful things: I love both of their first names. Alma and Marion.

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Prodigal

The year following the Korean Armistice Agreement, my grandfather was to be a senior in high school. A notion of patriotism swelling in his breast, he and a gang of chums agreed to all go off to the Marines together.

It has always seemed to me that the way my grandfather went about learning how things work and how to do them was simply to dive in and do them. This is what he did as a young man as well. His mind made up about the service, my grandfather went behind his father's back and enlisted, lying about his age. When my great-grandfather got wind of this there was a serious row at the house, and as his father headed in to town to tell the recruiters that his son was a liar and underage and wasn't ever going to be in no goddamn slaughterhouse of an army (only fight for you and yours, not politicians and abstract concepts), Marion boarded the first bus headed out and went to boot camp without a common fare-thee-well or goodbye.



Apparently, once you were in the army at that time, you could stay there if you wanted to, regardless of any lies or omissions of fact you may have perpetuated in order to enroll. And so Marion went on to spend several years in the mid-1950's stationed in Puerto Rico, a rather fortuitous assignment, considering; his enlistment fell from '54-'56, just between the 6–2–5 War and the 2nd Indochina War.

He had dropped out to join up, and so he never graduated from high school. All of his friends who had pledged their unity and fidelity to the preservation of their country looked on his boldness with admiration, but they didn't match it, and none of them ever enrolled.

My grandmother had also stopped school early, to help out, to work, something less grandiose and probably more heroic. My grandfather later told me that joining the forces had been a great mistake, perhaps the great mistake of his life, and the nature of how he did it was a shame to him years later. He told me that it was entirely foolish to endanger one's self for such simple rah-rah rubbish as "good of one's country"; what good is it without you and yours? And what of yours? What would they do without you? Needless to say, when the opportunity presented itself, he failed to re-enlist.

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St. Mary's on the Lake

Saint Mary on the Lake Parish was established by His Grace, Archbishop Patrick A. Feehan in 1901, ten months before his death at the august age of 72 years. The parish was one of nine developed by Feehan during his 32 year reign over Catholic Chicago. Feehan established, and a priest named Dennison was charged with organization.

The parish comprised the territory known as Buena Park, and was bounded by the lake on the east and by the following streets: on the north by Wilson Avenue; on the west by Racine, Clark, and the east line of Graceland Cemetery; and on the south by Waveland Avenue. With the help of several gentlemen entrepreneurs, Fr. Dennison was able to secure 100 feet of property along the lakeshore.


[The lakeshore had used to extend as far west as Sheridan Road, and this state of affairs is what the latter half of the parish name refers to; on the map above, the blue line denotes the most westernly point of the lakeshore past, the red placemark is the location of St. Mary's. How civil engineers managed to push the lake east half a mile, I've yet to discover.]

The initial church was built from the 20th of November 1901 until its completion and the first Mass on 2nd February, 1902. The structure cost $8,000 with an additional $2,000 spent for the furnishings. A short dozen years later, Dennison announced the construction of a new church and rectory at the Northwest corner of Buena Ave and Sheridan. In order to proceed, the parish purchased the house of former City Controller Robert A. Waller and moved the structure three hundred feet, from 4210 North Sheridan to 1026 West Buena (across the street, I think).


(above, St. Paul's floorplan; below, Santa Maria Maggiore)


Chicagoan Henry J. Schlacks designed the new church, taking his inspiration for the interior from Vatican Basillicas (St. Paul's and St. Mary Major), with an addition of a freestanding bell tower which is a replica of the campanile of St. Pudentiana in Rome.

(Campanile: above, St. Pudentian; below, St. Mary of the Lake)

The edifice was completed at a cost of $127,000. Funds for the project were furnished by the moneyed Irish of the area, and initially the congregation was predominantly composed of Irish parishioners. External construction was initiated with a cornerstone ceremony on the 29th of June, 1913, and finished with the dedication by Archbishop Mundelein on 20th May, 1917. The marble of the interior is from the quarries of Carrara, and internal construction and ornamentation went on for an additional nine years following the dedication. Works created during this time include statues of Thérèse of Lisieux, Jude the Apostle, Rita of Cascia, Saint Anne, Aloysius Gonzaga, Agnes of Rome, and Raphael and Anthony of Padua. The large columns of the church are imitation marble.

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Upon approach, naming sees a mural aback of the school building,a veranda for the clergy and faithful,a gathering of springbirds worming,the death of winter,                      an imposing bell tower, a woman making her devotions to the Virgin.

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Walking around blithely snapping pictures and being the obvious voyeur that I sometimes am, my intention was to just wind around the block and head over to Kenmore. I saw a few shabbily dressed fellows affixing signs to the church doors, but I didn't think anything of it. Snap:



Then, one of the guys, the better dressed of them, started running around in front of the church, which I only really noticed when he ran through a rather boring picture I was taking:



North of the church there were some intervening buildings and then a parking lot, and when I got to this section, I noticed the same fellow kinda pacing around quickly, on the lookout. We were within a ten feet of each other when he whipped around and our glances met. Drolly, I queried if he were looking for someone?

"Do you want to see the church?" he responded. Of course I did, why not?

He begged my pardon a moment, saying he needed to confer briefly with the police officer I had somehow not seen there in the parking lot. The cop was edging his cruiser forward toward us, and my soon-to-be tour guide to St. Mary on the Lake skipped over to the car. Without thinking too much, I just followed him, staying about five feet behind when we got up to the car.

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"Yea, sorry officer, he must have just left."

"He was asleep?"

"I think he was passed out. He was wearing a blue shirt. I'm sorry to call you out here for this, it's just, well, we're here getting ready for the Holy Week ceremonies and, well. . . ."

"You don't want him messing up the services," the cop gently put in as he unfolded a pair of glasses and affixed them to his well-rounded face, looking conciliatory and as decent as could be.

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Now, a number of things occurred to me at once. Firstly, I had just willingly walked up to an inhabited police car, which was a very un-naming-like thing to do. Secondly, the realization that it was the Holy Week, and Thursday (I thought), which, if my catholic school memory was correct, meant that the evening's ceremonies to be enacted here would include the recitation of a potentially relevant story relating to the current situation. Thirdly, that guy they were looking for was wearing a grey shirt, not a blue shirt.

In response to these revelations, point by point, in reverse my mind worked:

3rdly) Just after I had noticed my soon-to-be tour guide running madly about the church grounds a few moments before, I had walked past a fellow who looked as if he had recently arisen from the pavement of a parking lot, and I had noticed the color of his shirt because it appeared that there was a substantial amount of moisture thereon, which I did my tact best not to identify. (His unfocused eyes, bedraggled beard and zombie-like stagger had simultaneously attracted my attention from afar and superficially focused them elsewhere as we passed one another on the sidewalk. I had no doubt this was who they were looking for.)

2ndly) In traditional Christian lore, after the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, Jesus goes out to pray on a mountaintop with a handful of his followers. The disciples all fall asleep repeatedly, Jesus cries out for strength, someone involves the Romans, men kiss other men, ears get cut off, suicide ensues, and eternal rewards are awarded. While the brittle gears in my head futilely gnashed in an attempt to sort out what role I was to play in this recreation (so it's Thursday, the hobo had lapsed into sleep, my tour guide had alerted the authorities,—Would this hobo come back slashing off ears to protect his Master [who was]? Et cetera), the officer and my guide exchanged further pleasantries and misinformation, and I tried not to look suspicious.

1stly) I smiled at the cop and his professional looking glasses, said nothing to correct my church guide's erroneous description, and shortly myself and the churchman were headed off toward the St. Mary's easterly entrance.



As we strolled across the churchyard together, in order to move discussion quickly away from the previous scene, I confided the root of my interest for the area in general and this church in particular — my grandparents had attended here fifty-plus years ago. Stating this aloud seemed to excite us both, and as we made our way up the stone steps, there was the appearance of an instant (and probably unearned) rapport between us; had we been discussing anything besides the very recent history of this spot of the earth, I fear our blossoming friendship would have faced a far rougher initiation. In his excitement about the parking lot scene and then the interest shown in his church's history by some mystery young man, my guide had failed to introduce himself, and I withheld any mention of it until the very end of our interaction. From now on, my guide shall be know as I now know him. He's Joe.

When Joe and I reached the entrance, there were several other individuals milling about on the front steps. They seemed to be conferring about the signage which had been posted there on the wooden doors, apparently notifying the populace of the scheduled hours for the services of the church over the upcoming weekend. The notices were just single page printouts which were whipping about madly in the wind, so much so that I couldn't read the message printed there; the Spanish version of the message was in an exaggerated cursive font, and the letters themselves looked like they were actively swaying or seasick.

The gentlemen standing there were discussing their need for more tape. One of them, duded up in a fashion I would define as priest-casual, noticed that Joe had myself in tow. "This the one you called the law on?" the short and spooky-nosed clergyman chortled. "Come, come my boy, if they're after you — into the church, in to the Sanctuary, it's Sanctuary, Sanctuary!" Laughter all around, which eventually, after some hesitation, included your humble narrator; past the initial reserve, politeness forced it up, much like smiling at a policeman. In we went.



Once inside, the others quickly went about their own business and Joe set to showing me around the place.



We dished a bit regarding the history of the church and parish (from which much of the above noted history of St. Mary's on the Lake was culled).



He asked me where Marion and Alma had sat when they went here; a perfect question I felt, and I knew, I knew: "The back, they always sat in the back. Whenever they would take me when I was a kid, we'd sneak in and out of the back pews like fugitives."



Mere days later, unprompted, I found out I was wrong.



Alma and Marion and some of their friends on the block would stay up all night on Saturdays, playing records and dancing and playing poker and baking and drinking and visiting the lakefront and dipping there. . . .



"So when we went to church we just went down the back stairs. We always sat up front of church because we came in the front."



Through the side door.



I was so sure about where they had sat and I was wrong.



And the beauty is, it holds with an internal reasoning that's the nature of us — they sat in the front because that's where they came in.



They stayed up all night, ran across the street to Church in the morning, and then went to bed.



Due to some ritual of Holy Thursday, everything in the church, the fabulous sculpture and ornamentation, had been covered over with thick velvet and white linens. It was like they knew I was coming.



Joe invited me back for the evening's meal with the parishioners before the grand event later that night.

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Graceland and Buena Park

Off the direct path and well distracted, and circling round now on our prey



From east of Kenmore to just past the alley-passage on the west which runs directly beneath the tracks; heading south, we have come to a small walking park up the side of a manufactured hill between the Red Line L platform and the barriers which fence the public out of Graceland cemetery.


The cemetery's walls are all adorned with barbed wire. Therein, lies Pullman and Pinkerton, politicians and meat packers, priests and musicians, lumber barons and domestic tyrants, reformers, bankers, newspapermen, a gaggle of architects, drunks and children, and any other of the many dead.




When it was originally established in 1860, Graceland was two miles outside of city limits. Here is what we have from Sandburg on the matter:

TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose
     silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or
     dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she
     is reckless about God and the newspapers and the
     police, the talk of her home town or the name
     people call her.)

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Despite living within shaking distance of the L tracks, my grandmother never set foot on the train. She and her neighborhood friends would go to the grocery for fun, or walk over to that body of blue which led to the makings of the city.

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The park of Buena Park, just off the the east side of the L tracks at the junction of Kenmore and Buena, is as densely populated with childplay as the area was when local poet Eugene Field immortalized the the neighborhood and the property of his great friend, the aforementioned R. A. Waller, in his 1894 book of verse, Love Songs of Childhood:

The Delectable Ballad of the Waller Lot


Up yonder in Buena Park
There is a famous spot,
In legend and in history
Yclept the Waller Lot.

There children play in daytime
And lovers stroll by dark,
For ’t is the goodliest trysting-place
In all Buena Park.

Once on a time that beauteous maid,
Sweet little Sissy Knott,
Took out her pretty doll to walk
Within the Waller Lot.

While thus she fared, from Ravenswood
Came Injuns o’er the plain,
And seized upon that beauteous maid
And rent her doll in twain.



Oh, ’t was a piteous thing to hear
Her lamentations wild;
She tore her golden curls and cried:
“My child! My child! My child!”

Alas, what cared those Injun chiefs
How bitterly wailed she?
They never had been mothers,
And they could not hope to be!

“Have done with tears,” they rudely quoth,
And then they bound her hands;
For they proposed to take her off
To distant border lands.

But, joy! from Mr. Eddy’s barn
Doth Willie Clow behold
The sight that makes his hair rise up
And all his blood run cold.



He put his fingers in his mouth
And whistled long and clear,
And presently a goodly horde
Of cowboys did appear.

Cried Willie Clow: “My comrades bold,
Haste to the Waller Lot,
And rescue from that Injun band
Our charming Sissy Knott!”

“Spare neither Injun buck nor squaw,
But smite them hide and hair!
Spare neither sex nor age nor size,
And no condition spare!”

Then sped that cowboy band away,
Full of revengeful wrath,
And Kendall Evans rode ahead
Upon a hickory lath.



And next came gallant Dady Field
And Willie’s brother Kent,
The Eddy boys and Robbie James,
On murderous purpose bent.

For they were much beholden to
That maid—in sooth, the lot
Were very, very much in love
With charming Sissy Knott.

What wonder? She was beauty’s queen,
And good beyond compare;
Moreover, it was known she was
Her wealthy father’s heir!

Now when the Injuns saw that band
They trembled with affright,
And yet they thought the cheapest thing
To do was stay and fight.



So sturdily they stood their ground,
Nor would their prisoner yield,
Despite the wrath of Willie Clow
And gallant Dady Field.

Oh, never fiercer battle raged
Upon the Waller Lot,
And never blood more freely flowed
Than flowed for Sissy Knott!

An Injun chief of monstrous size
Got Kendall Evans down,
And Robbie James was soon o’erthrown
By one of great renown.

And Dady Field was sorely done,
And Willie Clow was hurt,
And all that gallant cowboy band
Lay wallowing in the dirt.



But still they strove with might and main
Till all the Waller Lot
Was strewn with hair and gouts of gore—
All, all for Sissy Knott!

Then cried the maiden in despair:
“Alas, I sadly fear
The battle and my hopes are lost,
Unless some help appear!”

Lo, as she spoke, she saw afar
The rescuer looming up—
The pride of all Buena Park,
Clow’s famous yellow pup!

“Now, sick’em, Don,” the maiden cried,
“Now, sick’em, Don!” cried she;
Obedient Don at once complied—
As ordered, so did he.



He sicked ’em all so passing well
That, overcome by fright,
The Indian horde gave up the fray
And safety sought in flight.

They ran and ran and ran and ran
O’er valley, plain, and hill;
And if they are not walking now,
Why, then, they’re running still.

The cowboys rose up from the dust
With faces black and blue;
“Remember, beauteous maid,” said they,
“We’ve bled and died for you!”

“And though we suffer grievously,
We gladly hail the lot
That brings us toils and pains and wounds
For charming Sissy Knott!”



But Sissy Knott still wailed and wept,
And still her fate reviled;
For who could patch her dolly up -
Who, who could mend her child?

Then out her doting mother came,
And soothed her daughter then;
“Grieve not, my darling, I will sew
Your dolly up again!”

Joy soon succeeded unto grief,
And tears were soon dried up,
And dignities were heaped upon
Clow’s noble yellow pup.

Him all that goodly company
Did as deliverer hail—
They tied a ribbon round his neck,
Another round his tail.



And every anniversary day
Upon the Waller Lot
They celebrate the victory won
For charming Sissy Knott.

And I, the poet of these folk,
Am ordered to compile
This truly famous history
In good old ballad style.

Which having done as to have earned
The sweet rewards of fame,
In what same style I did begin
I now shall end the same.

So let us sing: Long live the King,
Long live the Queen and Jack,
Long live the ten-spot and the ace,
And also all the pack.

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On returning from his sojourn in the armed forces, there was, no doubt, some tension awaiting my grandfather at home. Quick to action, he went dancing.

"lots of love to always . . ."

Meadowbrook

Two dance halls were destroyed by fire and razed to the ground at Meadowbrook Park in Bascom, Ohio; the first in 1925, the second in 1932. The latter case caused wide disquiet in the small community, it being widely supposed that the destruction was no mere accident, the locals having little faith in a second striking of light. Finished just before the onset of the '29 Wall Street crash, the second pavilion had stood for less than three years. New construction to replace the ballroom was begun immediately.

  (Meadowbrook's Burned Ballrooms: above, 1925; below, 1932)

Over 130,000 board feet of Redwood and Southern Pine were used for the structure, and Acer saccharum was used for the dance floor and promenade. All of the lumber was supplied by the neighboring (and misleadingly named) Gem Manufacturing Company. Of a Sunday evening during the '30s, the pavilion would play host to over a thousand eager dancers who would come to enjoy touring bands lead by Kenton, Goodman, Miller, et cetera. In later years, the ballroom was used for rollerskating.

Beneath is the current ballroom, pictured at the time of my sister's wedding there last fall; my attendance to this event lead directly to my moving to and taking residence in Chicago,

just as my grandparents had 53 years earlier, after meeting one another at a dance held in the same reception hall.



They met at a dance, got married, moved to Chicago, and had a baby (my mom); Marion 19, Alma 18.

Here's our girl:


When my mom appeared on the scene Alma and Marion moved from a first floor room at 4229 Kenmore to the third floor so that they could have more space; the flat on the third floor had a real bedroom. Before the baby came along they had flitted about town, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood and room to room every few months in order to beat rent.

When the time actually came for my mother to be born, Alma was anxious, and wanted to be at home (Ohio) for the event. Marion was attending tool and die school at the time, in addition to working like a Hercules at two-three jobs to keep them in rent and all the other necessities facing soon-to-be parents; he managed to get half a day off, drove Alma back to their hometown, slept for an hour, and then immediately drove back to work. When she went into labor a week or so later, Marion got the call, sped the 300 miles to the hospital, and arrived just after my mother was born.

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Returns

I didn't really know any of this until I had lived here for months. Then there was a grandmother-mother-naming communique, and at my mom's prompting they were looking at an image of my current residence courtesy of one of google's satellites whilst chatting with me on the phone. At the time my grandmother hadn't seen maps online before, and features like street view made quite an impression on her, reasonably enough.

The first time I used googlemaps, a madeleine memory had sent me back to my grandparents' house, which is just across the way from what had been my great-grandparents' house and farm. As I dragged my cursor around, shifting my satellite view frame by frame and waiting for the images to load, the unlimited aerial views of urban landscapes transported my thoughts to where I first remember seeing such things.

Beginning in the 1960's, travelling salesmen would canvas the countryside promoting overhead portraits of rural estates. One day each year, a rented helicopter would circle the area, snapping photos of the properties of those who had signed on with the salesmen. Working from these photos, a painter would replicate the landscape in oils.

Above is a picture of my grandparents' home taken from helicopter in the early 21st century. This has been turned into a painting I've yet to see. Below is an image from googlemaps. My great-grandparents' property can be seen on the south side of the road, opposite Marion and Alma's house.

In the breezeway of my grandparents' house, there are a series of these works, several of which were added during the course of my chlidhood,—the rectangular and squarish outlines of the little house and the polebarns' rooftops there interrupting the green checkerboards of the surrounding fields, the sets of crops made even more orderly from above—the property and the house always recognizable, though rendered slightly foreign by angle and era. In the little alterations from one picture to the next, in the sidings of the barns, the expansion of the house, the institution of proper driveways and the disappearance of the fenced-in pasture of when there were horses there, in these differences time wrapped around the room, canvas by canvas, and I would always try to find all the changes from one to the next. And I would visualize where I was in each picture, straining my hazy eyes at an image made decades before my birth of a house that I was standing in right then.

After my conversation with my mom and grandmother had ended, they continued looking about through the satellite and street photos, and Alma proceeded to look at all the old Chicago neighborhoods where they had lived briefly. And she found 4229 Kenmore.



Or she thought this was it, where they had lived the longest before moving back to Ohio a year and a half after my mother was born to build up their lives immediately across the road from Marion's parents.


(my great-grandparents and my mom, February 1958)

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Alma and Marion had seven children, and they have 16 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren. Chicago is a five hour drive away, and since they lived here 52 years ago, I am the first of my family to return.

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Pilgrim's Progress

"It's right there, seventeen thousand four hundred and twenty four steps from your house."


I took those steps.

The End