On any given day, all you were likely to find were a couple of spotted alley cats asleep on the banister, maybe a handful of tattered souls sipping warm beer out of the bottle, and always the sweet, antagonizing old lady behind the bar.
I always felt for the vendors. Not so much because they were walking ghetto streets at midnight pawning umbrellas during a drought. More because of the tongue-lashing they were about to receive from that sweet old lady behind the bar.
I met Oliver about half a year ago, when there was still some fight left in her. That first night, she took out an old postcard of her tavern and turned it over to write something on the back of it.
Oliver says she likes to think about the “old cats and the old days,” but good luck getting her to talk about them. Some of the jazz greats she calls “obnoxious drunks,” others “petty and vain.” But she stops herself before going into detail. “They were my friends,” she says. And like a good friend, she takes the good with the bad and keeps the dirt under the rug.
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“Gerri’s not one of these owners who throw their arms around celebrities for a picture to hang on the wall,” says architectural historian Andy Pierce, who helped compile a report nominating the Palm Tavern for the Landmark Preservation Council of Illinois’ list of ten most endangered historic places. “Dizzy Gillespie, Josephine Baker–they came in to put their arms around Gerri.”
The historic tavern and other businesses on 47th Street between Vincennes Avenue and King Drive have long been targeted for takeover by the city as part of a revitalization project spearheaded by Third Ward alderman Dorothy Tillman to transform the area into a blues entertainment district. In June Oliver ended a protracted legal battle by signing an agreement with the city. “What else could I do?” she says.
For the time being she’s living with a friend while she looks for a place in Bronzeville that allows pets. The city has agreed to pay the cost of storing her possessions, help her find a new place to live, and cover her moving expenses and rent for three years. And since the Tribune ran a piece last February reporting–wrongly, Oliver says–that she’d “fallen on hard times” and was sleeping on a mattress in a back room, the city has insisted paternally that it’s doing her a favor by moving her into new housing at taxpayers’ expense.
