By Jack Clark
It wasn’t a boring place, of course, not when I lived there. It was my city. The place I loved. I was 21 before I would move to the north side and find another city going by the same name and get lost in all those peculiar angles that I’ve since grown to love.
There were seven kids, so he’d usually rent a station wagon. We’d stop at a light and people in other cars would start counting us. Once he rented a Volkswagen bus, in the days before they became famous as hippie mobiles.
“It was on Latrobe Avenue, right near the Lake Street el,” my mother recalls. “A few years ago a bunch of houses burned down over there. I read about it in the paper and I was thinking, I’ll bet that was one of the houses.”
At one time there were signs on corners all over the city commemorating local guys who died in WWII. Like the one on Saint Louis, most of them are long gone. I have one hanging on a wall at home. “George P. Sepsis Sq.,” it says, and there’s a white star on a black background. It once hung on a light pole at Madison and Menard. My little brother found it in the gutter one day and brought it home. The back of the sign had rusted away.
My mother would probably still be living here if the neighborhood hadn’t changed. It’s getting better, I hear, more middle-class, more professionals. They’re remodeling my friend Joey’s old house. The places look smaller than they once did and now there’s a cul-de-sac at the north end of the block. You can no longer drive up to Madison.
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Frank Gusenberg, shot 22 times, was still alive when the real police arrived at the S.M.C. Cartage Company, 2122 N. Clark. “Who shot you?” they asked. “Nobody shot me,” Gusenberg’s reported to have said, and he died without ever changing his story.
