Jimmy Fitzgerald sits outside the Flat Iron Building in Wicker Park, his hand-painted cane in one hand and a crucifix in the other, and surveys the passing scene. He’s a familiar presence at the southeast corner of North and Milwaukee, where he sets up his folding chair twice a day, six days a week, in the early morning hours and again from noon to one. Sundays are reserved for rest and mass, but Monday through Saturday, no matter the weather, Fitzgerald can be found in the same spot, manning his front-row seat at the neighborhood’s eclectic street parade. “It’s like a hobby,” he explains in his slow, rumbling voice.
Then he goes up to his room and draws their pictures. In the six years he’s lived in the Flat Iron Building he says he’s amassed 2,099 drawings of home repair and roofing trucks and thrown out perhaps thousands more. The ones he’s kept are numbered and dated. “It’s my private collection,” he says. “I do it for my own pleasure. They’re not for sale.”
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While Fitzgerald’s truck drawings are off-limits, he’s quite willing to part with his other, more “commercial” works–bright acrylic paintings of subjects ranging from nature (flowers, fish) to city life (high-rises along the lake, Saint Mary of the Angels Church). During the recent Around the Coyote arts festival, Fitzgerald sold eight paintings, pocketing enough cash to cover over half of his $350 rent.
About two dozen of Fitzgerald’s paintings hang in the hallway outside his room, many of them with titles or short descriptions painted right in. There are patriotic scenes (Neil Armstrong on the moon, the Blue “Angles”) and movie stars (Chuck Connors, W.C. “Fells”). There’s also a big picture of John Dillinger robbing an Oklahoma bank–in 1936, two years after the outlaw was shot down. The pieces cost from $10 to $45; some have sale prices like $10.65, $26.55, and $35.75. They’re all signed “JF.”
“Jimmy came to me and said he’d been kicked out,” recalls Lopez. “He was all freaked-out. He needed a place. I was working for the building then, and I thought, why not help this guy?” At the time, Lopez occupied a large partitioned space on the third floor, which he also used as an exhibition space for his photographs and other artists’ work. He settled Fitzgerald into the smaller room, charging him $300 a month. In the hasty move, Fitzgerald had to get rid of many of his possessions, including his family photographs and the many truck drawings he’d already done. “I wasn’t sure how big of a space I was gonna have. I left a lot of things I wished I would’ve took with me.”
Lopez was let go as the Flat Iron caretaker a few years ago, but he stayed in the building, moving into another third-floor space. Fitzgerald stayed in his old room. “He’s part of the neighborhood and we’re glad we could give him a home,” says Berger. “He’s a damn good artist–he has a good sense of color. We liken him to our Henry Darger, our Bill Traylor. And he’s as nice a man as you could know.”
