Flashback 1989: Waiving the flag - American ideals come out the winner in artwork furor

"What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?" by Dread Scott

     Having pretty much exhausted what I have to say about the 25oth birthday of our country on Wednesday and Friday, I thought I'd fish something out of the vault for Fourth of July itself. I came upon this curious artifact that revolves around essential American attitudes and freedoms. 

     Curious for several reasons: first, it was written for the editorial pages six years before I became a columnist, when I was a general assignment reporter. Second, it brings up one of the more notorious artworks ever displayed in Chicago, Dread Scott's "What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?" Third, it is 1700 words long, more than twice the length of my regular column. I hope the piece merits the time it takes to read.

     I did write in the ledger — not standing on the flag, but leaning far over the corner. I've never been tempted to renounce an old opinion, but I will note that I winced reading the "Go try that in South Korea..." BS I trot out, twice, in this. Immature of me — I was 28 years old at the time. Anyway, Happy 4th of July. Stay safe around fireworks.

     Along with the tang of apple pie, the pop of Fourth of July fireworks and the satisfying crack of a bat at Wrigley Field, the flag flap at the Art Institute has to be seen as something purely American, a symbol of what makes this country great.
     All the participants in this brouhaha did exactly what they were supposed to:
     The young artist, Scott Tyler, did what young artists have been doing throughout time: tossing wrenches into the orderly workings of complacency.
     The veterans, for their part, filled the role of military men: defending the flag and honor of the country.
     And even the School of the Art Institute, which shamed itself during the seizure of David K. Nelson's cruel lampoon of Harold Washington last spring, scraped together newfound courage to fulfill its own role: providing a place for students to test their artistic wings, for good or ill.
     Not only did they all do their various duties, but they did them in a distinctly human way, meaning they were each in the right, but less than they might think, and each in the wrong, though they might not realize it.
     Begin with Tyler, the artist, working under the name "Dread Scott" (which the historically minded will recognize as a misspelling of the name of the slave involved in the 1857 Supreme Court case legally upholding slavery).
     On the positive side, Tyler's artwork, "What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?" is not as gratuitous as Nelson's meaningless jab at Washington, but has a defendable message: America does bad things sometimes and many people dislike it for a variety of valid reasons. That analysis may give Tyler more credit than he is due, but assuming the work has a message and is not just a backhand insult, it is a message all but the blindly patriotic can appreciate.
     "In this case, this student not only is making an artistic or esthetic point, but it is very clear he is making a political point," said Professor Sheldon Nahmod, a law professor at IIT-Chicago Kent College of Law. "It's very clear that the flag is first and foremost a political symbol; it represents national unity and patriotism. In my view, whatever one does to the flag is indeed a political statement."
     When put in the context of performance art, Tyler's work seems more impressive. Performance art is a sort of ritualized recklessness that commonly sees artists inciting people to do illegal things. One artist's work featured a gun, set to a timer so that it would fire at some random point. Viewers were invited to sit in a chair with their heads beside the gun, and some of them did. Another artist lay on the floor, surrounded by buckets of water and live, frayed electrical cables, and implor ed viewers to kick over the buckets and electrocute him. Tyler's invitation to violate flag laws seems almost tame by comparison.
     To Tyler's discredit, however, the manifesto the self-named "proletarian internationalist" wrote to justify his artwork shows him to be as blindly zealous in his condemnation of America as patriots can be in their praise.
     "Rambo, Reagan and Bush all love this sacred cow whereas the masses worldwide hate it," he said, referring to the flag his art piece invites viewers to trample and ignoring the fact that the masses hating the United States tend to be those who can't themselves get here, while few U.S. citizens hide under loads of fish trying to start a new life in Cambodia or Peru.
     He points to Iran, Vietnam, South Korea and South Africa as homes of oppressed people who hate the United States, but he fails to recognize the irony that the country he has chosen to relentlessly attack is one of the few places in the world free enough to allow him to make the criticism in the first place.
     The veterans, too, both displayed and departed from the ideals they fought for. To their credit, they generally conducted themselves in an American way - exercising their own right to free speech by protesting, pursuing redress from the courts. The statements of their lawyer, Joseph A. Morris, give more respect to Tyler than Tyler gives to the nation he ridicules while exploiting its freedoms.
     "The display all by itself may be a work of art; you can depict flag desecration, you an put a flag on a clean floor," said Morris, general counsel for the Mid-America Legal Foundation, which represents the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "It may not be great art, but it is a certifiable expression. The problem is an ordinary person looking at this exhibit cannot but draw the conclusion that this is an invitation to walk on the flag."
     The veterans want only to stop people from walking on the flag, not to close the exhibit, punish the artist, or even remove Tyler's work.
     On the other hand, while responsible as a group, individual veterans decided to imitate Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued a death sentence for author Rushdie, and go after the blasphemy themselves. One Purple Heart vet attempted to remove the flag (perhaps because he was not an alderman, a Chicago policeman detained him and not the flag). And Thursday a pair of veterans tried storming the school, which had closed the exhibit to the public in the face of numerous threats of violence.
     The school, as well, managed to be both more timid than some would want but bolder than it had been when it groveled apologies after several alderemn seized Nelson's painting. (Too bad the aldermen didn't take umbrage at Van Gogh's self-portrait in the Art Institute. The city could use the money.).
     It did, after all, allow the show, a display of the work of minority artists, one of the concessions made in the wake of the Nelson affair.
     The school also stood by the artist, after a fashion, keeping the exhibit open to students, professors and staff and controlling hostile vets.
     On the negative side, it begged Tyler not to show the work after it was selected for inclusion in the show. The school also closed the exhibit to the public and the press, citing "security concerns," the same excuse offered by bookstores yanking Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.
     Perhaps the confusion of those involved is a reflection of the muddiness of the central issue: Is Tyler's artwork legal?
     For all the mention of First Amendment Rights, this is not a First Amendment case, at least not yet, because the government is not involved. The First Amendment says the government cannot infringe your right to free speech. A private group — such as the School of the Art Institute — can, to the extent that it has control over what is displayed in its galleries.
     A 1972 case of a Downstate artist who displayed a work called "The Flag in Chains" reached the Illinois Supreme Court. In this case, the artist displayed an American flag, literally wrapped in chains, and the court ruled that the piece did not violate any laws, since the flag itself was not subject to destruction and the meaning of the piece was ambiguous.
     The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled, several times, that the flag can be humiliated in a variety of ways without involving any illegality.
     But both the Illinois and U.S. Supreme Courts have said the flag cannot be burned or mutilated, and people who have done so have been sent to jail.
     Which leaves the question of whether treading on the flag is destruction or merely abuse, a moot point in the eyes of the veterans, who view Tyler's display as worse than mutilation.
     "The artist's conduct is more egregious than a flag burning," said Morris. A flag burning is brief but the artwork is ongoing, he said. "The Art Institute has a flag desecration every day, with the invitation to come and see it, come and do it."
     But is inviting someone to do something illegal in itself illegal?
     "Nobody is forced to see the exhibit, and those who see the exhibit are not forced to stand on the flag," said Nahmod.
     Cook County Circuit Judge Kenneth L. Gillis agreed with Nahmod and rejected veterans' requests to bar viewers from treading on the flag.
     "This exhibit is as much an invitation to think about the flag as it is an invitation to step on the flag," said Gillis.
     All told, the flag flap — assuming that some unbalanced person does not inject violence into the situation — is a good indication that something possibly bad — the trampling of the U.S. flag — can have unintended good results, if people keep their heads about them.
     What sort of unintended good results?
     The artist, if he is fair, could see that his work sparked much sincere debate and soul searching among the citizens of the country he detests. As a performance artist, he might consider going to countries he seems to prefer — Iran, South Africa, South Korea — and present his display using their flags. Should he survive, he might learn additional lessons.
     The veterans, imbued with zeal for flag etiquette, might notice and do something about the tattered rags which are flown, unprotested, in front of businesses all over Chicago. They might also realize that respect for the American flag is not a product of flag laws, but a product of the country's greatness, a greatness whose vital core is the freedom of speech.
     The School of the Art Institute may learn not to be so fast to betray its more daring students. The scorned renegades of today are the grand old masters of tomorrow (to prove this, all they need to do is stroll next door to the Art Institute and look at the works of such art hellions as John Singer Sargent, who had to flee France in the uproar caused by one of his elegant portraits, or Henri Rousseau, whose whimsical forests were barred for years from the French Salon, too staid to see his genius).
     As onlookers, we can pat ourselves on the back. With all the scorn the we've been heaping on Iran for its reaction to The Satanic Verses, we can take pride that when it was our turn to have our sacred cow - the flag - trod upon, we held true, for the most part, to the greater ideals which that flag - dirty or clean, on a pole or on the ground - represents.
    — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 5, 1989

Like the Obama Presidential Center, Jackson Park was born over the furious objections of Chicagoans

Frederick Law Olmsted assumed Chicagoans making the journey to Jackson Park would
come by boat, so the Midway Plaisance was originally intended to be a canal.

   
     I've been blessed over the years to have access to one of the finest private research facilities in the world, the Newberry Library, which kindly permits me to be a scholar-in-residence. Using their resources really enhanced the following story — I probably would have never known about Frederick Law Olmsted's report on the future Jackson Park had I not bumped into an original copy waiting for me in the Newberry collection.

     The Obama Presidential Center had to overcome many hurdles before coming into existence, including continual protest and two federal lawsuits. The same is true for the parkland the center rests upon, which from the start sparked debate and litigation. Even the park’s name was once subject to “universal” outcry.
     When formed in 1869, the Chicago South Park Commission faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. First, it had no money — its authority to raise taxes ended up in front of the Illinois Supreme Court. Second, it had no land: The property it wanted was in the hands of people who demanded "exorbitant prices" or passionately refused to sell. Third, its legal right to exist was questioned.    
     Or, as the Chicago Times wrote, reporting on the commission's first annual meeting in 1870:  

     "Many persons owning property within the park and others on general principles and for various reasons manifested strong opposition to every measure tending to produce this result and proclaimed that, as advised by 'counsel learned in the law,' the South Park Act was 
unconstitutional and void."
     But a bond of $1,642,000 was floated, with $918.87 for office furniture and $1,500 to Olmsted, Vaux & Co. to assess the suitability of the area around Drexel and Kankakee avenues as a future park for a city whose population had nearly tripled in the previous decade.

     The landscape firm was headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for turning the ruins of "pig-sties, slaughter-houses, and bone-boiling works" into New York's Central Park and more recently carving 1,600 acres of Cook County farmland along the Des Plaines River into the nation's first planned suburb, aptly named Riverside.     

     In his 1871 "Report Accompanying Plan for Laying Out the South Park," Olmsted wistfully invoked "the great roaming grounds" of London and Paris before delivering the bad news about the barbell-shaped, 1,000-acre property that Chicago wanted to render into parkland. 
     "Your territory lies at the distance of six miles from the center of business of Chicago and quite beyond its corporate limits," he wrote — indeed, Hyde Park would not join Chicago until 1889. "Its neighborhood is mostly uncultivated country, much of it unenclosed and sparsely inhabited."
     The city could double and double again, Olmsted wrote, and yet the park "will not be much used by the citizens of Chicago."
     Here he was mistaken. While Jackson Park would never become the central civic feature that downtown's Grant Park would be, it would serve the recreational needs of the city's vibrant South Side, include including two popular beaches, and bask in international attention as host of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It would leave , leaving a legacy of one cultural landmark, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, and another frequently overlooked gem, La Rabida Hospital — , and leading eventually, despite furious efforts to thwart it, to the Obama Presidential Center.

Olmsted's task, and his obstacles

     Back in 1871, though, Olmsted bemoaned the land he was given to work with.
     "The first obvious defect of the site is that of its flatness," he wrote. What is needed is "a mountain glen with a dashing stream and cascades."
     That being impossible, Olmsted's view fell upon an undeniable "highly picturesque" feature already right there: Lake Michigan.
     "There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity and that, the Lake, can be made, by artificial means, no more grand or sublime."
     Olmsted envisioned a series of lagoons connected by a mile-long canal, the Midway Plaisance — an old French word for "pleasantness" — the assumption being that most Chicagoans making the journey would go by boat. The first L tracks wouldn't be laid until 1892.
     Fate had other ideas, namely the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 that destroyed the South Side Park Commission office — along with most of Olmsted's plans.

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Works in progress: Lane Lubell — The Intervention of Dictionary.com

     EGD is interested in many things —politics, culture, products, birds. Words themselves merit special attention. Today we welcome a guest voice, Chicago teacher and family friend Lane Lubell, who in 2023 took a look at the Academy Awards. He asked to comment on Dictionary.com's Word of the Year. The platform is yours, Lane:

“The English language is losing it. Maybe I should have treated her better.” 

              — Buffy Summers

     Hey Dictionary.com. Don't be alarmed. We are gathered here today because we all care about you a lot, but your behavior lately has made us very concerned.    
     That’s right. We are here because you chose “6-7” as your Word of the Year (WOTY). I know it seems like a silly award, but you and some of your friends sitting here — Oxford, Merriam, Collins, Macquarie — you’ve done some great work with it in the past. Remember when Merriam bestowed 2006’s title to the Stephen Colbert-coined “Truthiness?” Unbelievable! Or when Oxford chose “Post-Truth” following Kellyanne Conway’s first utterance of “fake news”? Or when they —
     No, no. You’re right. This isn’t about them. You’ve done great work, too. But, frankly, we’ve been worried for a while. Last year, you really scared us when you chose “Demure” just because some TikToker used it weirdly, but at least people were still using you to find out a good vocab word. But this year… I don’t even know where to begin. 6-7?!
     Dear God! Dic! What are you doing, bud? Just because you talk like a kid doesn’t mean they’ll use you.
     I know you expect me to tell you some things you’ve probably already heard: firstly, that you can’t release a year-end list in October. (If you can’t hear Wham! on the radio, it’s too early.) And yes, “6-7” is not a word so much as two digits uttered consecutively, but, Oxford, you chose the non-vocalic “😀” in 2015, so we’ll give you a pass. At least we can all say this one! (Sorry, Ox, but you know you had it coming.)
     But this is much more concerning than not abiding by convention. This is some anti-dictionary type shit. This is Gen Alpha slang.
     Oh, Harper! Sorry, I forgot you were here. You’ve been so quiet. I know you haven’t received a new edition since 2011, so let me get you caught up.
     The phrase “6-7” is extremely popular among Generation (or, Gen) Alpha (who were only one when you were last published), who represents kids born after 2010, meaning all of them are 15 and under. Here’s how it works: whenever anyone says either the words “six,” “seven,” or –God help you! – both, every child within earshot must scream “6-7!” while making an indiscernible gesture akin to mimicking the scales of Anubis. Most freakishly though, not one of them will be able to tell why they do this peculiar ritual. It’s a Rod Serling nightmare. All we know is that it possesses them with a fervor of joy so strong that South Park (hilariously) was forced to conjecture “6-7” to be apocryphal numerology so inscrutable that not even antichrist expert Peter Thiel could stop it. (Yes, the PayPal guy. Harper, you need to be updated more often.)
     What’s the etymology of “6-7”? That’s a great question, Mac. “6-7” has its origins in a 2024 song by a rapper named Skrilla entitled “Doot-doot.” (That title alone should give you an indication that he may not be the preeminent wordsmith of our time.) The lyric in question goes, “6-7, I just bipped right on the highway (bip, bip) / Skrrrt, uhh. (bip bip bip).” If you found that lyric confusing, don’t feel bad. Skrilla said he doesn't know what he’s talking about either (after all, it’s not like a rapper, for whom wordplay is paramount, should be concerned with things like… the meaning of their words). The phrase was further popularized through teenage TikTok videos and Hornet’s point guard LaMelo Ball, but no one is exactly sure how it exploded to the scale that it did.
     Gen Alpha however doesn’t care. They’ve become notorious for repeating stuff without knowing what they’re saying. And that’s precisely the problem here.
      No, Dic! I’m not anti-slang! We all know how important slang is. Every generation uses words in weird ways that contort their meanings to create completely new lexicons. Indeed, slang has been around as long as language, itself, and is the primary way that languages develop within a society without stealing or appropriating terminology from other cultures. But this generation has done something dangerous with its slang.
     Take any piece of slang from cultures past. “Rad.” Originating from “radical” — itself a product of ‘70’s surf culture — it originally meant “extreme,” but it very quickly became synonymous with “awesome” and “cool.” “Groovy” literally refers to the grooves in vinyl records, which led to songs being described as “groovy.” Soon, other, non-musical objects and feelings acquired the same attribution, which was able to make sense via connotation. Even wacky, constructed slang, when done right, has origins and clear definitions. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, always rife with wordplay, coined “Five-by-Five,” which originated in HAM radio lingo as a reference to signal strength, was contorted to mean “got it” or “OK”.
     Notice the rules? No matter when the slang was started, it always has some definitive origin, and, most importantly, a trackable definition. These rules should be inevitable. Words must mean something. otherwise, they shouldn’t exist. (Bip, bip.)
     Gen Z understood these principles. For example, “Rizz” is a valid example of slang. Though odd, the phrase is simply a shortened, phonetic form of “chaRISma” with a nearly identical meaning. Wonderful!
     But, Gen Alpha went too far. They started using nonsense words when there should be silence. Now kids are just saying stuff that means nothing as if it meant something.
     Even adding “6-7” to a dictionary presents our editors with a paradox: define a word that has no meaning. Numerology will get you nowhere. “6-7” is neither onomatopoeic nor substitutable nor advantageous. Indeed, it lacks all semblance of meaning. It is then, axiomatically, impenetrable per se.
     Your choice has brought heartache to a lot of good dictionaries, like myself, who you’ve hurt. After all, why are kids ever going to use us if we can’t show them that the meaning of words matter?
     To paraphrase Paddy Chayefsky: You, Dictionary.com, have meddled with the primal forces of English and you must atone!
      We have set you up with an appointment at a rehab center led by Britannica. We all believe in you. Now, go. Get help and good luck, Dic.
      Like any good reference material, I’ve included a bibliography below.

Works Cited:

Chayesfky, Paddy (writer) and Sidney Lumet (director). Network. Speech performed by Ned Beatty. MGM/United Artists. 1975. Streaming.

“Dictionary.com’s 2024 Word of the Year Is...” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, 28 Oct. 2025, www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2024/#recent-words-of-the-year.

“Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year Is...” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, 28 Oct. 2025, www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2025/#recent-words-of-the-year.

Djajapranata, Cliff. “What does '6-7' mean? We don't know either, so we asked a linguist.” Cynthia Gordon (interviewee). Georgetown University. 23 Oct. 2025. https://www.georgetown.edu/news/six-seven-meme-linguistics/

“Twisted Christian.” South Park. Written & Directed by Trey Parker. Created by Trey Parker & Matt Stone. Season 28, episode 1. 15 Oct. 2025. Comedy Central/Paramount+.

“Sigma.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2025. Web. 31 Oct. 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/sigma.

Whedon, Joss. Time of Your Life. Penciling by Karl Moline. Inks by Andy Owens. Colors by Michelle Madsen. Cover Art by Jo Chen and Georges Jeanty. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Print. 2009. Vol. 4 of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8.

"Word of the Year 2015". Oxford Dictionaries. November 16, 2015. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2015/.


“Word of the Year 2023”. Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved 4 Dec. 2023. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2023/.

Tattooing inks rich Chicago history

 

     Large portraits of tattoo icons Tatts Thomas and Ralph Johnstone watch over Nick Colella as he works.
     "Both of those guys tattooed on the 400 block of South State Street where the Harold Washington Library is," said Colella, owner of Great Lakes Tattoo on Grand Avenue.
     Tattoos go way back. The oldest known tattoos are on Ötzi the Iceman, a body preserved in the Alps for over 5,000 years. Tattooing was common in ancient Egypt and is found on mummies, mostly women, who often etched fertility signs onto their bodies.
     Chicago is part of that history.
     "Chicago plays a vital role in tattooing in the country," Colella said. "That area of State Street, you had all the sailors come from Great Lakes Naval Base. That's why this place is called Great Lakes Tattoo. You had this naval training base here where all these sailors in wartime came to train, then went down to State Street to see girls and get tattoos. All the arcades had tattooers. All the burlesque shows had tattooers. This stuff on the walls is all from those arcades."
     The walls of Great Lakes Tattoo are jammed with framed selections of classic art: swooping eagles and beribboned daggers, grinning skulls and flaming hearts. Like any fashion, tattooing goes through phases. Polynesian tribal tattoos were popular in the 1990s, then strands of barbed wire on the upper arm.
     But the snarling panthers and cheesecake ladies are always in style.
     "That's pretty much what I do: traditional American tattooing," Colella said. "That's what Danni's doing: repainting in the same tradition they repainted 80 years ago."
     Danni Nievera, at the next stall — 10 artists work at Great Lakes — carefully dabbed red onto a dragon on a sheet of paper.
     "I'm just using gouache, adding color," she said.
     I was not there to get tattooed — I have a hard enough time picking out a new pair of glasses — but to visit World Tattoo Gallery, a small exhibit space downstairs, and see a show of Tony Fitzpatrick's colorful paintings. Tony was heavily tattooed himself, and his art was influenced by tattoo art. Popping in, eyeballing his pictures, then leaving seemed a lost opportunity. So I asked to talk about tattooing while there.
     Besides aesthetics, the old designs carry the spirit of their originators.
     "I like tattooing off these old designs because that's what keeps those guys alive," Colella said. "That's what the history of it is. That's the tradition of it. I'm doing their designs in the current manner with better tools and nicer inks."
     What does Nievera, 30, like about tattooing?

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Danni Nievera

Flashback 2000: Born to be killers

  

     
     This is a relic from another era, when I'd pair with a photographer — in this case, my favorite shooter, Robert A. Davis — and do a deep dive into an overlooked urban problem. It's very long — 2800 words, almost four times a regular column. So I hope it'll hold your attention.

     The dogs are taken from airless garages, from abandoned apartments, from dark basements. Already a crowd is gathering. The dogs have heavy chains on their necks and deep, untreated gashes on their legs and faces.
      A circle forms — lots of children. Bets are taken. The dogs are kicked or "bumped" — slammed together to get them going. Usually that's all it takes. The dogs bite and rip each other, snarling, spattering blood. The crowd cheers, shouts encouragement. Sometimes the dogs are separated by a pry bar, to prolong the fight. Eventually one is the victor and the other, if it is lucky, dead. Money changes hands.
     It happens every day in Chicago, and also frequently in the suburbs and Downstate. What started out as a recreation and gambling sport among gang members has spread to the larger community, with even young children raising stray dogs and fighting them in such numbers that officials call it "an epidemic."
      "It's definitely getting worse," said Catherine Hedges, shelter supervisor of Chicago's Fury Friends Foundation. "I see abuse from dog fighting on an almost daily basis. Nearly every day a volunteer comes back from walking a pit bull to say somebody approached them and said: `How much do you want for that dog?' They think he would make a good fighter. They don't want the dog as a pet. They don't want to take it to the park and play. They want it as a fighter."
      Staging dog fights is a felony, but cases are difficult to prove. Dogs can't testify, and police officers, already overburdened by the relentless crush of crime against humans, do not put a high priority on trying to solve them.
     Except one: Sgt. Steve Brownstein, a 46-year-old officer who wages a one-man crusade against the abuse of animals, particularly dogs, particularly dogs that are forced to fight and kill each other.
     Brownstein has seized 700 animals since May 1999, and made 200 arrests. Operating out of the public housing unit at 51st and Wentworth, he strolls through the projects, chatting with residents, about rumors of dogfights and animal hidden in basements. Holding a flashlight, he crunches through the gloomy rubble of abandoned apartments, looking for chained dogs guarding drug stashes.
      He has seen a lot.
     "They beat these animals," he said. "They feed them hot peppers. Feed them gunpowder. Lock them in small closets. They do everything they can to make these animals vicious and mean."
     Brownstein said trainers will starve dogs, then throw a piece of meat between them and have the dogs kill each other for it. They'll put heavy weights on the animals to build up their strength. When there is a dogfight, if the wounded dog does not die, they will throw it alive on a garbage dump or leave it in a vacant lot or apartment to die a slow death.
     "The more fortunate dogs are the ones that die during the fight instead of after the fight," he said.
     People will set dogs on fire when they lose a fight, or something worse. "I've had dog fighters tell me, including teenagers, they're angry at a dog if it loses a fight, they want it to suffer, that's why they leave it locked in a closet to die a slow death of its injuries."
     Brownstein has seen children snap the necks of puppies, and it is the dehumanizing effect that such violence has on children that worries him most. He remembers one 12-year-old boy, "Speedy," who he first met when he impounded the boy's dog for fighting, and next heard of after the boy had raped a 7-year-old girl. The two events are not unconnected in Brownstein's view.
     "I think that when a child enjoys the suffering of an animal, has no empathy and compassion, it becomes very easy for that same child to grow into a teenager and adult who can inflict pain upon fellow humans and still have no empathy or compassion."
     Despite his humanitarian zeal, Brownstein has made a lot of enemies. Top police brass work to undermine him and some of his fellow officers call him "Dogman" and "Gomer Pyle," for his awkward, flapping manner.
     Unsurprisingly, those whose dogs he has seized are his fiercest critics, picketing Brownstein and peppering him with official complaints.
     "He's gone crazy," said dog trainer Walter Ward, who had his dogs seized this summer by Brownstein. "He does good, but he does a lot of wrong. . . . Someone has to stop him."
     Even Brownstein's allies admit that he is a man on a mission.
     "He's a driven individual, and at times that can be his undoing," said Dr. Gene Mueller, president of the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society, which just named Brownstein its Humanitarian of the Year. "He's drowning in these reports (of abuse). How can we expect him to follow up on them all? It's impossible. People say this is all Steve Brownstein, but it's so much larger, and has to be tackled. He needs more assistance, more resources."
     Dogfighting is a Class 4 felony that could, in theory, bring three years in prison. Even witnessing a dogfight is a misdemeanor. But felony dog fighting prosecutions are rare: there have been just nine in Cook County in the past two years.
     "It's so common. You continually hear calls about dog fighting on the radio. But the attitude is: `They're expendable; who cares?' " said a police officer in the Deering police district on the South Side. "The state's attorney will not approve felony charges for dog fighting."
     The state's attorney's office said it is aware of the problem and doing all it can.
     "The people doing it are becoming more bold," said John Gorman, a spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office. "It is moving out of the basements and into the parking lots and empty lots. More dogs are being killed and maimed, and when these cases are brought to us, we prosecute them as best we can."
     Still, many police officers are not aware of the felony dogfighting law, even though it has been on the books for more than a decade, said Mueller, the former head of the city's Animal Care and Control Department.
     "There have been less than a handful of prosecuted cases," said Mueller. "Because animal welfare laws are contained within agricultural law — an archaic, infrequently used part of the code — the police officer on the street, the reviewing desk sergeant, the state's attorney at the district, didn't recognize the criminal code."
     It is not that police are unsympathetic. Many officers in inner-city neighborhoods have stories of grim encounters with dogs abused by gangs.
     "Before I was a lieutenant, I worked on a tactical team and went on narcotics raids," said Lt. Nick Rotti of the Calumet district on the Far South Side. "We'd come across dogs . . . it's heartbreaking to see the things that are done to them. I've seen dogs on raids, they leave them chained in these abandoned buildings or basements where they hide their drug stash. I've actually seen the skeleton of a dog chained to a pole in a basement. The dog just starved to death. They left it there to lie dead."
     The bigger problem, police say, is building a felony case.
     "You have to keep in mind, without admissions and without facts to support it, it's very difficult to get that felony upgrade," said Pat Camden, a spokesman for the police department. "When the facts support a felony, the state's attorney's office has been more than cooperative."
     A lack of statistics on dog fighting is one sign of how recently officials have come to understand the severity of the problem. Only last year did the city began keeping track of emergency calls regarding animals. So far this year, 1,764 complaints of animal abuse have come into 911 — triple the rate of last year — with another 2,061 complaints of "inhuman treatment" of animals to 311.
     "We've done community education, tried to help people see the relationship between animal abuse and interpersonal violence," said Ted O'Keefe, director 311 City Services. "We've come to an awareness that this is a problem, not just in terms of animals, but a problem that can have an impact on our children as well."
     Indeed, concern for dog fighting is growing not out of heightened sympathy for the dogs, but from a recognition that violence against animals can lead directly to violence against humans.
     "This is a child welfare issue," said Brownstein. "I do hear, from people, that this is about animals. `People are shooting each other and this is about dogs.' My response is that in addition to the fact that this is extremely cruel to the animals, it is a fact that when children and teenagers become desensitized and sometimes actually enjoy the sufferings of animals it then becomes a small step for them to commit violence toward their fellow human beings."
     Mueller said he did not fully understand the impact of dog fighting on children until a chilling encounter as principal for a day at a West Side magnet school.
     "I was in a fourth grade classroom — 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds — and the subject came up," he said. "I said, `Let's talk about dog fighting. Who has seen dog fighting?' Every hand shot up. I said, `I don't mean Molly slipping out of the yard.' Every hand. It was unanimous. The kids said it happens all the time, in the alleys."
     Mueller remembers in particular four boys in the class.
     "These four little boys — 10-year-old boys — said that this was so exciting, that there was nothing as exciting in their neighborhood. This is not a violent video game. These children are seeing in first person this incredible cruelty. . . . This is not the cause of violence, but we have this terrible, unrecognized poison in many neighborhoods in Chicago that our children are being exposed to."
     Worse than a child witnessing a strange dog in a fight, Mueller said, is when it is a dog that the child has learned to love, usually while the adults are waiting for it to grow old enough to fight.
     "Pit bulls are used for currency — someone will give a pit bull puppy instead of $20," said Mueller. "They'll raise the puppy. Build trust, and over the course of a year, the dog grows and gets bigger. Then the person in charge of the family — the dad, the cousin — says, `We're going to fight it.' They take it out in the alley to fight. You can imagine these children having this animal they may have developed love and empathy for, out in the alley. All the other neighbors are there. They're cheering. They're screaming. The whole neighborhood. One of the animals loses, which itself is a terrible tragedy. But then there are these 10-year-old kids."
     Dog fighting is a particular problem in the city, but it is certainly not limited to urban areas. Earlier this year, Brownstein consulted Elgin police on dog fighting after officers began receiving complaints.
     "I don't think there is any part of the state that doesn't have some form of dog fighting," said Officer Chuck Thomas, a 16-year veteran of Joliet Township Animal Control. "What police run into most are the backyard fights. But there's also big money in it. It's organized. There are professional fighting rings all over. It's very, very hard (to crack down on)."
     Compounding the problem is the difficulty of locating, never mind gathering evidence on, a dog fight, fleeting encounters which are either hidden from view or easily dispersed at the glimpse of a squad car.
     Just last week, Chicago police Officer Lyteshia Gunn, responding to a report of a dog fight in the 10100 block of South Lafayette, saw a group of neighbors gathered around two teenage boys, each holding a pit bull on a leash.
     By the time she pulled over and got out of her car, the group had scattered. Soon Brownstein and half a dozen other officers were on the scene, which was spread over a block. At the center were two bloodied pit bulls.
     "How long have you had these dogs for?" Brownstein asked some men nearby. "You know there was a fight going on."
     Nobody was telling. The matter took almost a half hour to sort out. Two men were handcuffed and put in a squad car, and two teens, 13 and 14, claiming ownership of the dogs, were also arrested.
     "I don't know nothing about no dog fight," said one of the boys, who said his dog had no name. "I just call it `girl."' Asked about the wounds and the fresh blood glistening on the dog's legs, the boy said: "That ain't blood."
     Several officers stood watching Brownstein conduct the investigation.
     "We get calls on this constantly. It's a daily thing," said Chicago police officer Larry Dotson. "By the time we arrive, unfortunately, the dogs are already gone. Or they'll leave the loser, maimed, as we arrive."
     At least one of Brownstein's superiors described Brownstein as a "loose cannon." But his most vocal critics tend to be the people he has arrested.
     One of them, Doris Blumenberg, of the 10800 block of South Parnell, said Brownstein kicked open a door in a business where she works and seized six dogs without cause.
     "There are so many complaints on this man, it's incredible," she said. "How long has he been doing this? . . . He only takes blacks' and Hispanics' dogs."
     Blumenberg claims she is not a trainer and was not responsible for the dogs. But in court she pleaded guilty of cruelty to animals. And her neighbor said she has personally seen her hauling dead dogs out to the garbage.
     "She was fighting these dogs," said Bernadette Lewis, 31. "She was supposedly training them, but she would leave the dogs in the basement, all the windows boarded up, no air, no food, no water. They were just in there dying. They were eating each other, and all the dead dogs she would put them in garbage bags put them in garbage cans at the side of my house and leave them there for weeks at a time."
     The stench was almost unbearable, Lewis said.
     "It's a money thing," she said. "They bet. We saw it plenty of times. These dogs, all they want is for someone to love 'em and care for 'em. They're not asking to be abused. They don't want nobody to abuse them. It's a shame. It really is a shame."
     While Brownstein's obsessive manner turns some off, others see beyond to what he is trying to do.
     "His social skills aren't the best," said Hedges, from the Fury Friends Foundation. "But he is doing the right thing. He definitely is not crazy, definitely not a menace. Everyone thinks he's the bad guy, but he's risking his life to try to end the No. 1 form of abuse toward these animals. The police department should be supporting him."
     Indeed, the police department stands behind Brownstein. Recently, after several months of working alone, he was assigned a new partner.
     "Obviously, we don't think he's crazy," said Camden. "We think he's very dedicated to what he's doing and takes a personal interest."
     "This is not something that exists solely in Steve Brownstein's head; I wish it was," said Mueller, who calls dogfighting "an epidemic." "The terrible reality, I can tell you, after being at Animal Control for many years, is this is a pervasive poison in almost all the wards in the the city of Chicago. This is not a black issue, not a white issue, not a Hispanic issue. All types, all creeds, are fighting animals out there. They do it for gambling. They do it for fun. It's a terrible problem."
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2000

Motel life: analyze, adapt, overcome.

      Inflation is bad, I know. But the specifics can still be startling. We were striding through the Chicago Botanic Garden earlier this month. It was hot, I was thirsty and a lemonade was in order. So I got in line at a refreshment stand and, in a pro forma way, asked what a cup of lemonade costs. Answer: $12. Mind you, this wasn't a lemonade and vodka, or fancy lemonade squeezed in front of your eyes. Just a glass of plain old lemonade. Made from water, sugar and a lemon or two. Or lemon extract, more likely. 

     Maybe I'm cheap, but I couldn't do it. I turned and fled, muttering apologies. Setting off toward a water fountain, I asked myself what was the most I would have paid for a lemonade there at the Botanic Garden, and decided $8. 
     Or on Sunday. We decided not to drive straight home the day after the wedding, but to stop in Traverse City, an hour south. Take it easy. We booked ourselves in a Best Western motel. What would you think a room at a Best Western would cost? With the $20 fee for the dog, over $300. Not to diss the hotel. It was clean, the clerks were very nice. There were chocolate chip cookies that evening and make-your-own waffles in the morning. 

     Though we did check into the special dog suite — it had an exit to outside the building, and no carpeting. But my wife didn't like the uncarpeted effect, so we quickly changed rooms, from 125 to 108.
    Which meant, when the air-conditioning started this loud whining hum, we were not predisposed to change rooms again. I mean, once is acceptable. But twice, that puts you in the realm of chronic complainers, if not the unhinged.  I figured, we'd get used to it.
     But I am nothing if not handy. And I know that noise is created by vibration. Approaching the air conditioner, I placed my palm firmly on the surface and pressed. The hum stopped. Now the thing to do was try to replicate the effect of my hand pressing hard on the air conditioner front panel. I slid over the one chair and wedged it against the air conditioner. It continued operating, quietly. Amazing. Sometimes stuff works. I was pleased with my handiwork though, frankly, for $306 a night, you expect better.

Danish notes #1: Spiral city

 

Church of Our Savior, Copenhagen

     "Leitmotif" originated as a German word, used by critics picking apart the works of Richard Wagner. A fitting term to start my reflection on Copenhagen, as Danish is a Germanic language. It means, roughly, a recurrent theme, and in the case of our recent visit to the capital of Denmark, the theme we kept returning to was, of all things, spirals.

Eliasson bridge

    The overture began hours after we landed, with an enigmatic tower glimpsed from the canal tour my wife cannily put us on, in the sound theory that we'd been traveling all day and would need some low energy activity to introduce us to the city. It worked. We saw all sorts of wonderful sights — a bridge designed by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson that looks like a sailing ship and collapses in on itself to let boats pass. The Rem Koolhaas-designed Danish Architecture Center, which I immediately tweeted at Lee Bey ("EAT YOUR HEART OUT!" I wrote, having decided years ago it is hysterical to taunt Lee, our architecture critic, when I see noteworthy architecture abroad. I can't hope he finds it as funny as I do; but he hasn't asked me to stop, which I take as license to continue). We even locked eyes on the backside of the Little Mermaid statue, sparing us the need to carve out time and face the throng for the obligatory visit.
     Above all, the Church of Our Savior, whose spiral steeple is unlike anything I've ever seen atop a building. Gold and black, we could see tiny figures working their way up the staircase. I wanted to be one of them.

Dragon Spire

     Moments later, we cruised past a second spiral steeple, the Dragon Spire atop the Old Stock Exchange, hove into view, evoking my favorite German saying, Einmal ist keinmal und zweimal ist immer, or "Once is never but twice is always."

     I noticed a trend, but did not expect a third spiral. The next day, however, we were wandering away from the Rosenborg Castle — delightfully downmarket, compared to palaces in Paris and Madrid — and happened upon the Rundetaarn, or Round Tower. We were looking for a particular marketplace, to lunch on their brand of open-faced sandwiches, and I figured atop the tower would be a good vantage point to eyeball it. 

     Don't let the bust of Tycho Brahe outside the tower fool you — the Danish astronomer died in 1601, in exile in Prague, while the Round Tower wasn't completed until 1642.

     The tower has no stairs, but a spiral path  winding seven and a half times around the building, the way the tower of Babylon is depicted. We paid our eight Euros and marched gamely upward. 

     "What's with Copenhagen and spirals?" I typed into Google, expecting all sorts of sites rhapsodizing bout Spiral City. Nothing. A lot about Church of Our Savior.  And that's about it. Nobody seemed to have made the connection before. 

Path up the Round Tower

     So the field is open to me. Readers might remember how in 2015 I used four shapes as a lens to view Chicago — the parabola, the circle, the square, the triangle. A spiral is the perfect representation a city, which also unwinds out from a central point over time — in "The Wizard of Oz," remember, Dorothy starts skipping along a spiraling Yellow Brick Road that leads her to the Emerald City. 

     The Round Tower went up in 1642. The Church of Our Savior spire was added in 1759. So I assumed the former inspired the latter. Not so. The Church of Our Savior website says it is based on the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, and I have no reason to doubt them.

     Those are the only two spiral church towers in the world I could find, which is odd, because spirals are an omnipresent natural design form, from starfish to galaxies. They've been used in architecture since Greek times — the capital of an Ionic column has a pair of spirals. Trajan's Column in Rome, built over 2,000 years ago, still has its spiral staircase inside. Modern buildings use them — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim comes to mind (though honestly, as a museum warrior, I'm no fan of that ramp). 

    I started to see them elsewhere in Copenhagen, pausing in the middle of the street to snap this spiraling brick chimney, the likes of which I've never seen before.

The Treetop Experience

    The Danes are still twirling. In 2019, a 148-foot-tall spiral ramp the Treetop Experience opened in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove,, a forest an hour south of Copenhagen. The structure is 12 loops around a hyperboloid, for you geometry geeks (an hourglass shape for everybody else) offering visitors a treetop view of the surrounding area. I didn't visit; next time (kidding; there never is a next time).

     My wife wanted to go to Christiana, the hippie commune turned tourist attraction, and I cut short her consultation with bus schedules by suggesting we bike there. 

    On the way, we saw the Church of Our Savior, first in the distance, then looming before us. Turns out, the church is a block from an entrance to Christiana. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We parked our bikes at the church, and after wandering about Christiana, enjoying an ice coffee, we went up the spire, which, rather than opening out on an observation deck, basically got narrower and narrower until you were jammed into an endpoint below the giant golden ball. It was not something pleasurable to do, but definitely something worth having done.

Fence around the Church of Our Savior.

"Look at this!"

Charlie Bliss

     Some work you can't do at home. For instance, you can't stop by the People's Republic of China Consulate on Erie, to talk to an official from the embassy in Washington, who's in town and asked you to stop by (nor can you decline; the Chinese, they're kinda important).
     Nor can you, in your home office, run into Charlie Bliss — or, rather, have Charlie run over to you at the Northbrook train station, where the retired Chicago firefighter and Maine South legend (Charlie retired as offensive coach in May after 22 seasons leading the highest scoring offense in Illinois) runs the coffee stand. 

     We hadn't seen each other in years, the thousand days that COVID compressed and scattered. He was glad to see me, and I was sure glad to see him. We hugged. He disappeared behind the coffee bar and emerged with the blog poster I'd given him a decade ago — taken down for safekeeping. He put it back up while I watched approvingly, then bought a coffee out of gratitude. So can you, Monday through Thursday. It seems a doable outing for those working at home in Northbrook. Head over to the train station, buy a donut and coffee from Charlie, support local business. I plan to. It's good coffee.
     Another thing you can't do making coffee in your kitchen is walk from Union Station to the Chinese consulate. Or stop in at Atlas Stationers on Lake Street. Where you greet Therese and Don Schmidt, the owners, and their son, Brandon — Brian works here too — and learn about the newest trainee, age 7.

The backing of the frame letters is carpeting 
from before the remodelling.

     "He loved it," said Therese, after we hugged. "The fifth generation."

      You might remember, we met Therese a dozen years ago, running deliveries through the underground streets beneath the Loop. Not much call for that lately. The store has shifted from an office supply store supplying file folders to surrounding businesses to a luxury pen emporium doing huge internet sales. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

     "We ship out so much," she said. "So many people come in."

    A thousand people came to their sidewalk sale. Yes, there was a person threatening to jump off building next door and that kind of got in the way for a while It's still Chicago. But the jumper was coaxed back inside and the sale was a great success. 

     We talked about the traditions of Atlas, founded in 1939. She showed me a table built by Don's father in 1948, and the one they had recently constructed — by an 80-year-old carpenter, which makes it kind of an honorary antique. They're covered with interesting notebooks and pens. 

     "I need to buy a pen," I said — not really needing to buy a pen, but wanting to contribute to the cause. She showed me some brawny $10 pens, and, being me, I picked out a promising orange Caran d'Ache pen from some cups holding less pricey pens, tested it to see the ink was indeed blue, paid the $6 or so, and tucked it into my sport coat pocket.

     Therese was so happy to see me, she followed me in the street when I left, talking about how the city seems to her from the perspective of running a business on the corner of Lake and Orleans.
     "People are nice," she said. An 'L' train rumbled by on the tracks directly above our heads, down Lake Street.
     "Look at this!" she said, gesturing toward the train and the tracks and the buildings beyond that and the sky above, the great big frenetic world. I understood what she meant, and headed toward the river and the consulate. I had walked several blocks when it struck me: next time, buy a more expensive pen.
     You can't figure that kind of thing out at home.

A brick shy of a load

      Lots of construction in my neighborhood. Fences go up, small humble Monopoly houses come down, equipment arrives, and far larger edifices go up in their place. With two nearby projects, to my amazement, the owners of large, attractive new homes have bought the lot next door to theirs and built secondary additions as large as the original home. I'm tempted to knock on the door and demand, "Why....?" But haven't gathered the courage yet. 

     Anyway, I have an idea as to the answer: because there's a lot of money in the world.
     At least the previous fashion — faux Norman mansion — seems to have fallen from favor. Now the style is American Gothic on steroids — someone's idea of a farmhouse, all vertical clapboard and metal roofs, but grown huge, perhaps due to exposure to radiation, like those ants in 1950s horror movies. How they resisted putting in a symbolic patch of real corn in front yard — I would — is a mystery.  The corn would pull everything together.
    Living in an actual 1905 farmhouse, one built when the surrounding area was an apple orchard, I sometimes envy the owners of these new places. How pristine they must be. How huge. How perfect. Our house has all sorts of idiosyncratic quirks — the bottom of the closet in one bedroom is three feet off the floor.  They bedrooms range from modest in size to small. If I don't duck strategically while walking through the basement, I risk smacking my head into a beam. The garage, which once held horses, is not designed for our modern bloated SUVs. My car just fits. That kind of thing.
      Thus I welcome reminders that the owners of these new homes have troubles of their own. I watched this particular neo-farm house go up a little south of my place. It seems aesthetic enough, if a little soulless. At least they left themselves a little bit of a front porch; a lot of places don't, I'll never understand why — well, actually, I do understand: because they are never going to sit out there, and if they did, there are no people walking by to greet. 

     Not quite. I was walking Kitty by there Tuesday night, and notice that the freshly laid steps had already lost a brick, smack in the middle. The construction couldn't have finished a month ago. Two, tops. And look. 

     This isn't schadenfreude. I hope. I'm not any better or smarter than the owner of this place. Probably a lot less. And when we bought our place, the front steps were also bricks. They also promptly began to fall away, so much that it was dangerous to go in through the front door. We ended up having to put on a new set of wooden steps which, 20 years on, are rotting in all sorts of alarming ways. I'll start to remove a rotten part, so I can patch and paint it, and the next thing I know a section a foot square is gone and I'm making custom molding in the basement. I should probably just rip the entire thing off and put on a new one. But that would be a big job, and if I can patch and delay another year, well, that works for me.

      Anyway, I paused to snap a photo. I intended to blur the address of the place, so as not to cast derision on any specific individual.  But when I took a look at it, I noticed that the pillar had been unintentionally lined up to block the address. As I always say, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. 

Works in progress: "Good for somethin': A Twitter Tale"

     Writing for publication is hard. I sometimes forget that, because writing for publication is about all I do. But this Saturday feature, Works in Progress reminds me. Even professional writers can have a tough time with it — I had a pal whom I asked to write a single sentence about a current project. Just one; I'd fill in the rest. The pal phoned me, genuinely panicked, stuck. Couldn't get a handle on it. I of course replied there was no need. But it was surprising. Then again, I've always had the gift of facileness. Or maybe the curse.

     So it didn't surprise me when the Saturday "Works in Progress" spot began to go unfilled. Until this week, when there were two offerings — it never rains, it pours. One, from a fiction writer, went into the weeds over a comment on the Tylenol killings column, and I decided the matter had been aired enough. 
     But this, by perennial reader Jakash, I'm happy to share. "Jakash" isn't his real name; he asked if I could preserve the fig leaf of anonymity. It IS daunting, to hang your identity out there — another reality that often flies past me. Sure, I said, why not? Take it away, Jakash:

     Almost exactly a year ago, my wife and I were taking a casual Saturday stroll through one of the non-descript parts of Lakeview in Chicago. As we walked south on Ravenswood, we noticed workers on scaffolding taking the siding off a building near Addison. Crossing to the south side of the street, by Dunkin Donuts, we turned back to see that an old advertisement was being revealed as the siding was pulled off: "Ward's Soft Bun Bread," certainly unfamiliar to us. My wife took a photo of the partially uncovered sign, and we figured we'd come back later to see more.
     Everybody knows that Twitter has its problems. More so since having been picked up at the bargain price of $44 billion by that emerald-encrusted champion of free speech, Elon Musk. (It was recently characterized by our genial host in the Sun-Times as "a toxic hellscape run poorly by a right-wing South African egomaniac..." Personally, I never signed up for it, since a) I realized that it would be a huge time sink and b) I'm not really what you'd call a joiner. 

     However, enough people I respect are on it that I've haphazardly sought out maybe a dozen  accounts. Looking at just those is also a time sink, of course, but not to the extent of becoming the time drain it could if I were actually participating.
     At any rate, many of the folks I follow are local history, architecture, infrastructure or nature-minded Tweeters who are frequently posting interesting ephemera or more significant news about under-reported goings-on in the city. I knew from them that the sign we'd seen was a ghost sign, i.e., a sign painted on a building that used to advertise something which has either been blocked from view by a newer building, or covered up by renovations. 

     "The ghost sign people are gonna love this!" I thought. 

      Since the corner of Addison and Ravenswood is not exactly in an uncharted wilderness, I figured I'd be seeing tweets about it soon. So, I waited, checking my usual suspects each day, pretty sure that if anybody posted photos of this sign, they would go viral, at least among the select group of like-minded Chicagoans. 

      We saw the workers on Saturday morning, July 9. By Tuesday evening, still nothing to indicate that the building had been discovered. I felt people were missing a treat, and figured I had 3 options: a) keep waiting. b) Join Twitter and post about the sign myself. Or c) pick somebody that I followed and hope that he'd visit the location and put it on his timeline, to then be seen by others. 

      I went with the third option. That night I decided to email Robert Loerzel, a journalist and photographer whom I consider the King of Local Twitter (editor's note: he is correct. Robert Loerzel is indeed the King of Local Twitter). He has over 20,000 followers and maintains a very robust and interesting timeline, thriving in the midst of the hellscape.

     I was pretty sure he'd be interested in this sign. Alas, for whatever reason, he didn't jump at the chance to visit the site and I went back to waiting for somebody else to stumble upon it.
     By the following Sunday, still nothing about this building. I couldn't believe it. Especially since we'd gone back and there were a number of other ghost signs now uncovered on the north side of the building. I knew from looking at his interesting Twitter account that Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern and a lover of local historical minutiae (and literature) (and baseball) (and bicycling) (and...) (editor's note: and hot dogs, and editor of my Chicago memoir) sometimes rode his bike on Damen Ave., which is two blocks away from Ravenswood. I thought perhaps he might make a slight detour sometime if he was riding by to see the signs. So I emailed four photos to him, specifying the location. 

     That worked. Within hours, he had stopped by, taken several of his own photos (much better than ours) and posted the news of these ghost signs to Twitter.
     And from there, it was off to the races. They were quite popular, among the people who find something like that appealing. Bill's tweet went viral in a low-key, non-Obama version of viral. (No doubt assisted in this regard by being retweeted by Robert Loerzel...) The signs were reported about and photographed by Colin Boyle on the news website Block Club Chicago and even made the TV news. Many folks took their own pictures and posted them. We had thought the building would most likely be torn down within a week. But the signs stayed up for over a month. People who are interested in preserving such historic material got involved and proceeded to painstakingly remove them. "Local experts dated the ads to the late 1920s and early ’30s," Colin Boyle wrote on Block Club. "They were painted directly onto wood panels as opposed to the common practice of painting onto brick, adding to their rarity.
     The moral of this tale is that Twitter contains multitudes. It's not just a free-fire zone for anybody with a wacky conspiracy theory to promote. There are a lot of folks who use it as the most efficient way to broadly share information. Though currently I don't even look at it, because Elon Musk, flashing his galaxy-brained brilliance, has decided that you must sign up in order to browse tweets now. And pay, if you want to enjoy certain features of the site. He's talked in the past about his wish for it to be a virtual town square, but doesn't seem to recognize the disconnect when it comes to his desire that people should pay one of the richest men on Earth in order to step onto the village green.
     Anyway, it was quite enjoyable for my wife and me to see what happened once this discovery became better known, and the signs ended up in good hands. As for the "Wards Soft Bun Bread" sign that we originally glimpsed? It's now in the possession of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/07/19/rare-decades-old-ghost-signs-revealed-on-ravenswood-building-facing-demolition/
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/08/12/rare-lakeview-ghost-signs-saved-just-days-before-demolition-thanks-to-donations/

Works in progress: Monica Eng

      Writing with a co-author is an entirely new gear for a writer. At least it was for me — whereas I usually write based on my own gut, now there was a second, exterior voice, one I was obligated to listen to, understand, respect. 

     Which wasn't a problem when I was writing "Out of the Wreck I Rise" with Sara Bader, who inevitably was right, or at least had a point, particularly when dialing back my more flowery prose. I remember her saying, "You're competing with the poetry."

     It was fun, educational, productive.

      So when I approached my former Sun-Times colleague, Monica Eng about her writing something here about her new book, "Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites," I asked her to address how she came to collaborate with her co-author.

    The only thing better than eating great local food is reading about it, and this book seems a natural summer read for those of us bouncing around the suddenly-warm city, eating stuff. Monica and her co-author will be at the Highland Park Public Library Monday, talking about their book. Take it away, Monica:

     After years of reporting on Chicago-invented dishes, I was having lunch with a food historian friend who suggested I collect a bunch of their origin stories in a book. The University of Illinois Press was launching a 3 Fields imprint on Midwest culture and he thought it would be natural fit.
     I was barely keeping up as a mom, radio journalist and podcaster — much less a person who regularly washes her hair. So it seemed nuts to add a book deadline to the chaos. But at a book party in late 2018, I was talking to my pal and fellow food writer, David Hammond, about the difficulty of the project and he agreed to take on half the writing. We cooked up a book proposal and finally signed a contract right before the pandemic hit. I don’t think we saw each other’s faces in person for four years after that party.

     When it came to figuring out the 30 foods to feature we used these rules: All the dishes (or twists on them) had to be invented in Chicago, served in more than one place and tell an interesting story. To meet our 18 month deadline, I worked during vacations, on weekends and at night, mostly wishing I’d never agreed to do it. But like most of my big babies, this one has left me with nothing but pride as the memories of labor pain fade away. The book designers did a nice job of making this perfect for the your bike basket and glove compartment, so you can whip it out anywhere in the city to learn that a tasty bite and story are right around the corner.
      But more than just making an eating guide, I wanted to highlight these inventors, almost all of who were recent arrivals from other countries or the South. Our hot dog toppings tell the story of early 20th Century migration to Maxwell Street. The Pizza Puff comes from Assyrian immigrants from Iran crafted hot dog carts from baby buggies and manufactured corn roll tamales. Rib tips hit menus because Chicago barbecue masters from Mississippi didn’t want to waste a gnarly bit of the rib that many threw away. And the Akutagawa omelet represents Japanese-Americans in Wrigleyville who held onto small part of their culture even after the U.S. government told them to leave it behind.
    Beyond the happy stories, though, I found a bigger depressing story of persistent cultural segregation. Few South Siders have ever eaten the Akutagawa or gam pong gi, and fewer North Siders have tried Sweet Steaks, Jim Shoes or Pizza Puffs covered in mild sauce. My naïve hope, though, is that this book might change that a little — that these stories might intrigue readers to the point where they bust out of their own neighborhoods to try something new across town that gives them a little better understanding of the people who share their city.