I always knew Clark and Congress was historical

but I didn't know how historical

09/15/2011 2:15 AM

By Bonnie McGrath

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Margaret Hicks of Chicago Elevated Tours was taking a bunch of South Loop Neighbors through the South Loop on a turn of the century history tour Wednesday night. The tour vacillated between depraved stories of prostitutes who roamed around and robbed and ridiculed their customers within clusters of brothels along State, Dearborn and Federal. And the history and architecture of the Chicago skyscraper.


Then there was the story of bartender Mickey Finn from the Lone Star Saloon. I found out later that infamous saloon just happened to be where State Place is now at 1101 S. State. Before that, the corner housed the First District police station. Finn used to drug his customers with a mixture of pure alcohol, tobacco juice and a mysterious white powder--and then roll them in the alley. If the low-life prostitutes didn't get to them first.

Then there were the cornices, the bay windows, the rusticated Richardsonian Romanesque facades, the metalwork, the modern and the post-modern of South Loop structures such as the Manhattan Building (1888), the Old Colony (1893), the Donahue (1883), the Dirksen Federal Building (1964) and the Harold Washington Library (1991).

Suddenly, Hicks, who is boisterous and animated in her tour-guiding, leaned over and said something like, "You wanna see what the Red Light streets of vice looked like back in the day? That's what they looked like!" And she pointed to the west side of Clark, just north of Congress--to a strip of buildings that are old and decrepit, but filled with character, to say the least. According to Hicks, they still harbor exactly the kind of atmosphere that the rest of the South Loop grew out of long ago.

It's just a little strip, not even a block long, but even before Hicks' declaration, I always felt it should be declared a local landmark and preserved like other historical strips. It's got the single-room-occupancy-with-doorways-that-are-closed-in-look. Peopled-with-those-who-could-be-gamblers-pimps-or-drug-addicts-coming-and-going-like-they-are-up-to-no-darn-good-types. And-businesses-like-pawn-shops-currency-exchanges-and-fried-with-lard-only-restaurants.


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By Paul from Original Wrigleyville
Posted: 09/15/2011 10:40 AM

Robbing the johns is one thing, but ridiculing them is just plain unprofessional!