Chicago’s Left Bank

Title: Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith

Location: Google Books       Date: 1953

This is one of my favorite books on the subject of literary Chicago. Smith has a witty style that matches his topic and, I believe, will grab you from the get go. Tracing the history of Chicago’s literati we get a glimpse of the bohemians in their native environment – Towertown. You’ll love it.

Out In Chicago, the only genuinely civilized city in the New World, they take the fine arts seriously and get into such frets and excitements about them as are raised nowhere else save by baseball, murder, political treachery, -foreign wars, and romantic loves . . . almost one fancies the world bumped by a flying asteroid, and the Chicago River suddenly turned into the Seine.—Henry L. Mencken in the Smart Set.

Chapter I
Montmartre in the Midwest

EVERYTHING in Chicago dates from the Year of the Fire, 1871. Post anno incendii, the chief structure left standing on the north bank of the Chicago River was the waterworks building on East Chicago Avenue. The tall stone tower of this inelegant edifice looked out over the fire-blackened ruins of what had been one of the city’s better residential sections, the Near North Side.

It was only natural that when the rebuilding began, the area in the immediate vicinity of the old water tower should be dubbed “Towertown.” And, like the arch in New York’s Washington Square and the golden dome of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre, that tower was destined to cast a long shadow over the world of arts and letters. In the years between 1912 and 1924, it was the geographical center of what was perhaps the most vital literary and artistic upsurge in the history of the country. At least Papa Mencken thought so; in 1920 he went to England to startle the dilettantes of Fleet Street with the information that the Germans had really won the war and that Chicago, Illinois, was the literary capital of the universe.

The part about Chicago was approximately true, although book critic Harry Hansen, speaking for the city’s better classes, angrily denied the accusation. In those years corn-fed hopefuls from all over the Midwest flowed into the free-and-easy bohemia of the gigantic abattoir by Lake Michigan. They came to read their poems to Harriet Monroe in the studio at 543 Cass Street, to study under Lorado Taft at the Art Institute, and to chase fire-engines for Henry Justin Smith and the Chicago Daily News in return for the privilege of rubbing shoulders in the city room with Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht.

Towertown was the center of this renaissance. It was happily situated between the palaces of a rich residential area, the Lake Shore Drive “Gold Coast,” and the miasmal slums of Little Hell. Little Hell, like the deteriorated areas around New York’s Greenwich Village, was largely Italian, and the cheap spaghetti parlors of the neighborhood had atmosphere to fit the temperament and price to fit the pocketbook of the impoverished artists and writers in the batik-curtained coach houses, studios, and stables of Towertown. North Avenue, main artery of the old German “Nort’ Seit’,” bounded bohemia on the north, and the river, with its many bridges into the Loop, was on the south. Bisecting the whole area was the bright gut of the North Clark Street rialto, traditional main drag of hobohemia and the demi-world, with its saloons, night clubs, gambling joints and “hotels.” Rents were cheap, the Loop was within easy walking distance, and the finest beach in the city was at the foot of Oak Street. All this and Ireland’s, too—for one of the world’s best sea food restaurants was on North Clark Street, and still is.

Magazines of a Market-metropolis By Herbert Easton Fleming

Full Title: Magazines of a Market-metropolis: Being a History of the Literary Periodicals and Literary Interests of Chicago  by Herbert Easton Fleming

Location: Google Books     Date: 1906

With a suggestion in its name of the bright give-and-take of afternoon teas, Four O’Clock was conspicuous among the original magazines expressing the attitude of certain literary workers, pen-and-ink artists, and dabblers in art at Chicago in the late nineties. Its descriptive subtitle proclaimed it to be “a monthly magazine of original writings,” and its motto was “Sincerity, beauty, ease, cleverness.” Most of its contents were from Chicago writers. Not all were so original and clever, nor so marked by ease and beauty of style, as to be of special literary value, though some had a degree of merit. The “sincerity” was its expression of that vague spiritual quality known as the artist soul. In illustrations, however, the periodical was original and specially attractive. The reproductions of drawings, done so as to give them the effect of originals, appeared on leaves of special texture, pasted into the magazine. This device gave the periodical distinctive aesthetic values. Young artists, a majority of them students at the Art Institute, did most of this illustrating. Among the illustrators was Carl Werntz, who is now the head of the Art Academy, an independent art school in Chicago. Four O’Clock was started some time after the Chap-Book had reached the height of its career in Chicago. No. I was dated February, 1897. With the seventy-first number, December 1902, Four O’Clock was merged in Muse, another of the art-spirit literary periodicals, which had grown out of still another called Philharmonic. Literary workers who recall these magazines characterize them as dilettante ephemerals.

Note: This is one of my favorite resources on early Chicago magazines. But, be advised. This was Mr. Fleming’s dissertation. There is not one illustration in the entire paper.

Cartoons Magazine edited by H. H. Windsor

Full Title: Cartoons Magazine, edited by Henry Havens Windsor; Published by H.H. Windsor

Location: Google Books     Date Published: 1919

Up an Alley to a Wild Place

The Dill Pickle club in Chicago is where visitors from the country and New York are taken to have shivers and shocks. Most of Chicago’s best people go there, and all of its worst people.

Lecturers (who once were professors of comparative ethics at the University of Copenhagen or Bayreuth, and are now deans of lunchrooms or prominent night watchmen) deftly set aside the laws of gravitation and attraction, and show where Newton and Galileo were wrong. The drama is dragged upward by the hair of its head, and a successful evening at the club is measured by the number of women who leave before the meeting is half over.

To get to the Dill Pickle, you go through a tight passageway (too narrow for a fat secret service man to get through) into a blind alley, and continue westward till you come to a garbage can. Right alongside this can is the doorway into the club.

One Saturday night a Chicago detective was showing a friend from Kansas City all the tough places in town. Finally, they came in sight of the Dill Pickle Club, where an affinity masquerade was effervescing. The ex-garage in which the club is housed was brilliantly lighted; clouds of cigaret smoke poured from the windows, and the strains of an orchestra almost in tune cleft the night air.

“There’s one wild place, Jake,” said the detective.

“Tough, eh?” responded the visitor.

“You said it. Every guy that goes into that hall is searched for concealed weapons—and if they find a guy who ain’t got any concealed weapons, they give him some.” John Nicholas Beffel.

Popular Mechanics cover (1904)

Cartoons Magazine, published monthly beginning in 1912 at 6 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago,  specialized in social and political cartoons wrapped  with editorial from around the world. Poems, essays and jokes (as the above excerpt illustrates) framed the cartoons, but the whole point of the magazine was to feature cartoonists. Chicago Tribunecartoonists John T. McCutcheon and Clare Briggs were frequent contributors. Editor Henry Haven Windsor (1859-1924) was also the founder and first editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine.

  

More information on Cartoons Magazine:

 Cartooning: Cartoons Magazine January 1916 from ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive