Chicago History Museum
Chicago’s Extraordinary Queer History
Recently, Jennie Brier and I, as the curators of Out in Chicago, were invited to be guests on Feast of Fun, the nation’s most downloaded LGBT podcast. Life partners Marc Felion and Fausto Fernós produce the talk/variety show from their home in Andersonville. They beckoned us inside from the February chill with a cup of chamomile tea, and we proceeded to have a blast.
Out co-curators Jennifer Brier (left) and Jill Austin examine a caricature of nineteenth-century gender rebel Dr. Mary Walker. Photo by Roberta Dupuis-Devlin, courtesy of UIC College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
We love these fabulous men but didn’t know quite what to expect: it was our first time experiencing the show at the microphone, with noisemakers and a rubber chicken clad in a polka-dot bikini at our feet. It was a party, a celebration, and a stimulating conversation about the history of LGBT people in Chicago and our thought process behind the scenes, all in one. We talked a lot about the foundation of Chicago’s queer history and stories that Marc and Fausto found fascinating or thought provoking. Their excitement and hospitality made me, once again, happy to be a curator and grateful to be part of this amazing exhibition.
Thanks to our Feast of Fun hosts, people around the nation have the opportunity to hear more about what we in Chicago are doing with LGBT history. Check out feastoffun.com or iTunes for this and other hilarious installments. And, join Jennie and me for a live version (sequel, if you like) at Out at CHM’s Curators Bare All discussion on Thursday, March 8.
Illinois residents, don’t forget! The Chicago History Museum is free every day through the rest of February. It’s a great opportunity to see the Out in Chicago exhibition before it closes on March 26.
> Listen to the Feast of Fun #1523: Chicago’s Extraordinary Queer History
> Buy tickets to Curators Bare All ($12, $10 members and students)
> Learn more about Out in Chicago
From the Desk of James L. Smith
Blogger’s note: For this installment of the People and Places series, DePaul students Christina John, Kevin Kauffman, Maureen Maher, and Brandon Wright talked with Pam Smith about her late father, James L. Smith.
A decorated World War II veteran, civil rights activist, and loving father, Mr. Smith had one weapon of choice when fighting for equality — his typewriter. Smith spent much of his time tenaciously typing hundreds of letters through which he fought for African American rights and equality.
James L. Smith, 1945
Courtesy of Pam Smith
Born in 1922, Smith spent his earliest years in the southern Illinois town of Harrisburg. He later moved to Chicago where he attended Englewood High School on the South Side. Known to his classmates as “Tank” and “Smitty,” he became the first African American to make the all-Chicago basketball team. Smith, in 1942, enlisted in the US Army in the midst of the war.
By late 1944, the United States had suffered heavy casualties while battling Nazi German opposition in Europe, especially during the Battle of the Bulge. Because of depleted troop levels, American General Dwight D. Eisenhower briefly lifted the ban on racial segregation in the military. In one day, about 4,500 African Americans volunteered to serve their country in temporarily desegregated units. The 2,221 volunteers who passed weapons training became part of the first group of African Americans to integrate the armed forces.
Volunteering for integrated combat came with a price for these African American soldiers. Many experienced demotions. Smith, a former corporal, was demoted to private in order to fight with the Seventy-Eighth Infantry. Nevertheless, Smith served his country bravely, fighting with the “2,221” in Germany, mostly along the Rhine. When later asked about his reasons for volunteering, Smith said he “wanted to secure [his] rights as an American citizen.”
Even after the war, Smith and his African American comrades were not restored to their previous ranks. The 2,221 fought and died for a country that refused to recognize their bravery. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman officially desegregated the U.S. military. After eleven years of military service, Smith was honorably discharged and decided to work at the U.S. Post Office in north suburban Evanston.
In 1974, Smith requested a vacation day on January 15, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, but his supervisors denied the request. Despite this denial, Smith did not attend work, and he was penalized. He then filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the grounds that no employer could discriminate regarding the observation of such holidays. The complaint included support for holidays like St. Patrick’s Day and Rosh Hashanah. Pragmatic and fair-minded, he wrote, “I will not make demands of one group at the expense of others.”
Smith typed sixty-two letters to federal agencies in defense of his position. Stopping short of court proceedings, the post office finally relented to Smith’s request for a day off. In 1983, President Ronald Regan signed legislation officially making the third Monday in January a federal holiday in Dr. King’s honor. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first observed in 1986, and in 1994 Congress designated MLK Day a national service day.
Smith’s daughter Pam remembers the numerous times her father’s activism began with the stroke of his typewriter keys. Though not always a perfect man, Smith was a fighter who recognized that change did not come easily. He taught his family members to question authority and think for themselves. To Pam, Smith imparted the gift of consciousness, a way of thinking and looking at the world that opened her eyes to service. Smith’s civic-minded spirit lives on in Pam and her sisters, who all have chosen a career in the field of social activism.
Listen to Pam Smith talk about her dad, James L. Smith:
2122 North Clark Street
The only noteworthy characteristic about the building that stood at 2122 North Clark Street was its scale—a two-story brick structure in a block of three-story and higher apartment buildings and commercial structures. The façade was unremarkable; two mounted lights framed a small storefront window and an entrance door, and the limestone-capped parapet wall above the roof made an architectural nod to a pediment. It had the appearance of a funeral home rather than a warehouse.
Police and curious onlookers crowd the street in front of the SMC Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark Street as news of the crime spreads across the city. CHM, ICHi-27393
On February 14, 1929, gunmen lined seven men up against the north wall of the SMC Cartage Company building and mowed them down with shotguns and Thompson submachine guns, a heinous crime now famously known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Documented in gruesome newspaper photographs, the murders left the public with a searing image of gang violence, which, despite the inconclusive finding of the investigation that unknown assailants killed the men, ultimately helped seal the fate of Al Capone. The audacious crime endured as legend, and for thirty-eight years, people from around the world made pilgrimage to this nondescript building to see the bullet-pocked wall and imagine the unfolding carnage.
Cook County Coroner Herman Bundesen (right in glasses and bow tie) directs a re-enactment of the murder as part of his investigation. CHM, DN-0087708
Watch a dramatization of the massacre
Boarded up briefly after the murder, the building passed through a number of owners and moving companies over the next two decades. In 1949, Charles and Alma Werner took over the building as a packing, shipping, and storage facility. Impatient with the ongoing stream of visitors who came to see the wall, they plastered over the bricks.
The neighborhood underwent dramatic change in the 1960s. Lincoln Park Project 1, part of the General Neighborhood Renewal Plan for Lincoln Park, called for the demolition of 617 structures, some considered substandard housing, others because the land was needed for community facilities. 2122 North Clark and all of the structures north of it to Webster Street—almost twenty buildings—were slated for demolition to make way for senior citizen housing. The city purchased the building from the Werners, and the National Wrecking Company demolished it; on November 9, 1967, the company salvaged 414 bricks from a six-by-ten-foot section of the north wall where the victims were shot to be sold to the highest bidder.
Google satellite image of North Clark Street with overlaid image of the 2122 building from 1935 Sanborn Fire Atlas to indicate location of demolished structure. Created by Russell Lewis.
2122 North Clark Street today. Photographs by Russell Lewis.
George Paley, a Vancouver-based publicist, purchased the bricks and shipped them to Canada. Public outcry dashed his initial efforts to display a reconstructed massacre wall with lifelike mannequins of the killers and victims at shopping malls. In 1971, he installed the wall in the men’s room of the Banjo Palace bar and restaurant, where patrons viewed it until it closed in 1976. The bricks then went into storage, and Paley sold about a hundred of them to individual buyers before his death in 2004. His heirs sold the remaining bricks to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which opens today and features a reconstruction of the wall. So if you want to see this famous landmark, you’ll have to head to Nevada. After all, what happens in Chicago, stays in Vegas.
L Car No. 1 on the Move
See Chicago’s first-ever L car travel from the CTA’s storage facility in Skokie to the Chicago History Museum. Contractors took two days (January 18 and 19, 2006) to relocate the 42,000-pound artifact and carefully lift it into the second floor of our building. Russell Lewis, the Museum’s chief historian and executive vice president, narrates the video, explaining the origins of the L and its importance to Chicago.
Graceland Cemetery: A Design History
Vernon, Christopher. Graceland Cemetery: A Design History. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press in association with Library of American Landscape history (2011).
President’s Commentary, February, 2012.
Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery too often is best known for its “residents” and their monuments. Now, thanks to this well-researched and illuminating book, the cemetery itself comes into view as a masterpiece of American landscape design. First laid out in 1860, the cemetery took shape as a result of national and local trends, including the innovation of the “rural” cemetery as epitomized by Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the building mania in Chicago, which attracted architectural talent to that city even before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. William Le Baron Jenney – who finally has his own gravestone at Graceland – is a key figure for both the city and the cemetery. If this book had been written two decades ago, it would have had an elegiac tone, because over the years, some of the cemetery’s original features had fallen into disuse and guiding principles had been forgotten. Beginning in 1991, however, Graceland has seen one successful renovation after another, all based on careful research. This new book will serve that on-going project well, but equally importantly, it will help us to understand and appreciate cemeteries around the country that were built in the same spirit.
The House that made History
Editor’s note: The Chicago History Museum welcomes first-time blogger Naomi Blumberg, who recently joined our curatorial staff.
When it was announced that the Hull House Association would be shutting down, I was struck by how many people were shocked and saddened by the news. Having worked for two years at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, I was prepared to know a lot of people who would be emotionally affected by the closure of the organization, people dedicated to telling the stories of the revolution that had its humble beginnings in that very building on South Halsted Street.
The Hull-House complex at 800 S. Halsted Street, c. 1910. CHM, photograph by Barnes-Crosby, i19288
But the Hull House Association was not a museum: it was the living, breathing legacy of the most famous settlement house in America. The impact of its closing reaches far beyond the history lovers and devotees of Jane Addams, the so-called “grandmother of social work.” The association, working in the spirit of Addams and the countless residents of the Hull-House Settlement, provided services to those who needed it most, and its closing is a great loss to communities around the city.
Jane Addams, social reformer and activist, c. 1892. CHM, i09378
Hull-House played an important role in the building of Chicago. It began more than 120 years ago when Jane Addams and her close friend Ellen Gates Starr arrived on the Near West Side, the most depressed and heavily populated part of town. Their initial goal, to bridge the gap between the rich and poor by offering encounters with art and culture to a population of the city without access to such luxuries, was soon joined by many more pressing needs. The two women realized that, while these were, perhaps, wonderful ways to lift the spirits of their neighbors, it was a far cry from all they truly needed. And thus began a remarkable foray into what we recognize today as social services.
Children in a Hull-House art class, 1924. CHM, Chicago Daily News collection, DN-0076595
The impact of the Hull-House Settlement is more far-reaching than most can imagine. When I arrived to work at the Hull-House Museum on the campus of UIC in 2009, I knew very little about Jane Addams, the function of a settlement house, or the Hull-House Settlement’s history. What I learned about the work of Hull-House residents astounded me. How could these women accomplish so much at a time when they didn’t even have the right to vote? It was truly a progressive era! The environment they cultivated in the house (and ultimately throughout the complex of thirteen buildings) and the legislation that passed and the policies that were reformed due to their collective efforts and savvy navigation of the local, state, and federal governments gave rise to the very foundation of our democracy:
- The eight-hour workday
- Investigation into and reform of child labor laws
- Founding of the first juvenile court in the United States
- Establishment of housing codes
- Establishment of the first public playground
- Protection of immigrants’ rights
- Advocacy for women’s rights
- Health services for babies, children, and mothers
- Access to the city’s first public baths (since many in that neighborhood did not have a place to wash at home)
- Access to art-making in all media, including dance, music, and theater
- A safe place to celebrate one’s heritage and find camaraderie
- Among many, many others
The Hull-House Settlement was keenly aware of the changing needs of the people it served. By the 1960s, Chicago’s many immigrant communities had spread out to different neighborhoods, so Hull-House (which was, by this time, officially the association) set up satellite centers throughout the city, hoping to serve as many communities as possible.
When UIC was established in its current location, it turned two of the original thirteen Hull-House buildings into a museum to serve as a memorial and tell the stories of the thousands of people who lived and worked there. The Hull House Association, until last week, continued to work with and advocate for Chicago’s underserved population, offering classes and social services and preserving Jane Addams’s legacy.
Right now, you will find Jane Addams and the history of Hull-House in two Chicago History Museum galleries: the Crossroads exhibition and Out in Chicago. These displays explore the important work that was done at the Hull-House Settlement to shape our city and our nation.
If you want to learn more, I invite you to visit the Chicago History Museum, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at 800 S. Halsted Street, and these online resources:
> Plan your visit to the Chicago History Museum
> Visit the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum website
> Read a brief history of Hull-House
> Explore related primary sources and scholarly essays
> See photographs of social reform
> Discover the end-of-life story of Hull-House co-founder Ellen Gates Starr
The Most Shocking Playboy Issue Ever
After 58 years of publishing in Chicago, Playboy Enterprises recently announced the move of all editing, art, and photography operations to Los Angeles. Readers of the announcement, largely communicated through Facebook and other social media, could hardly believe their eyes—and needless to say, they weren’t looking at any centerfold. Say it ain’t so, Playboy!
The first issue of Playboy, December 1953
CHM collection
Departments and archives based at founder Hugh Hefner’s original mansion will leave the city, as will nearly all employees. Only a skeleton crew of staff will remain at 680 N. Lake Shore Drive but the company has not yet divulged further details on who will stay and how they will function at the Chicago offices. Since last year, about 245 employees were based here.
Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, Chicago, c. 1965
Gift of the estate of photographer Declan Haun, i40391
In 1953, at age twenty-seven, Chicago entrepreneur Hugh Hefner debuted the first issue of Playboy magazine. Aimed at (but not solely appealing to) men who fancied themselves masculine, intellectual swinging singles of postwar prosperity, Playboy was an innovative product that blended hard news and progressive journalism with work of emerging fiction, interspersed between photo spreads of delicious ladies, including startling nude shots of Marilyn Monroe. Within its first weeks of publication, the issue had sold 72,000 copies, and Hefner was on his way to growing a sexual empire. He used the popular yet controversial magazine as a vehicle to explore issues of censorship, sexual freedom and desire, civil rights, political corruption, and creativity.
Hefner expanded by catering to experiences like the members-only Playboy Club, which opened in Chicago in 1960 and sought to fulfill heterosexual male fantasies of having it all: good drink, good company, stimulating conversation, all provided by female creatures/waitresses known as Bunnies clad in low-cut bodices, bunny-ear headpieces, and cottontails. The Chicago club closed in 1988 and the Museum has several artifacts and costumes from the club in its collection.
Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Club, c. 1960
Gift of photographer Stephen Deutch, i23629
Playboy Bunny costume, 1972
Gift of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 1972.239
It seems Chicago-based historians and the most ardent local fans have dreaded the possible loss of our homegrown girlie magazine over recent years—perhaps even as early as Hefner’s relocation to California in the 1970s—as publishers continue to struggle in this sluggish economy. Today, the most moneymaking piece of Playboy is the brand, and merchandising continues to expand. Despite the failure of the short-lived television series this past fall, the club is still enjoying a comeback with plans for development around the globe.
The Chicago History Museum has a full run of Playboy in its Research Center for historians looking for a little vintage cheesecake.
Thanks for a great run, Playboy.