Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant
Sister Bay, Wisconsin

By Jenna Goldsmith

Before Americans were obsessed with the Swedish practice of fika, Norbert Blei was perfecting it at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant and Butik in Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

“I must go to Al Johnson’s for coffee . . . for conversation, camaraderie, my late morning break,” Blei declares in his 2002 essay “Counter Culture.” But it had snowed all night in Sister Bay, so much so that the road from Blei’s home to his beloved coffee counter at Al Johnson’s was impassable. 

Blei’s destination sits at the bottom of a hill, the focal point of Sister Bay, which is itself a hub of the scenic Door Peninsula. The restaurant, which began as a humble operation—just breakfast and dinner, cooked, served, and bussed by Al Johnson himself—is now a bustling terminus for locals and vacationers alike. It is not uncommon for diners to sit down for a meal of Pytt I Panna (Swedish hash) a full two hours after putting their name on the waiting list. Servers dress in traditional Swedish dirndls, just as they did a half century ago, and the food is served on dishes from Persgrund, Norway. During the summer months, there are goats on the roof. 

No matter how many times I visit Al’s, I never stray from my usual short stack of Swedish pancakes, Swedish meatballs, and lingonberries (and lots of coffee). Though he has been gone for nearly seven years, I inevitably find myself staring at the coffee counter nestled in the restaurant’s northeast corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of Norbert. I like to picture him there, hunched over a cup of coffee and a folded-over Door County Advocate, or his manuscript in progress, knowing full well that if he were actually there, I wouldn’t have the gumption to approach him and risk interrupting his beloved fika. Still, I play this hologram game. I ask my mom to describe to me for the hundredth time my eccentric distant cousin Chuck Clemensen, another counter sitter, who Norbert called “Wall Street Charley.” “Well, Chuck was tighter than the bark on a tree,” my mom would remind me. “He died with the first nickel he ever earned, and he claimed to know the original recipe of Coca-Cola because he worked as a chemist for the company.” Chuck frequently fika-ed alongside Norbert and Al. I imagine they spoke about Door County’s rapid transformation, influx of vacationers, and their shared history as native Chicagoans.

Though I never met Norbert, I feel that we are kindred spirits, tied together not just by our mutual Chuck, but by our alma mater Illinois State University, our vocations as writers, and our love of counter culture. As of late, I can’t help but relate to the ambivalent Norbert of “Counter Culture” sitting in his warm, safe home, debating whether or not to brave the elements for fika at Al’s. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my own writing practice relied heavily upon a coffee counter down the street from my apartment in Bend, Oregon. This practice, along with many others, has been completely upended. And though I think of myself as flexible—professional enough that I can work anywhere—my writing life has suffered. I find myself wondering how Norbert would have fared without the respite of the safe, welcoming coffee counter at Al’s. 

Norbert eventually made it to Al’s coffee counter that snowy February day. Did I ever really doubt him? Even February in Wisconsin is no match for fikasugen.

Jenna Goldsmith is the Assistant Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University. She is the author of two chapbooks, Genesis Near the River (blush books, 2019), and Suppose the Room Just Got Brighter (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her poetry can be found in New Delta Review, Tildé, and Sheepshead Review. In 2019, she was honored to be named a Mari Sandoz Emerging Writer by the Story Catcher Literary Festival at Chadron State College. Learn more about Jenna at jennalgoldsmith.com.

Photo courtesy of Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant.

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Angelou Memorial
Stamps, Arkansas

By Greer Veon

Despite living in southwest Arkansas most of my life, my first visit to Stamps was with my parents in August 2018. We made the trip on a Sunday afternoon before my flight back north the following morning, my parents joking that Stamps was the kind of place that kept to itself. I sat in the backseat picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across and imagined feeling the breeze she once breathed.

In September 2017, a local newspaper reported that a memorial sign dedicated to Angelou disappeared from the grounds of Lake June days after Stamps elected Brenda Davis, their first Black mayor. “It makes you wonder,” Mayor Davis told reporters. “But I wouldn’t speculate.” All the same, the mayor’s suspicions resonated, coming as they did in the Southern town that served as the backdrop for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s painful 1969 memoir about coming of age during the Jim Crow era. Over time I searched for updates, but the suspects’ names were never printed, and the story went cold.

In a way, Angelou’s memoir prefigures Mayor Davis’s wariness:

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high rise? The answer must be in the experiences shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.

In the early 20th century, Stamps served as a flag stop for the railroads that stretched across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. I grew up forty-five minutes away on the state line between the twin cities of Texarkana, one of the bigger stops on that same line, the Cotton Belt Route. Many of my childhood memories are set in the backseat of our family car as we took weekend drives on local roads through one-stoplight towns filled with forgotten gas stations and churches. Most of the newer highways bypassed Stamps. So did most people. When my ninth-grade English class read Angelou’s memoir, our teacher spoke less about how close we lived to the town and more about parents’ letters asking that my classmates be excused from the reading.

I didn’t revisit that memory until shortly after I moved away and read a piece on the Celebrate Maya Project, which was holding a 2018 celebration for the author’s 90th birthday. Angelou’s admirers gathered in Stamps to honor her and witness her childhood landscape. Still, I couldn’t shake the missing sign. I wondered what remained, and I longed to visit Maya’s hometown the next time I returned home.

On the way to Stamps that afternoon, we stopped at Burge’s, a retro dairy barn in nearby Lewisville, where we ordered from the front window. Minutes after stuffing ourselves with brisket and chocolate pies, we entered Stamps’ historic downtown, marked by a post office and outdoor storefronts. Paint cans and a ladder leaned against a half-completed mural. As we crossed over the train tracks, I looked for Annie Henderson’s merchandise store, the center of Angelou’s life in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it’s gone.

We found Lake June on the edge of town, the water drained enough to expose its bottom brush. Despite reports that the state would replace the missing sign, there, almost a year after it was stolen, stood a wooden skeleton of the memorial. There’s something sobering to see that as the same place where a young Angelou spent her alone time. Even Maya Angelou, a voice of her generation, still faces these attempts at erasure, even in the town that played such a vital role in her legacy. Angelou’s memoir addresses a childhood filled with love and pain that stayed with her no matter where she moved. What “heroes and bogeymen” have other children first encountered here and other towns alike?  I feared who decides what parts of our homes will be made forgotten. Will they make space or blot out the experiences, the identities of their neighbors? I inhaled the damp air and left without answers.

Greer Veon is a writer who works for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent work has been featured in ELLE. Find her at greerveon.com.

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1525 N. Campbell Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Olga L. Herrera

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in the Little Village neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. At the time, the area was in transition between Eastern Europeans leaving for the suburbs ahead of the incoming Mexican immigrant families, who bought up the neighborhood’s turn-of-the-century working-class homes. If I had read The House on Mango Street when it was published in 1984, I would have been convinced that Sandra Cisneros was writing about Little Village. That’s how real it felt, with versions of Lucy and Rachel from Texas living down the street, and Cathy Queen of Cats who is moving away because she says “the neighborhood is getting bad.”

The House on Mango Street, however, was based on Cisneros’s childhood in Humboldt Park in the 1960s on the near north side of the city. Even though our two neighborhoods felt similar, they have distinct characters. A tiled archway over the eastern end of the neighborhood symbolizes Little Village’s Mexican identity, while in Humboldt Park, enormous metal Puerto Rican flags arch over a diverse mix of eateries on Division Street, including a Mexican taqueria and a Colombian cafe. Recently, gentrification has been changing the demographics and character of Humboldt Park more swiftly, making a significant change on Cisneros’s old street.

The House on Mango Street was partly inspired by her memories of the house her family bought when she was a young girl, at 1525 N. Campbell Ave. If you do an online image search for the “real” house on Mango Street, you will find images of a red brick two-story house with a flat roof and a small front yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. It looks just as Esperanza describes. But it’s not a picture of the original house.

At a symposium I attended in 2017, Sandra Cisneros explained that this image had circulated for years but was, in fact, a photograph of the house directly across the street. The red house in the picture is 1524 N. Campbell Avenue, and it is a mirror image of her house, with the front door on the reverse side. Her childhood home had been demolished in the early 2000s, and a new condominium building was constructed in its place in 2005. You couldn’t see her original home anymore, she said, but the one across the street would give you a good idea of what it looked like.

These two houses tell the story of gentrification in Humboldt Park. One is a modest two-story house with painted brick, a metal awning, and narrow windows. The other is a sleek three-story building with large windows that open to balconies on each floor, with a garden level below. Located between two larger, older apartment buildings, it bears elements of their style, but because the footprint of the plot belonged to that smaller house, the new building at 1525 N. Campbell is wedged into the space, with the northern exterior wall angled away to make room for a narrow gangway. Ceilings have swept upward, and bay windows and a new third floor have sprouted. It has an attenuated look, seeming to both belong and not belong.

The differences represent not only changes in architecture but also in affordability and the families who can live in this building. Gentrification reverses the mid-century trend of white flight to the suburbs. Now wealthy families move in, and less affluent immigrants and families of color have fewer chances to live in this culturally significant neighborhood. In a city notorious for segregation, the Humboldt Park neighborhood has been home to a diverse community that includes Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, and African Americans. The House on Mango Street brings that rare diversity to life. Since the mid-1990s, residents have fought to preserve the neighborhood’s character by organizing around issues of affordable housing, community development, and park use. Now, when I walk over to Division Street in Humboldt Park and see El Paisano Tacos across from Nellie’s Puerto Rican restaurant, I see that the community has held on to those cultural differences that make this a special place.

Olga L. Herrera is associate professor in English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. Her research and teaching interests include Latinx and Chicago literature, and she thinks that she will always be fascinated with the complexities and contradictions of cities. 

Photo by Marie Villanueva, who was born in Quezon City, Philippines, but has lived in Chicago since her family landed in O’Hare Airport in 1979.  She is the author of “Nene and the Horrible Math Monster,” a children’s book loosely based on her experiences growing up as a Filipino immigrant in Chicago’s West Side.  She is also a contributor in the anthology, “Children of Asian America.” Marie lives in Chicago and continues to write adult fiction.  Photography is one of her many artistic pursuits.

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Crutchfield
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Caleb Freeman

One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders was still in pre-production, Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s director, rode double on a bicycle down North Tulsa’s side streets. More than 60 pounds of film equipment sat in their handlebar basket, so they had to stop periodically to keep from falling onto the pavement. Their route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. They rode past houses in various states of disrepair, many of them built shortly after the city was incorporated in 1898, as well as industrial sites and manufacturing plants, some empty and derelict, abandoned in the years of suburban sprawl.

Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. Louis Ave. in the Crutchfield neighborhood. With its rusted chain-link fence and overgrown lawn, it was a promising candidate for the Curtis house, where Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, the orphaned protagonists of The Outsiders, would live. Hinton agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it.

Hinton’s novel of warring teenage gangs, written fifteen years earlier when she was a student at Will Rogers High School, has a complicated relationship with Tulsa. Hinton is from Tulsa, and by all accounts set the story here too, but chose not to include any real names or landmarks in order to, as she told the local newspaper, “protect the guilty.” When she wrote The Outsiders, Hinton was bearing witness to teenage alienation and violent socioeconomic segregation, and these weren’t Tulsa problems; they were everywhere.

The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in Tulsa. In March 1982, Zoetrope Studios moved into Crutchfield, setting up their production team in the former Lowell Elementary School building, which had been closed four years prior. In a type of method acting, the young cast members haunted the city as greasers, stealing from local drug stores, staying out all night, and sometimes sleeping in the Curtis house, which didn’t have any heat. Local markers — the Oklahoma Steel Castings Company, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, the Art Deco architecture of Will Rogers High School and Boston Avenue Methodist Church — appear in the film. Hinton and Coppola even revised the story so that the Greasers would live on the north side instead of the east, a more accurate geographic representation of Tulsa’s class and racial divide. When the filming was done, Coppola threw a party in Crutchfield Park, complete with carnival rides, an abundance of food and beer, and an ice sculpture. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association.

Then he left. The film came out in 1983, and members of the Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force, which had lobbied hard for Coppola to film in Tulsa, relished their success. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory.

The neighborhood is still here, though, just north of the historic “Frisco” Railway, which once brought hopeful settlers and cutthroat opportunists to Tulsa back when the area was still known as Indian Territory. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. By 2007, approximately one-third of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. Rates of violent crime rose to become the highest in Tulsa.

The neighborhood association, led by longtime residents — truck drivers, store owners, church leaders — advocated tirelessly for Crutchfield. They organized neighborhood cleanups, met with city officials, and developed a revitalization plan which called in part for better infrastructure and more public facilities, including a new school. Although the City of Tulsa approved the plan in 2004, little has changed. In 2006, Tulsa Public Schools spent $3.3 million converting the old Lowell Elementary building, the former production site for The Outsiders, into a four-and-a-half acre “state-of-the-art” ropes course. Although it was touted as a boon to the community, the course was fenced off and inaccessible to the neighborhood’s residents. The course was later closed in 2017 due to budget cuts, and the site once again sits abandoned.

Today, Crutchfield is still without a school or a grocery store. Its predominately Hispanic population experiences some of the worst health outcomes and rates of poverty in the city. Although the neighborhood is one of Tulsa’s oldest, the City has never treated it with the same significance as its other historic neighborhoods.

As my girlfriend and I drive through Crutchfield in the winter of 2021, I wonder about the decision to bring The Outsiders film to Tulsa. When the novel was released, local media was quick to absolve the city. The Tulsa World suggested that, although the setting was Tulsa, “it could be any city.” After watching the film, though, I wonder if Hinton might say otherwise.

The Outsiders is a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate. It’s a fitting story for Tulsa, a city whose inclination towards boosterism — as the self-proclaimed “Magic City” and “Oil Capital of the World” — frequently has sanitized and distorted its history, almost always at the expense of its marginalized communities.

Crutchfield sits just north of the line that divided Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, one of the lines established by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The neighborhood was named after Vinita Crutchfield, who was allotted the land after the General Allotment Act. She appears on the Dawes Roll as a nine-year-old Cherokee girl living with her mother. Growing up, Crutchfield would have lived on the dividing line much like the characters in Hinton’s novel.

One mile to the east of Crutchfield is Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was once 40 square blocks of Black-owned land known as “Black Wall Street.” Born of entrepreneurship, Greenwood was a precarious haven for Black Oklahomans during a time when the state adopted strict Jim Crow laws. Local newspapermen disparaged Greenwood as “Little Africa,” and the growth of the KKK in Tulsa posed an increasing threat. In May 1921, a white mob invaded, razed, and, in the end, partially annexed Greenwood, killing its residents in a state-sanctioned slaughter. For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre, as it would come to be known, remained a secret, a part of Tulsa’s history hidden from people like me who never learned about it in school. From Crutchfield, just beyond the borderlines of Lansing Ave. and the Midland Valley railway tracks, you would have been able to see the smoke of Greenwood’s burning buildings.

When we arrive at the Curtis home, which was purchased in 2016 and converted into a small museum dedicated to The Outsiders, I think about the people of Crutchfield. Surrounding the home are boarded-up houses flying tattered American flags. Stray dogs roam the area. Less than a block away from the house is an auto shop, the same type of place where Ponyboy might have worked. We stay for a little while, driving around the neighborhood. When we leave, I think about the tyranny of boundaries and the exorbitant privilege of being able to cross them.

Caleb Freeman was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a freelance writer, an adjunct English instructor, and a part-time librarian. When he is not working with words, he is more than likely annoying his cats. Follow him on Twitter @calebdfreeman. 

 

Photograph by Megan Hosmer, an artist, teacher, and Tulsa transplant. Her work primarily centers around feminist questions of identity and community through photographic portraiture. Check out her artwork at https://www.meganhosmer.com/.

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William Henry Harrison Tomb
North Bend, Ohio

By Sean Andres

It’s not hard to find something of historical significance in the Cincinnati area, but many people don’t even think about North Bend. The town was founded by John Cleves Symmes, father-in-law of President William Henry Harrison, who swiftly and violently removed, swindled, and stole the land of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Territory, including those who had resided where North Bend now stands. As a child, too young to remember and appreciate, I had visited Shawnee Lookout and the William Henry Harrison tomb with my family, and North Bend soon became a town I passed by on the way to the dentist.

But then in 2010, in my second year at Ball State University, I was introduced to little-known poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt in an American Literature course. This was the beginning of a challenging hike up a steep hill. While working on an ongoing project on Cincinnati area women’s history, I delved into Piatt and, through a Piatt family member, began connecting to other researchers.

Soon I was enveloped in Piatt’s life and her work, which revealed her to be deeply sympathetic to Indigenous and enslaved peoples and grievously anti-war. Because the most famous woman in the Western world had fallen into obscurity after her death, I was able to uncover over twenty poems and a narrative, from her youth to her late years. When I found out she had lived in North Bend, every time I passed by on the way to the dentist, I wondered whether random houses were hers. Then I learned that one of her houses was a half-mile up Mt. Nebo from Congress Green, where Harrison’s tomb sits on what was believed to be a Native mound. As steamboats passed by, it was customary to fire a salute in his honor.

There, at the tomb, Piatt sings loud in my head with her sympathetic, sharp-tongued wit. I envision North Bend as she might have on her daily walks to the tomb with her husband and their children, spotting the wild rose, wild grape and violets she documented in her poems. The river runs below, and I’m reminded of what the Cincinnati Commercial wrote about Piatt’s writing, that it appears “sweet and peaceful” but proves to be like “the depths of a dark river,” “shadowy and terrible.”

Many people had drowned below that tomb and the Piatts’ home, a weight Sarah carried with her. Still, without doubt, Piatt’s “A President at Home” swells in me.

I pass’d a President’s House to-day —
“A President, mamma, and what is that?”
Oh, it is a man who has to stay
Where bowing beggars hold out the hat
For something — a man who has to be
The Captain of every ship that we
Send with our darling flag to the sea —
The Colonel at home who has to command
Each marching regiment in the land.

This President now has a single room,
That is low and not much lighted, I fear;
Yet the butterflies play in the sun and gloom
Of his evergreen avenue, year by year;
And the child-like violets up the hill
Climb, faintly wayward, about him still;
And the bees blow by at the wind’s wide will;
And the cruel river, that drowns men so,
Looks pretty enough in the shadows below.

Just one little fellow (named Robin) was there,
In a red Spring vest, and he let me pass
With that charming-careless, high-bred air
Which comes of serving the great. In the grass
He sat, half-singing, with nothing to do
No, I did not see the President too:
His door was lock’d (what I say is true),
And he was asleep, and has been, it appears,
Like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for years!

The tomb, for me, is less about the Harrisons and more about the Piatts. It’s hard not to think about her two children, here alluded to as “child-like violets up the hill,” for they lie in unmarked graves beneath a tree somewhere on this “beautiful burial-hill” of grief, as Piatt refers to it in “Death Before Death.”

While the tomb succumbed to the forces of nature, the Piatts continued to keep North Bend historically relevant by placing emphasis on the tomb. Aside from Sarah’s regular visits, her husband J.J. lobbied for the tomb to become a national park, writing a bill that made its way to the Congressional floor. When that failed, he intended to save the old-wood forest around the tomb by purchasing it and turning into a park with proceeds from The Hesperian Tree, a book he edited, collecting work from Ohio and Indiana authors and artists, including William Henry Harrison’s granddaughter, Betty Harrison Eaton, reflecting on life as a Harrison in North Bend. The book did not sell well. His attempts failed, and the forest was logged.

I certainly don’t mourn the man in the tomb who violently swept through the Northwest Territory and lies in rest on top of their dead. However, I do grieve for the long-forgotten poet, Sarah Piatt, who seems to try to atone for her predecessors’ sins, seeking rebirth through the cruel river below.

Sean Andres is a marketer, writer, and educator at non-profit KnowledgeWorks. With Chelsie Hoskins, he operates Queens of Queen City, a public history project lifting the voices of women in the history of the greater Cincinnati area through local schools and publications. He loves to be outdoors among the trees and woodland critters when he’s not glued to the computer — researching, writing, and working.

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