4831 S. Vincennes Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Joseph S. Pete

Powell’s Books used to have a few locations in Chicago, none anywhere near as large as the fabled city block full of books in Portland. Now only its venerable Hyde Park bookstore remains, but I fondly remember the Lincoln Park Powell’s with its distinguished rows of dark-wood bookshelves soaring up to the ceiling, the rarefied upper shelves reachable only by sliding ladder. It had the hallowed airs of some centuries-old university library. It’s where, as a pock-faced and perpetually despondent teenager, I first obtained a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which swiftly became one of my favorite and most re-read books.

Fran Lebowitz said at a recent talk at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago that literature should be a window and not a mirror. I found Wright’s Native Son to be both. It was a mirror in that I hailed from the heavily industrialized and culturally similar Northwest Indiana just outside the familiar South Side landscapes he described. As a troubled youth, I could also relate strongly to Bigger Thomas’s alienation and desperate sense of doomed hopelessness. And Mary Dalton’s rebellious dalliance with communism spoke to my burgeoning political consciousness. I was delving deeper and deeper into reading serious literature and Native Son had more recognizable touchstones than the 19th-century British and Russian classics I was devouring around that time. It just clicked for me.

But it was also a window into the African American experience I could never fully know, and that intrigued me. I had started to see the white flight, abandonment, and segregation that split greater Chicagoland asunder as the great defining original sin that corrupted the area. Highways came to divide white and minority neighborhoods in both Chicago and the Calumet Region. I went to high school about a block south of Gary when it was still the murder capital of the United States, where as many as 13,000 vacant buildings have rotted in shameful testament to people’s unwillingness to live next door to people who look differently. The sins of our forefathers scarred the landscape with blight, boarded-up storefronts, and rubble-strewn buildings with collapsed roofs. Native Son explores racial discrimination that sadly remains just as relevant as ever. A recent HBO adaptation, instead of putting Bigger through a show trial, modernized his plight by having Bigger gunned down extrajudicially by trigger-happy police.

Wright grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and moved as a young adult to Chicago’s South Side, his family following the Great Migration from the South to the more prosperous industrialized cities of the North. He spent the most time in one place on the second story of a row house in Bronzeville, a largely residential neighborhood flanking Grand Boulevard (now called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive). He lived with family in a two-story building with a cream-colored brick façade, bay windows, a tiny patch of lawn, and an entrance with stone stairs and relatively unembellished Greek pillars, the most modest home in a strip of taller and more architecturally extravagant houses. Today, the home is privately owned, and no tours are offered, but you can admire the solid masonry of the stone-and-brick exterior and enduring handiwork of craftsmen from 1893, when it was built.

Wright lived on that densely populated stretch of S. Vincennes Ave. in his early 20s, working as a postal clerk until the Great Depression cost him that position. He went on to bounce around the city, working a series of unskilled jobs, but spent that formative period in the Black Metropolis that produced many intellectuals, artists, and musicians, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Ida B. Wells and Sam Cooke.

During his downtime, Wright studied great authors and started to pursue his literary ambitions. He contributed to the area’s vibrant culture, founding the South Side Writers Group and the literary journal Left Front as he started to publish his own poetry. He also began his first novel, Lawd Today!, which he finished in 1935 but wasn’t published until after his death decades later.

There’s not much to see now on the quiet residential street other than a plaque designating the house as a Chicago Landmark, but the modestness of the abode that helped nurture Wright to greatness is the point. Ninety years after he lived and started writing there, the neighborhood continues to hum with culture. There’s the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the Southside Community Art Center, Room 43, the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour, and the Bronzeville Walk of Fame, among many other points of interest.

Though just south of the glittering skyscrapers of the Loop, the majority-black Bronzeville often gets as overlooked as it was when Wright lived there from 1929 to 1932. In Native Son, Mary Dalton tells Bigger, “I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other.” Even today, many suburbanites and recent Big Ten grads transplanted to the North Side have never set foot in the rather genteel neighborhood. I frequently attend White Sox games just across the highway, but it feels a world away. The divisions that doom young men like Bigger Thomas still stand today in great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.

The descendent of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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South Side Community Art Center
Chicago, Illinois

By Angie Chatman

4724 South Evans Avenue was located a block south of Cottage Grove, one of the main thoroughfares through the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The three-flat building, now demolished, initially housed four generations of my family. The oldest generation — my great-grandfather Ernest Hezekiah Fambro, along with his two sons, Curtis and Timothy, his wife, Nellie, and her mother, Amelia Beasley Ball — had moved to Chicago from DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1916. This was early in the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North of the United States, which continued through the 1960s.

My relatives weren’t the only Negroes to settle in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks and her family also migrated to Chicago, in response to lynchings and other forms of racial unrest in Topeka, Kansas, as well as for economic opportunities. Brooks lived in other places after her literary successes brought more lucrative teaching assignments, but those were temporary addresses. Chicago was home. This is obvious from the title of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, as well as Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956.

Due to national and local laws mandating segregated housing, at its peak 300,000 Negroes lived in Bronzeville, in the area between 39th and 51st from Cottage Grove to Halsted (until the Dan Ryan Expressway was built in 1961 and cut the western boundary line of the neighborhood to State Street). Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital, the first African American owned and operated hospital in the country. Loraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage play, A Raisin in the Sun, was based on her family’s experience living in and attempting to move away from Bronzeville.

Once, on a Saturday morning my mother took us to the South Side Community Art Center, a three-story brick building on Michigan Avenue. We were going to hear Mrs. Brooks, who was then the first African American Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, read her poems. My younger siblings and I sat on the linoleum floor on mats of woven fabric, fans moving the air like a barge on the Chicago River. Mrs. Brooks’ voice rose above the hum, like that of the soloist in the choir. I don’t remember what poems she read, only that I recognized the tenor of the words. Her poetry had the same rhythm and cadence of conversations among my relatives during a backyard cookout in the sunshine.

My mother had promised we’d stop for ice cream after the reading. She took a detour on the way and pulled over in front of 4724 South Evans. Stairs led up to the entrance. Every apartment had the same layout: an open living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was a small yard in the back. My siblings and I were dismayed that a family of six shared one bathroom.

I never lived in that building on 47th and Evans; it’s now an empty lot. For my mother, though, it was the telescope she used to focus on fond memories of carefree days with her three older sisters: days full of hopscotch, double-dutch jump rope, roller skating to the Hall Branch library — a mile and a half away — and movies at the Regal Theater. Ms. Brooks’ also uses her experiences in Bronzeville as a lens with which she can zoom in and out to comment not only on the quotidian activities of Black folk, but also display how dysfunctional racist practices are for both Black people and white people.

I have not lived in Chicago for over 25 years. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement grew from Minneapolis, to Chicago, to cover the globe, I turned my telescope towards home. It occurs to me — each time there’s another murder of a Black man/woman/child by police, and as people of color face a disproportionate impact from COVID-19 — that “We die soon.” Too soon.

I turn also to Brooks’ Annie Allen, published in 1949, especially a poem entitled “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” about a drive through Beverly, a then all-white neighborhood on the South Side:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are.

Angie Chatman is a native of Chicago. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “Ode to Poundcake,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won a WEBBY award for her performance in the “Growing Up Black” episode of the World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Angie can also be heard on The Moth Radio Hour’s podcast in the episode titled “Help Me.” Angie now lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood with her family and rescue dog, Lizzie.

Photo courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center.

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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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The Fine Arts Building
Chicago, Illinois

By Jesse Raber

Chicago isn’t an iconic setting for Willa Cather, the great novelist of the prairies. Yet, in a sense, during Cather’s time Chicago writing was prairie writing. When H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920, he credited the city’s literature to the “remote wheat-towns and far-flung railway junctions” of its hinterland. “The newcomers who pour in from the wheat lands,” he wrote, full of “elemental curiosity” and “prairie energy,” seek in the city’s cultural scene “some imaginative equivalent for the stupendous activity they were bred to.” Mencken’s description of country talent “pour[ing] in” to the city seems to imagine Chicago writing as a river fed by the vast “Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital.”

But where Mencken, the consummate urbanite, saw brain drain, Cather sees back-and-forth circulation between country and city. Chicago drummers teach the townsfolk the latest songs in My Ántonia, and the South Dakota grande dame in A Lost Lady often entertains Chicago friends. The Chicago voice teacher Madison Bowers, in The Song of the Lark, trains soloists from across the Midwest and takes “long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus.” The closing paragraph of The Song of the Lark sums up the dynamic:

The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.

The prairie towns aren’t unsoiled streams flowing into the urban river; they are points in a “network” that regularly communicates, through Chicago, with a wider world.

Cather’s Chicago itself is a symbol of hypercirculation, a “blur of smoke and wind and noise” whose disorienting flux creates eddies of creativity. “In little towns,” Cather writes in Lucy Gayheart, “lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.” By contrast Chicago, with its uncaring crowds, allows Cather’s prairie-bred artists to make themselves secret nests. Rather than exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, the city helps them find themselves and their own kind.

The most memorable of these artistic aeries is the singer Clement Sebastian’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. Practicing there, Lucy Gayheart feels “it was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one … heard no one; the city below was blotted out.” Located a few blocks south of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the Fine Arts Building has cultivated artistic tenants since 1898. A ten-story structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque style of rusticated stones and stately arches, in Lucy’s day it was the city’s literary epicenter, and many of its greatest occupants presented themselves as obscure “little” niches in the big boisterous city. There was the Little Room, an aesthetic society featuring Hamlin Garland and Harriet Monroe (among many others); Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, which faced obscenity charges for publishing parts of Ulysses; and Ellen von Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s movement-launching Little Theater.

Today the Fine Arts Building still has some of that cloistral spirit. When I first went inside, during an open studio night, it was like stepping between worlds. Lush Art Deco murals cover the lobby walls, and the antique elevators have human operators. The upper floors are all dark wood trim and muted white paint, like the outside of a Tudor house. That evening, drifting between studios, each its own aesthetic universe, I bought a postcard-sized watercolor of Colorado pines, painted at the western fringe of Chicago’s old railroad kingdom.

Years later I returned to visit the new Dial Bookshop, named for the old magazine and decorated with portraits of Chicago writers, including fellow Fine Arts tenant L. Frank Baum. The store was lovely, but I wondered if this veneration of the building’s past meant that creativity had lapsed into nostalgia.  This question bothered me as I thought about what the Fine Arts Building represents today.

One evening, as I was brainstorming this vignette, I joined a six-foot-spaced circle around a fire pit on my friends’ lawn. “Does anybody happen to have any stories,” I asked, “about the Fine Arts Building?” It turned out they did. I heard about a filmmaker with an office there, working for years on a documentary about feuding martial artists. Another friend recalled her amazement at wandering into a violin-maker’s workshop — a luthier’s shop, she insists — while looking for a replacement guitar string. (The luthiers were unhelpful.) A third reminisced about how the old movie theater there casually mixed art house and mainstream films. Some of that old spirit of hidden wonders lives on, it seems. My favorite story, though, was a little older — about one friend’s dad who used to take the Greyhound there to see films that didn’t play in his hometown. He sometimes had to leave the movie early to catch the bus back to DeKalb, Illinois, way out in Chicago’s Middle Empire.

Jesse Raber is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and has also taught literature courses at several Chicago universities (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago). He is the co-creator of the Chicago Writing gallery at the American Writers Museum and is currently working on a literary history of Chicago.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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