Argyle Street

When my husband and I moved into Chicago’s Uptown in 1953, this young bride found the neighborhood as different from Texas as if it had been Saigon.

The building at 4902 Sheridan, probably built around 1900, once had large, luxury apartments. When we moved there in 1953, the place had been cut up into a warren of smaller spaces. Our apartment had formerly been the dining room, kitchen, maid’s room, and bath. The kitchen was primitive, with a one-piece porcelain sink and drain board, NO counter tops or cupboards, but a pantry. The bathroom had a toilet with an overhead water tank; when I pulled the chain, I sometimes got a shower.

A block north was Argyle Street, where I climbed the iron stairway to catch the “el” to my job at The Billboard, the entertainment weekly. Right at the base of the stairs was the bar where Wally and I went on Saturday night to hear a combo play Chicago-style jazz. Nearby was the bakery, where I stopped on the way home from work to buy freshly baked bread and pastries.

One afternoon Wally called from Roosevelt University and asked me to go to the Chinese laundry to pick up the shirts which he needed the next morning to wear with his uniform when he went for his weekend with the Air Force Reserve. This dutiful wife immediately walked up to Argyle Street, where the Chinaman said what I thought was simply a comedian’s joke phrase: “No tickee, no washee.” (The ticket was in Wally’s pocket in downtown Chicago.)

Across the street was a little store which sold produce and a basic assortment of groceries. One night Wally and I came home on the “el” after some event in Chicago’s loop, maybe to Orchestra Hall, where we climbed to the peanut gallery to listen to the Chicago Symphony for $2 each. As we came down the stairs from the train, I remembered I needed something for breakfast. It was past midnight, but Pete’s shop was still open. There was Pete, sweeping up, and his big cat lying contented on top of the lettuce.

Wally’s favorite shop on Argyle Street was the used book store, run by a young man with a foreign accent. At that time half the people in Chicago had foreign accents, most of them Polish. Wally asked the man to find books by George Orwell. A few weeks later, Wally came home and found in the mailbox a postcard saying the bookseller had two Orwell paperbacks for him. Wally rushed around the corner to the bookstore. The sign on the front door said, CLOSED. In the middle of the afternoon!

The next morning the Chicago Tribune headlined, “Escaped German Prisoner of War Captured in Chicago.”

Our neighborhood bookseller was a German soldier captured in Europe during World War II. While the war still raged in Europe, he simply walked away from an Arkansas prison farm and hitchhiked to Chicago, where he found a job in a big, downtown book store. The war ended; he stayed, married a Chicago girl, and opened his own used book business on Argyle Street After his capture, he was released and was allowed to go to Cuba. (This was before Castro.) Almost immediately he was permitted to return to the U.S. legally, apply for citizenship, and reopen his shop – and sell Wally books by that Communist Englishman, George Orwell.

In later years the neighborhood changed. The Nguyen family moved into an apartment in Uptown in 1973. Vietnamese refugees found themselves in a dumping ground for derelicts, drug addicts, prostitutes, gangs, and “everyone else the city didn’t want.” Trong Nguyen said, “In Uptown we felt we had been thrust from one war zone to another.”

The shops along Argyle Street were mostly vacant. On the corner of Argyle and Sheridan Road was a multi-story housing project which Mr. Nguyen described as “very dangerous. Refugees were constantly robbed and beaten.”

When Wally and I lived there, the Uptown area was beginning to deteriorate, but wide-eyed and naive, I was fascinated, but never afraid, not even when Wally was away on his weekends with the Air Force Reserve. There were two movie theaters within a block of our apartment. As I walked home alone late at night after seeing a foreign film, I remember meeting a uniform policeman walking the opposite direction. I had seen street cops in movies, but this was the only time in my life I actually saw a policeman “walking his beat.” Was the neighborhood less safe than I knew?

I never was mugged or threatened by gangs. I thought the area was simply exotic.