For all I know, this is a fantasy I concocted on a drowning wet day in a vacant bread factory in Bronzeville.

We were cordoned in the front fraction of the factory — maybe the third, quarter or eighteenth. Vacant but for peel-paint columns, a bit of old machinery that didn’t look like bread, rain-shed lakes oceaning swaths of floor and a waterproof boombox for construction sites blasting opera, it was hard to tell how far the rooms and crooks of the factory floor leaked past the yellow tape.

And a mantle. A fake wooden fireplace, carted from some unknown scrap heap or wiring-stripped flophouse to be set between the bit of machinery that didn’t look like bread and a fallen Butternut sign that said it was. A fake mantle next to a ficus that was either also fake or exceptionally hearty. Fireplace, potted plant, waterlogged recliner and bust-smash-soak-endlesscoatsofdustandpaintpeels coffee table somehow standing enough to keep aloft a turntable and a hardback of “The Purpose-Driven Life.”

The man from the developer didn’t know where it came from either.

It was like that when they bought the building and rousted the squatters to start the long process of turning bakery into data center. The squatters hadn’t gone upstairs, though. When the man from the developer went to clean up and turn out the upper floors, he found them dusty but vacant, no signs of human life since the Schulze factory stopped making bread in 2004 and gave up on being a shipping facility in 2006.

“Too spooky,” a woman wearing a Chicago Architecture Foundation Open House Chicago T-shirt joked.

Along one wall of the factory floor, a turn and a room from the mock ’50s dad den, among lookie-loos and lollygaggers there for a two-day shot at gaping at the space, an old man sat on a stack of boards. He sat with bare legs, a madcap scragglebeard and three plastic grocery bags of possessions. He lolled and rolled, he wrung his hands and dozed atop that neat, tidy stack of lumber.

Who stacked the boards? Who carted a mantle, ficus, turntable and Christian devotional hardcover into a vacant bread factory? Was I in a set from a terrible student film or had this man or a man, woman, child like him wanted to feel human?

Had they wanted to feel human so badly they broke a recliner into a squat?

For all I know, the man with the bare legs had never been there before, just took advantage of the open house to get out of the rain.

For all you know, I made this all up.

The Golden Lily is still a long-shuttered Harold’s Chicken Shack.

Three years ago, I started two blogs. One contains interviews, profiles, vignettes, ramblings and, at least at one point, mayoral campaign finance paperwork expressed as world poetry.

The other one has a picture of a sports field and a note that I would be taking a “brief hiatus” starting three years and a month ago yesterday.

The other blog was an attempt to track down what’s in the locations of old restaurants from a 1930s dining guide I own. I broke down the book into chapters and created interactive maps and paired current photos I took with the 1930s description.

Then, life.

Work picked up. This site kept me busy. I got a $2,700 repair bill on a car with a $2,900 blue book and decided to see if carlessness would work for me. It became harder to run around snapping photos that Google Street View was already doing a better job on.

It was fun to find pickled pigs’ feet were served at a now-posh Gucci store, or that the big bohemian haunt is now an alley, but nothing gave me more pleasure than tracking down the restaurants of The Great Black Way.

“Way down south, around 35th Street, 47th Street, and Garfield Boulevard, lies Chicago’s great Blackbelt. It is a ‘city within a city;’ it speaks its own language and has its own churches, schools, dance halls, movie palaces and five and ten cent stores; also, it has such institutions unique to the locality as barbecue stands, East India herb shops, and black-and-tan night clubs. It is, in short, the Harlem of Chicago.”

The jazz history. The cultural appropriation. The writer who didn’t seem to see any contradiction in warning readers to treat black people with respect and equality while he called them “mammys” and “high-yellow.” The clear, honest laying out of which clubs were interracial “black-and-tans” and which allowed only whites. It repelled and fascinated me in equal measure.

Three years, a month and a day after that site’s vacation, and 84 years after the book that inspired it was published, still-carless I took to Google Street View to check on some of the places I re-found.

Club El Rado, “Made famous by Nora Holt, the internationally-known ‘blues’ singer,” is still a hardware store, as is The Sunset, “Last survivor of a day (or night) when black-and-tans were plentiful along 35th Street, which was then called the Rialto of the Blackbelt.”

The manager of the Ace that was The Sunset will let you see the mural that was at the back of the stage if you ask him. I did that once.

The bust-windowed frontis of the Blackbelt nightclub Grand Terrace Café has been boarded and spiffed.

Chapman’s, of the “white-tiled counter, a table lunch room, and quite a few Southern dishes, prepared by an expert chef,” was a menacingly empty storefront with a “NO CASH ON PREMISES” sign when I was there three years ago, but a beauty salon when Google Street View slid by back in September.

The Poro Tea Room is still Mollison school. The Ritz Club still a weed-choked field.

The Blackbelt has become the euphemistic Bronzeville. The area still struggles with low income and low property values. That mansion that used to house King Tut’s Tomb is valued at $101,000, a ridiculous pittance at city prices.

I don’t head down there much anymore, despite the surviving blog’s stated purpose to tell untold stories. That’s a failure on my part, carless status irrelevant.

A pledge and a hope that I’ll do better, that no one will read my lines 84 years on and chuckle at the racism I laced in them. I want to go back, need to if I’m ever to claim this site is more than another hipster’s pretense.

And I don’t want to wait another three years.

Read some of the South Side stories I have written:

• A Woodlawn cabbie
• A Canaryville barber
• An acrobat from Bronzeville
• Hot dogs in Bridgeport
• A Jackson Park drum circle
• Spelunking Hyde Park’s castles
• A South Chicago steelworker
• And the mermaid of his in Oakland

Mister Terrific is not a well-known superhero. He has a red T on his face by way of mask and his logo isn’t a big S or stylized bat, but the words “FAIR PLAY” written on his jacket, a nod to the 1940s hero who inspired him.

Mister Terrific is corny and dutiful and nuanced, which is why circus acrobat Eric Robinson chose him as his superhero alter ego for Acrobatica Infiniti: The Nerd Circus.

“When did comics become popular? The war was going on. You had World War II going on. Somebody needed an escape,” Robinson said. “Kids needed a hero to look up to. Somebody needed to know there’s some form of justice in the world, and that’s what comics bring to people.”

Acrobatica Infiniti is a collective of acrobats, trapeze artists, jugglers, contortionists and other working Chicago performance artists looking to take circus out of the world of candy floss and animal abuse into the artistic limelight.

Their routines are polished and elegant, a Second City Cirque Soleil.

They just do it dressed as comic book and video game characters.

In previous stories, I’ve covered the why of the circus and how a few different performers found their way to AI’s nimble nerdery.

Robinson’s path started at the now-shuttered Rosenwald Apartments at 47th and Michigan in Bronzeville. It started with a bunch of kids from the apartments running around the neighborhood.

It started with flips.

“I just did flips all around my neighborhood. Like literally, I would do flips off of things,” he said. “Eventually, I took a dance class and the dance teacher also taught tumbling. I picked it up from there. I just did it outside constantly with a bunch of other kids.”

He ran, he flipped and he tumbled, but he still hadn’t thought about any of that as more than pastime.

“I started out doing acrobatic gymnastics. Then a couple of friends were already involved with the circus arts and they were like, ‘Hey you should try to do actual circus gigs.’ And I was like ‘What are circus gigs?’” Robinson said.

“’Well, we go and perform and then we get paid money for doing the stuff we do here.’ I’m like, ‘Wait, what? You get paid money? How much is this money?’”

Robinson’s résumé is now chocked with circus. He performs, trains, teaches children the art form he loves.

And sometimes he gets to do it as a superhero.

“It was a lot of jumping around and flipping around, and eventually it amounted to something,” Robinson said, smiling behind the red T.

Learn more about Acrobatica Infiniti

Meet two more nerd circus performers

And a third

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Now it’s an athletic field for the three schools that moved into the old DuSable High School grounds. On that spring day, gray-headed dandelions grew long among bleachers. Green blades had broken through the track at points, inspiring or angering depending whether you’re a bigger booster of nature or education.

It wasn’t like that in 1931, the old restaurant guide I found at a used book shop said. Work started that year on DuSable High School, which wouldn’t open until ’35. I wonder what King George thought of the school going up just to the south of his barbecue hot spot. I wonder when he closed.

“Here is the big thrill in the Blackbelt,” wrote John Drury, the author of the restaurant guide. “King George (Mr. William Hale Thompson please note), is none other than the eminent Mr. George Oglesby, the barbecue king, who learned how to cook barbecue meat in the hills of Tennessee. Theatrical people, diners-out from the Loop, politicians, and policemen from the various Blackbelt police stations come to King George’s Southern Barbecue Inn at all hours of the night and day for the delicious and wholly satisfying barbecue sandwiches that he serves.”

William Hale Thompson was the mayor of Chicago. He was dangerous, corrupt and hilarious. Thompson courted South Side Irish votes in ’27 by promising to “bust King George in the snoot.” He meant George V of England, of course, but that explains the joke in the restaurant guide.

“White visitors stand about, eating the sandwiches; colored customers are at the counters; a negro youth plays a piano all night long; cooks are chopping up chickens with hatchets; the atmosphere is gay and bohemian and everybody laughs at King George’s sallies and wise-cracks.”

It was just a field that chilly spring day. Long gray dandelions and the football team’s Lev Sled.

From the “learned how to cook barbecue meat in the hills of Tennessee” line, I’m guessing King George was part of the Great Migration, when millions of black people moved from the rural south to cities in the north.

The city report giving DuSable High School landmark status says 50,000 black people moved to an unwelcoming Chicago between 1916 and 1918. Housing discrimination created the “Black Belt,” which the report defined as “a narrow 40-block-long corridor running along both sides of State Street.”

Martin Luther King once called Chicago “as much a segregated city as Birmingham.”

You can tell which way is south at an ‘L’ station by seeing which races are waiting on which side of the platform.

King George’s sandwiches were 25 cents and he would deliver anywhere within city limits.

History devours every corner of Bronzeville, what the area was renamed in the 1990s. The DuSable High School report added the word “euphemistically” when describing the rename. DuSable was the first high school in Chicago built specifically for a black population. It was named after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first permanent resident of Chicago. He moved to the area in the 1780s. He was black.

DuSable the school had a famous jazz program under Captain Walter Dyett. Nat King Cole went to DuSable — another king to go with George, George and Martin Luther.

Redd Foxx went to DuSable too, as did Don Cornelius of “Soul Train” and Harold Washington, the first and only black mayor of Chicago.

That’s a sad story, if you ever have time to look it up.

The Robert Taylor Homes housing project was built in the area in the 1960s. That’s another sad story. It’s gone now.

This little field with the gray-headed dandelions has seen violence and segregation. People ate barbecue sandwiches there too. They laughed at King George’s sallies and wise-cracks. They learned jazz from Captain Dyett and still play football there. Someone probably had a first kiss there. Maybe it was Don Cornelius.

Cooks chopped up chicken with hatchets. The mayor of Chicago threatened the king of England. 50,000 black people moved to the city in a two-year period. Housing discrimination. Jean Baptiste. Urban renewals. Gangs. Sandwiches. Council Wars.

You can get lost in history, in one little field that once housed “a dingy one-story nondescript shack, in a neighborhood of shacks.”

I’m sure other records of King George Oglesby must exist — old phone books or Census records. But for the casual Googler, “King George’s Southern Barbecue Inn” just pulls up eight sites that quoted Drury’s restaurant review.

Here’s the last line of what turned out to be King George’s eulogy.

“The meats are clean and served under sanitary conditions. Drexel 3223.”

Read the full review of King George’s Southern Barbecue Inn

Read the DuSable High School Landmark Designation Report

Read about the last days of the Robert Taylor Homes

Listen to a This American Life episode about Harold Washington

I’ve written about the Drury book before

Comment on this story

The stage went out six feet farther, David Meyers said, gesturing to the glass case as we took the steps to his office.

“I want to make this a museum inside of a hardware store,” he said.

Meyers Ace Hardware seems like a lot of other over-stuffed stores in a moderately low-income neighborhood – Bronzeville in this case. It’s jammed with merchandise, wash cloths for 99¢, hangers for $1. Bedbug killer advertised in the window. Toys, tents and other non-hardware merch that ended up on the shelves somehow. There’s a turnstyle after the entrance and a tall man paid to guard against the inventory walking out the door one plunger or child’s doll at a time.

But in the 1920s and 30s, this was the Sunset Cafe, the hottest of the hot hot nightclubs. “Chicago’s Brightest Pleasure Spot” where both blacks and whites could dine and dance to a “Colored Revue Extraordinary.”

“All is lively, lurid, noisy and ‘hot’ in a Negro night club, and the proceedings get much ‘hotter’ as the night wears on,” a man named John Drury wrote in a 1931 Chicago dining guide I happen to own. “Here, also, are the Negro ‘blues’ singers, the amazing tap dancers, those high-yellow chorines (chorus girls), and those snare drummers and saxophone artists who seem almost possessed by wild demons.”

I handed my copy of that book to Meyers in the hardware store back room. He handled it gingerly, as people accustomed to handling old things do.

He nodded as he read along.

“It was known as ‘black-and-tans’ because both blacks and whites went there,” Meyers said, confirming the book’s description of the Sunset.

Meyers and I were the only whites around today. His family bought the building from Louis Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser in 1960. It has been a hardware store ever since.

“I’m trying to build up my tourist business,” Meyers told me moments before an employee named Raoul cut in with a question about Scotts Turf Builder.

David Meyers is a polite, slight man on first-name terms with all his employees. He wore a baseball cap and a promotional vest from Gorilla Glue the day I visited. You’ll have to ask for David at the counter; he’s the one to see about the breakroom wall.

The back wall of the breakroom and of David’s office is what remains of the club that brought Satchmo to Chicago, where Benny Goodman, Sun Ra and Earl “Fatha” Hines would heat up the Thirty-fifth and Calumet crowds those noisy, lurid nights. It, or rather the mural of jazz men painted on it, was the backdrop of the stage that once went six feet into the wrenches.

This piano player whose head is now cropped by cabinets looked over Satchmo’s shoulder as he blew his horn into the hot lights of the black-and-tan crowd. This saxophone artist who now looks like he’s kissing a vent once backed Rudy Grier’s Autumn Follies, music by “Sun Ra & Orch. 3 Shows Nitely.”

Now these painted jazz men watch hardware store employees clock in, clock out, hang their coats, nuke their lunches. They look on as Meyers does the inventory, payroll and other work that’s kept this business open for 50 years and two generations.

After the Sunset Cafe became the Grand Terrace, Wednesdays were Mambo Nights. Now they’re Senior Days, offering 10 percent off all purchases.

David Meyers had to return to work to handle a particularly tricky customer question about sizing screens. He asked if I needed anything else. I told him I just wanted to take some pictures of the glass case of tools. He left.

Alone, I did something corny. I closed my eyes and listened for what’s left of the jazz. I listened for Louis, Cab, Benny, Fatha, Sun, Rudy and hundreds more I’ll never know. I listened for the cabinet-cropped keyboardist and vent-kissing sax man to start up a sweet and hot song last heard a wild Chicago night decades ago.

I listened. I heard.

Written in May 2012

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