I’m staring at a severed head.

It’s an old head, so that makes it better, maybe? It’s from Egypt’s Ptolemaic-Roman period of 332 BCE to 395 CE, the plaque on the glass case tells me. They think ancient grave robbers threw it away after tearing apart the body to get at jewelry, amulets, medallions and other valuables to pawn. The head is completely wrapped but for a section under the nose where the muslin fell off centuries ago. I see a dried, blackened philtrum leather-stretched back over small, flat teeth.

And this seems natural. It seems natural that giggling kids are being hushed among bodies, that this leather-stretched upper lip that once formed words and smiled is now laid on a table for my edification, education, titillation in a way I would find disgusting if the corpse were younger.

“A body that is 200 years old, what makes that any less palatable than a mummy that’s 2,000 years old? Boy,” Egyptologist Emily Teeter of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago said, taking a moment to think. “Boy, I really don’t know.”

The Field Museum of Natural History is tourist attraction, research institution and final resting place for more than 4,000 human beings, ranging from individual toe bones from Native American mass graves, to ceremonial trumpets carved from Tibetan femurs, to the current “Mummies” exhibit running through April 2019. And it’s just one of the Chicago museums and art galleries — from the Museum of Science and Industry’s body slices and plasticized human bits to the International Museum of Surgical Science’s trephined Peruvian skulls — where corpses are the exhibit.

But there are other collections that aren’t on display, relics of days when spectacle trumped education and it was hard to tell sideshow from research institution. Mummies torn to shreds in early 20th century “unwrapping parties.” Native American skulls plucked from graves as souvenir. Or medical oddities from black Chicagoans unfortunate enough to die poor with unusual bodies in the 1800s.

These are the stories of the bodies that don’t go on the museum floor, of the program frozen by the Trump administration that guides Native bodies’ return and of how Chicago institutions handle those people who, through no fault of their own, have a museum for a grave.

Skulls and the Star-Spangled

The guiding American law for bodies and museums — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA — relates only to bodies from the indigenous from U.S. soil, but the moral issues don’t stop where the law does, said Field Museum Repatriation Director Helen Robbins.

“Museums and other state institutions have a lot of other human remains too, and they have the human remains of the mentally ill that became medical specimens — or prisoners or criminals. People who don’t have power in the world, that’s what happens. It is a Native American, indigenous issue because of the history of what happened in this country and also in other colonized places, but there are human remains of African-Americans in museums, in universities, in surgical colleges,” Robbins said. “It’s a much broader reality than just Native Americans.”

The Field has repatriated more than 200 people’s remains domestically through NAGPRA and 200 internationally to indigenous groups including the Maori in Tasmania, the Inuit in Labrador and the Haida in British Columbia.

The mummies are staying put, Robbins said, as the Egyptian government is not considered the descendant of the pharaohs. Under Field policy, remains must be given only to descendant communities for proper interment — whatever that means in that culture.

“They could put them in caves, they could put them traditionally in trees or scaffold burials like they did in parts of the Plains. Burial, cremation, out to sea — whatever ‘repose’ would mean to that cultural group,” Robbins said. “But not sitting in a museum.”

Any institution that receives federal funds, even passthrough funds, has an obligation to report potentially Native American bodies to NAGPRA. Pending or recent NAGPRA cases includes museums of course, but also art galleries, universities, state historical societies, the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture and even the office of the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner after a man brought in a box of hundred-year-old Native American skulls and bones he found while cleaning out the house of a recently deceased relative.

NAGPRA Program Manager Melanie O’Brien said when NAGPRA passed in 1990, remains of more than 200,000 Native American people were identified in American museums. Now that number is down to 180,000.

“It’s a human rights law,” O’Brien said by phone from her DC office. “It’s about equating the rights of Native American dead to the rights that everybody else enjoys in this country. There’s a common-law understanding of what happens to your relatives that die, and that common law was not extended to Native Americans.”

All American grave repatriations stopped in May 2017, when President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke temporarily suspended all Department of Interior advisory committees, including the NAGPRA Review Committee. While existing committees received individual reviews to see if the administration considers them wastes of money, Zinke added new committees such the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee and the Royalty Policy Committee, which consists of mostly oil, gas and mining industry executives.

Tribes and museums that had already come to terms on transferring ancestral remains had to simply pause, waiting for Zinke to review NAGPRA, O’Brien said. The committee passed muster and will meet for the first time since then on Oct. 17-19.

Meteorites, Nazis and Slippery Slopes

NAGPRA scared researchers at first, Robbins said. Many were concerned it would open a floodgate of returning valuable scientifics specimens, and not just bodies. NAGPRA also covers the return of sacred objects — like pipes, headdresses and kochina masks — and “objects of cultural patrimony.” Those are objects so central to a tribe’s identity, it’s considered owned by all members; O’Brien uses the original Star-Spangled Banner that inspired the national anthem as her example.

Many scientists feared the slope would slip and NAGPRA could mean turning over insects, fossils, botanicals — and the valuable intellectual property from any medicines derived from such plants.

It wasn’t an unreasonable concern. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon tried to use NAGPRA to reclaim the Willamette Meteorite — which the Clackamas people called Tomanowos — from New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1999, as Tomanowos was the traditional site of religious ceremonies. (They came to a deal — the museum kept the meteorite, but tribal members can schedule private ceremonial visits.)

As Field showstopper SUE the T-rex was found on Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation land held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, those initial concerns of a specimen floodgate hit close. They also largely haven’t come true.

“I’m not worried that we’re going to have a huge request for botanical specimens or insects or certain kinds of things,” Robbins said. “But the world is changing and shifting and people are asserting ownership over items that 100 years ago nobody would have considered to be claimable or anybody’s cultural property or intellectual property.”

Robbins’ job puts her between researchers and indigenous people, sometimes uncomfortably. While the Field offers bodies back to the tribe — there are 300 people’s partial remains waiting to be picked up and another 1,000 offered to NAGPRA with no tribe claiming them — getting back a sacred object or item of cultural patrimony “isn’t a slam dunk,” Robbins said.

“You have to have a certain tolerance for having people yell at you or be upset, whether its from other institutions or from descendant communities,” Robbins said.

No matter how respectable and above board the museum was in its acquisition of a sacred piece, if they got it from a person who got it from a person who got it from a person who acquired it illegally, it’s not the museum’s.

“The closest that you can come to this kind of process or legal process would be the work that’s done around looted Nazi art,” O’Brien said. “Museums have priceless collections of artwork that, through provenance research, can actually be shown was looted in World War II by the Nazis, was bought by the museum and the museum actually doesn’t have good title to that.”

And some of the pieces were most certainly not acquired with consent, whether sacred relics or human bodies.

“Some of the early collectors, they just walked around picking up human remains,” she said about the museum’s collection of Native American dead. “Late 1800s, early 1900s. ‘Aw, I’m living in Arizona, just walk around picking up human remains.’ They weren’t scientists. They just thought it was cool or interesting.”

Pickled Punks

Repatriating bodies is a global issue. British academics are working to find a suitable resting place in India for the skull of 1850s rebel Havildar “Alum Bheg,” executed by the British in 1857 and found in the back room of The Lord Clyde pub in Kent in 1963. Irish activists including the mayor of Derry have petitioned the Royal College of Surgeons in London to release the body of Charles Byrne, the 7 foot, 7 inch “Irish Giant,” who died in 1783. Anatomist John Hunter acquired the body somehow — the most popular account is that he paid off the undertaker and had his agent fill the coffin with paving stones to dupe Byrne’s friends.

He chopped up Byrne’s body, boiled his flesh off and, while The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum is closed until 2021 for renovation, has displayed the skeleton ever since. Because Byrne was tall.

Some long-sought repatriations have come to pass.

The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia returned the skull of World War I soldier Thomas Hurdis to the Australian government last year. Donated by an army doctor, Hurdis spent 98 years as part of the museum’s “dry specimen” collection of skulls and bones. Its “wet specimen” collection is body parts and fetuses — many of conjoined twins, including the shared liver of Chang and Eng Bunker the original “Siamese twins” — preserved in formaldehyde or other fluid.

“Pickled punks,” as preserved fetuses in jars were called, were a staple of 1800s sideshows.

Many medical specimens in museums, colleges and other private or public collections have questionable pasts, Robbins said, referring to the collection of mostly African-American medical oddities Rush Hospital gave the Field in 1900.

“Poorhouses, prisons, mental institutions, almshouses. If you don’t have money and you die, today even, what do you do?” she said.

But the issue, like the world, is complicated.

“It’s really important to understand too that human remains in institutional collections have huge scientific importance. Not only for abstract knowledge like anthropology and archaeology and the peopling of the world and all these kinds of more abstract intellectual things. How do you think people developed artificial knees or hips?” she said. “They did it from using, looking at and working with skeletal collections. But a lot of these skeletal collections are from problematic backgrounds.”

Representatives of the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Field is working on improving the standard of care for the thousands of human remains, even individual bone fragments, not on display. That includes separating co-mingled bodies from mass graves and, when applicable, storing them in a manner fitting that culture’s funeral customs.

They’re starting with the North American remains, then hope to apply that standard to all the people who rest in peace in the museum’s back rooms.

“It’s our responsibility to care for these individuals no matter how they got to the Field Museum,” Robbins said. “It doesn’t matter whether it was legal, scientific excavation or somebody wandering around in Montana picking up a skull.”

Wrapping Up

One of the mummies in the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is “just a bare body that was in a case,” Teeter said. It was a woman who was acquired, like much of the museum’s collection, by Dr. Henry Breasted, many when he and his wife went mummy-shopping during their 1894 honeymoon. She was stripped of all wrappings sometime between 1910 and 1930.

“We have no idea why,” Teeter said.

Teeter thinks the woman might have been used in an “unwrapping party,” a late 1800s, early 1900s entertainment that is exactly what it sounds like.

“This poor mummy, it’s being basically pulled apart for people to just look at it,” Teeter said. “You’d end up with this poor, naked body on a table and then party’s over.”

It wasn’t the most grotesque fate given to the pharaohs’ heirs.

“Certainly in the 1900s and the 1800s, mummies were dealt with in a much more cavalier way. You hear about them literally being ground up for medicine,” she said. “Every small museum needed to have a mummy, so people were going on the Grand Tour and just buying mummies helter skelter without any concern for their context.”

The unwrapped woman is in Oriental Institute storage, as are other unwrapped mummies and mummy parts. Three of the four regularly displayed mummies — 2,800-year-old singer-priestess Meresamun, 2,400-year-old priest Petosiris and 2,150-year-old “Young Boy” — are in full wrappings and, when available, coffin.

Teeter doesn’t expect the unwrapped woman will ever be displayed. A strip of fabric determined which mummies are showpieces, which storage.

“We exhibit mummies to show something about the culture, and showing just a body is not something about the culture,” Teeter said.

But there have been some unwrapped at the Institute.

One of the people — Teeter’s careful never to call them “specimens” or “things” — on regular display is completely without wrapping as part of a predynastic pit burial, when they weren’t wrapped. Similarly, an unwrapped head was temporarily on display as part of the recent “Book of the Dead” exhibit, which ended in March.

The purpose was educational both times, Teeter said. The unwrapped predynastic pit burial “was an important part of the story of mummification.” The decision to temporarily display the unwrapped head came after a more difficult conversation.

“We also want [museumgoers] to understand the full meaning of what they’re looking at, that it’s a beautiful box but the reason the box is there is that there is a mummy inside it,” Teeter said. “This is a person who chose to be, or his family chose to have him, prepared in this very particular way.”

It is “quite subjective,” Teeter said. She had to fight to get the child’s mummy displayed, but she fought against a guest curator who a few years ago wanted to display one of the collection’s wrapped heads.

“I said no. No. No, no, no, no. To show parts of a body, to me that was disrespectful and just plain ghoulish. There’s nothing to be really learned from that display other than [being] kind of creepy,” she said. “It’s a head torn off a body. It’s somebody’s head in a box. It’s like, ick.”

As sensitivities have changed over the years, different museums have reacted differently. Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit that visited the Museum of Science and Industry in 2005, 2007 and 2011 — and whose creators provided the plastinated specimens for the MSI’s ongoing “You! The Experience” exhibit that kept the Jewish boy from seeing Harry Potter in the story from Oct. 3 — trusses corpses up like art pieces.

On the other extreme, the Manchester Museum in England covered all its mummies in cotton shrouds in 2008 out of respect. That lasted two years, when they caved to public demand and re-uncovered the mummies. Other museums display trigger warnings that bodies are present, or put the humans in the collection in side rooms where no one could stumble upon them unaware.

Beyond the Native remains guarded by NAGPRA, there’s little guidance for how human remains can be displayed, said Teeter, Robbins, O’Brien and a few other museum folks who didn’t make it into this article, for reasons you’ll discover Thursday.

Instead, the reasons a pharaoh is science and a pickled punk sideshow is cultural, they said, part of a general shift in terms of what people expect of our museums.

“There should be a purpose,” Robbins said. “It shouldn’t just be ‘Hey, here’s the Irish Giant! Look! Isn’t that weird?’”

The woman on the phone with Rabbi Mordechai Millunchick was a kohain, as was her son. Kohanim, the plural form of the word, are in certain Jewish traditions a priestly clan direct descended from Moses’ brother Aaron. They are the only ones allowed to perform certain rituals at the Temple in Jerusalem. As such, they have to keep themselves ritually clean, free of impurities such as the “tumah” coming from dead bodies.

Which is why the MSI’s collection of historic body slices meant a little Jewish boy couldn’t go see Harry Potter.

It was 2009, and although the touring “Harry Potter: The Exhibition” came and went before the ongoing “YOU! The Experience!” opened that year with Body Worlds-created plasticized corpse-bits, the preserved cross-sections of an actual human body have startled the curious and MSI-goers who stumbled into the wrong stairwell for years.

“I told her, ‘Listen, lady. Wait. Tell your son to wait and maybe the exhibit will go to a different city, it’s just what happens.’ It may not be a good solution, but I told her, I said ‘Listen, your son is a kohain. I’m not. There are places today that I can go to and he is not allowed to go to, OK?’”

Contact with a dead body doesn’t mean touching. It can mean being in the same building as a dead body, or walking under the shade of a tree that overlaps a tree that overlaps a tree that casts shade on a cemetery. Kohanim can only go to the funerals of parents, spouses or their own children. Millunchick said observant kohainim interested in medicine often go into dentistry so they can avoid med school cadaver work.

“‘I’m allowed to go to a cemetery,’” Millunchick told the Harry Potter mom. “‘I’m allowed to go to a funeral home for just a friend, I can go to a museum, OK? In the times of the Messiah when the Temple’s going to be rebuilt, there’s going to be places that he’s going to be able to go to that I won’t be able to go to.’”

The only ceremony that cleanses a kohain who came in contact with death involves a red heifer meeting certain rigorous genetic standards set in Mishna. In all of history, the Mishna says, only nine heifers ever fit the bill. Observant Jews have been looking for the 10th red heifer since Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The Jerusalem-based non-profit The Temple Institute has only reviewed two candidate cattle since it was founded in 1987. Both were disqualified, the most recent one in 2002.

As there’s no way to clean death impurities without the cow, avoidance has become vital. The sin is not in finding yourself in a building with a corpse, but in not immediately leaving if you discover yourself in one. Even if it has a really cool Harry Potter exhibit in it.

“‘He’s going to be able to serve God, basically. He’s going to be able to serve in the temple in a way anyone who’s not a kohain is going to be able to do, right?’ She understood that and she passed that on to her son who…”

Here the rabbi trailed off.

“Probably didn’t take that too well,” he finished, chuckling.

Read Rabbi Millunchick’s Chicago guidebook for tourist kohanim

Read about a rabbi’s typewriter

And about nuns window shopping cash registers

Punk rock polka

To: 1001chicago@gmail.com

Questions for Meresamun:

What did your music sound like? Was it more like chanting? Were there duos or trios?

I know that you worked in Thebes. Where did you and your family live? 

Did you know any of the other people who worked at Karnak that we know from their mummies-like Paankhenan (Art Institute) or Djedmaatesankh (Royal Ontario Museum)?

…

Amun loves her, that’s what the name means.

Meresamun worked as a singer-priestess in the wind god’s temple at Karnak in Thebes twenty-eight hundred years ago. She was about 30 when she died, a woman of wealth and status who pacified Amun, king of the gods, three times a day, one month out of every four.

Today, she lives under glass in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Teeter and I wonder about her.

What was your life like when you were not working in the temple? Did you have a lot of household servants, or did you help with cooking?

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is a historical jumble sale, a museum of what museums used to be like. Glass cases and stands are crammed with artifacts, each of which would get its own room with interactive display and Morgan Freeman-narrated movie explaining its role in ancient life if it were part of a smaller collection.

Here, the history is so massive, the collection so stunning and the dang rooms so small, the cases crowd. Here, a glass box of a dozen amphorae. Here, a pharaoh statue as tall as the room. Here, a Persian bull head so crushingly massive, the floors had to be specially reinforced.

Here, Meresamun.

How old were you when you started working as a temple singer, and did you (as we have suspected) work your way up through promotions or seniority to the final title of “singer in the interior of the temples”?

Dr. Teeter is Dr. Emily Teeter, an Oriental Institute egyptologist who has studied Meresamun for years and who was kind enough to share some of the questions she would have for the woman who would become an artifact.

Were you really buried at Medinet Habu?

Her coffin is still intact, nothing opened or unwrapped. She sits under glass or Plexi sharing a room with the first written account of a labor strike, the aforementioned massive pharaoh, hundreds of artifacts of such meticulous preservation and beauty as to make a classicist weep, and two other mummies, one that researchers think might be Petosiris the high priest of Thoth and one they’ll only ever know as “a Young Boy.”

I found myself idly wondering if Meresamun and Petosiris would have liked each other. Were they nice? Were they jerks? Were they pleasant enough but when all was said and done didn’t have enough in common to sustain a conversation? If she hadn’t died 400 years before he was born, would they have carried a priestly rivalry between Amun and Thoth, or would they have found common ground griping about wheat merchants, whiny worshipers and how touristy Ptolemais Hermiou has gotten these days?

If they’d lived another 250 years past Petosiris, would they have been kind to the boy?

Lives centuries apart in Egypt, three deaths are bound forever in a room in Cook County. It’s a respectful display that, even under glass, makes me think of Meresamun, Petosiris and a dead mummy boy as people.

I wondered what Meresamun’s voice sounded like. I wondered if she was pretty. I wondered if she was a jerk. What song did she sing as the maraca-like sistra and the necklace menats rattled and shimmied to calm the wind god, make Him amenable to praise and petition?

What did you do before you came to Chicago, she who Amun loved? Dr. Teeter and I want to know.

More on the priestess’ life

A look at an Art Institute ogre

And my grandpa’s bug at the Field Museum

Her talk was inflected and genuine, but as lunchtime became afternoon she was getting tired being on her feet. An active 50s in dyed red hair and white hoodie, she wanted us to turn down cellphones, sheath our umbrellas, check any bag that might knock over one of the artifacts should we turn too quickly and unwarily.

Then she could turn us over to the tour guide. Then she could walk the five meters back to the gift shop in the converted car garage where she could rest, chat with co-volunteers and get off those aching ankles that made her shift as she talked.

The Robie House in Hyde Park is gorgeous. The first non-UChicago building on that particular strip of Woodlawn Avenue, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright from the waning days of the master’s first act.

Wright had just turned 40 when he started designs on Frederick Robie’s house in 1907. A few months after work started in 1909, Wright would leave his wife, six children and architecture practice to travel Europe for a year with translator Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, who had left her own husband and two children to be with Wright.

When the lovers — or heartbreaking cheating bastards, depending on your sympathies — returned, they hid from the national scandal in an estate Wright designed in Wisconsin. It was called Taliesin. That’s where Martha Borthwick, her 11-year-old son, her 9-year-old daughter, a gardener, a draftsman, a workman and the 13-year-old son of a carpenter were murdered in 1914 by a mentally unstable servant. He killed Mamah and the children with an axe, then set their bodies on fire, attacking the employees as they fled the burning building.

Wright was changed, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But his designs were too. The Robie House where the lady shifts foot to foot prepping crowds for the tour was one of the last examples of Prairie Style Wright would ever produce.

It’s a stunning home. It’s an organic space made of sharp, Wrightian angles and inhumanly flat lines. How such a jagged place appears so friendly and warm is a stunner to me.

Over the decades, the Robie House suffered the calamity that claims all homes — use. A seminary bought it in the ‘30s to use as a dorm. Rooms were chopped, fittings replaced, demolition constantly considered. In the 1950s, two fraternities gave up their frat houses so the seminary would have space to expand, sparing the Robie House.

The house went to the U of C in the ‘60s and the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust in the ‘90s. The trust is trying to restore the house. They’re re-building built-ins from old designs, re-matching paint colors from black-and-white snapshots, re-fabricating fixtures the Robies loved but the seminarians didn’t. They’re getting things back to 1910.

It’s a full-time job saving beauty from the free market. It involves politics, signs, chanting, expensive books in the gift shop, expensive tickets for tours. By rights, the Robie House should be a parking lot, a tower-block dorm, a fast-food joint for hungry college kids or some other temple to the muse Economy.

But it’s not. It’s a beautiful place surrounded by beautiful places, a spot of joy protected by a gift shop, ticket sales and a woman in her 50s shifting foot to foot.

The new Seminary Co-op Bookstore is gorgeous. It’s open and airy with a massive collection under high ceilings. You have space to move, breathe, turn around without accidentally bumping knocking over an endcap of Very Hungry Caterpillars.

I thought we had come to the wrong place.

It had been years since the old location, the sunlit man behind the bookstore counter told me. Years and years. Somehow, I had missed it. Somehow, I never knew that the location of what I thought was one of my favorite places in Chicago — the bookstore in the old church — hadn’t been what it was for the half a decade.

“Our new store will allow us to improve what we do now and open possibilities to do new things not possible in our current situation,” the manager wrote on the store’s website in 2010.

They moved in 2012.

It was disheartening to realize what a poser I had been, thinking I knew about a store. I felt so sad that something I trusted to be there wasn’t, and that apparently hadn’t been for quite some time.

I don’t want to overdramatize, to cry “I thought there was more time!” but I thought there was more time. I thought I’d be able to bang my head on the low Seminary Co-op ceiling again. I thought I’d be able to dance one last country two-step at Carol’s Pub. I thought I would taste a Swedish Bakery sweet roll or grumble through a beer at Schaller’s Pump.

I assumed the treats of this city were permanent. I assumed the co-ops and country pubs I enjoyed would linger on a little longer. I assumed the pumps and bakeries I hadn’t got around to would give me a little more time to get there.

So what’s the moral? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow the locally owned businesses will shutter? Appreciate what we had? Check Yelp business listings more often?

I don’t know if there’s a moral or just misplaced nostalgia. Can I really gripe about “the way things were” when I didn’t even notice they had gone?

Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

The purpose, aside from the fact I’ve been all coughing and bronchial and wanted a story I could write from my sickbed, was to get people to explore certain sites I like, including this one, Atlas Obscura, the Chicago Collections Consortium, the Chicago History Museum, Mysterious Chicago and Curious City.

So I made the quiz goldanged impossible. (And Curious City, that thing we talked about? It’s handled.)

From the Fool Killer submarine to park bats to Iroquois Theater Assistant Chief Usher Archie Guerin, here are the answers you didn’t get to the 1,001 Chicago Afternoons Really Difficult Trivia Quiz.

The Answers

1. Assistant chief usher of the Iroquois Theater, seen in news photos following the fire.

Archie Guerin, as seen in this Chicago Collections Consortium photo.

A brief word about the Collections Consortium: It’s awesome.

It’s an online home for the combined collections of 18 local institutions, from universities to libraries to museums to the frickin’ Brookfield Zoo. A big reason for this quiz was for an excuse to tell more people about the site.

…

2. The first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, located underneath the University of Chicago’s football field, was in a room originally constructed for this sport.

Squash. As in “that sport that’s not quite racquetball but no one can really explain how it isn’t.” As outlined in this Curious City story, Enrico Fermi and his team turned a squash court into the home of the first self-sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.

…

3. Her husband signed away her objections to the Art Institute.

For this we turn to, well, me. Her name was Sarah Daggett and you can find out more about her in #566: The Gray of the Lions.

…

4. A mysterious submarine found in the river, maybe.

The Fool Killer. Maybe.

Adam Selzer of Mysterious Chicago has put in a yeoman’s effort on separating truth from lie in the story of the Fool Killer, which was possibly a scam, possibly a hidden submarine complete with dog skeleton. Check out his whole fascinating site.

…

5. The only newspaper to make deadline after the Great Chicago Fire.

A little blurb in an 1888 listing of newspapers I got as a gift once led me to the story of Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News. It’s one of my favorite stories about the Great Fire. A little girl rescued the mailing list from the legal newspaper created by her mother, who was kinda sorta the nation’s first female attorney, oh you know what? Just read #555: Myra Bradwell and the Fireproof Newspaper.

…

6. This obscure library at the Leather Archives and Museum has a flowery name.

The Teri Rose Memorial Library. See what I did with the hint there? Obscure? Like Atlas Obscura? Like this Atlas Obscura listing of Chicago’s secret libraries?

I’m very clever. The “mysterious submarine” was a hint too.

…

7. The exciting voice of this person appeared at the Cairo Supper Club in this Egyptomania photo.

Manuel De Silva.

Although it’s not part of the quiz, here’s a review I found of him in a review from Billboard in 1948:

“Manuel De Silva, billed as the “New Voice,” loses little time living up to the cognomen. Handsome youth exhibits an excellent song choice and his lusty-lunged barying nets him the show’s top mitt. Manages striking nuances with a cultured piping of Donkey Serenade and surpasses this effort with smart selling of Sorrento, Temptation and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Had to beg off. Lad looks like a comer and it shouldn’t be long before he’s rated tops in the field.”

It’s on page 48, where you also learn the “Mary Kaye Trio” was originally the “Mary Kaaihue Trio.” They’re from Hawaii.

…

8. You can find the records of the Jane Dent Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People at this library.

The Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

…

9. When the Loop addresses were converted to the new numbering system in 1911, the Hotel Princess at 267 S. Clark St. got this as its new address.

331 S. Clark St. For this you have to use the address conversion guides in the Chicago History Museum, Building and House History section.

Both Curious City and I have done stories on Edward Brennan, the force behind the new numbering system, although only I present a compelling case for why he was history’s greatest monster.

I mean, I was super-sleepy the next day, man.

…

10. This Uptown silent movie studio produced both early Sherlock Holmes movies and the world’s first pie in the face.

Essanay. You can find out about the Sherlock Holmes and watch the movie in the room where it was shot in an upcoming joint Atlas Obscura/Mysterious Chicago event. You can find out about the pie from me in story #602: Chicago, the Home of the Pie in the Face.

…

11. Three werewolves from this area of the Baltic are killing time waiting for prey in a South Loop statue. One has a book.

Livonia. As in the Livonian Wolves in this Atlas Obscura entry. It’s a creepy myth of Christmastime and the fattest werewolf.

…

12. “Kitchen Klenzer” was advertised for this much in the storefront window in a 1963 photograph of a drugstore at Drexel and 47th.

Two for 21 cents. I mean, seriously, just play around with the Consortium site. You can find just, just anything there.

…

13. Researchers found this species of bat living under the boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bonus points for finding out from a particular interactive display on a certain radio station’s website.

I was going for the little brown bat, as mentioned in the Curious City interactive display created by Erik Rodriguez of The Illustrated Press, but a sharp-eyed reader (hi, Joann) found in the accompanying article that all seven locally common species have been found under the boardwalk.

So if you said:

• little brown bat
• big brown bat
• hoary bat
• silver-haired bat
• eastern red bat
• evening bat
• eastern pipistrelle
• or the number seven

you should be good.

Anyway, thanks for taking/please forgive me for this quiz. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get more ‘tussin.

Read a random story that’s most likely not a quiz

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Sure, you know that the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was at the U of C campus, but do you know what sport the room was originally made for?

Part of this project is to get people interested in the historical resources around us every day, to show that history is a live, breathing thing.

That and the fact my cute little sneezy cold has morphed into a broad, hacking bronchitis and I wanted a story I could write indoors led to today’s challenge, 13 of the most fiendishly obscure questions my cold medicine-addled brain could muster.

This being the Internet, you can find all these answers in seconds with a few well-chosen keywords. But the point of this is exploration, to give you an excuse to crack into the Chicago Collections Consortium’s historical photographs for the Iroquois Theater usher or WBEZ’s Curious City for the location of “Chicago Pile 1.” (Those two are on the house.)

Search within the collections, of course. But while Phineas H. Google has made a heck of a site, this will be more fun for you the deeper in you dig.

All of the answers can be found at one or more of the following sites:

• 1,001 Chicago Afternoons
• Atlas Obscura
• Curious City
• Chicago Collections Consortium
• The Chicago History Museum, Building and House History
• Mysterious Chicago

In disclosure, I contribute to Atlas Obscura for fun (no money changes hands, alas). I also am included in the Chicago History Museum’s ongoing “Chicago Authored” exhibit and am participating in a professional development event for teachers on April 2.

Other than that, I have no connection to any of these sites other than that I like ‘em. And I would straight up kill a man to get a job with WBEZ’s Curious City.

Seriously, who do you want done? One of those WFMT guys? Consider it handled.

Enjoy! Answers Friday.

The Questions

1. Assistant chief usher of the Iroquois Theater, seen in news photos following the fire.

2. The first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, located underneath the University of Chicago’s football field, was in a room originally constructed for this sport.

3. Her husband signed away her objections to the Art Institute.

4. A mysterious submarine found in the river, maybe.

5. The only newspaper to make deadline after the Great Chicago Fire.

6. This obscure library at the Leather Archives and Museum has a flowery name.

7. The exciting voice of this person appeared at the Cairo Supper Club in this Egyptomania photo.

8. You can find the records of the Jane Dent Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People at this library.

9. When the Loop addresses were converted to the new numbering system in 1911, the Hotel Princess at 267 S. Clark St. got this as its new address.

10. This Uptown silent movie studio produced both early Sherlock Holmes movies and the world’s first pie in the face.

11. Three werewolves from this area of the Baltic are killing time waiting for prey in a South Loop statue. One has a book.

12. “Kitchen Klenzer” was advertised for this much in the storefront window in a 1963 photograph of a drugstore at Drexel and 47th.

13. Researchers found this species of bat living under the boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bonus points for finding out from a particular interactive display on a certain radio station’s website. (Edit 3:34 p.m. March 9: The article connected with the interactive element mentions more species than the interactive element did. Name either the species listed in the interactive, or the number of species mentioned in the article.)

Think you’ve got it? Email your answers to 1001chicago@gmail.com.

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For those who don’t have a GPS and time to spare, here’s a little list of an article on four of the oddest things created in Chicago.

But if you have both, it’s a chance for you to hunt down four spots where Chicago changed the world.

For the record, I have not been to these coordinates (I’m pulling this together late at night after my planned story fell through), so I can’t say for certain if I’m putting you in the middle of an intersection, pond or choreographed dance battle between 1950s Hollywood musical gangs.

But if you do decide to check out these spots and have your phone ready, tweet any pictures you want to share to #hashtagforthephotothing or #chicagofirsts, whichever you prefer.

Now to four things created in Chicago.

The First Brownie

Coordinates: N 41° 52.814′ W 87° 37.622′

This one’s going to be hard to write about without giving away the surprise, but let’s talk about Bertha and Potter, last name withheld.

Potter was a millionaire real estate magnate in the 1800s, a time when a lot of people thought only companies and governments had dollar values hitting seven digits. Bertha was his 20-years-younger wife, a high-society trendsetter.

They owned a hotel that you might have heard of (it still goes by their last name). During the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, Bertha asked the chef to whip up something sweet that ladies could eat with their hands. He invented the brownie.

Now here’s where we have to be very careful to not spoil the surprise. The hotel’s website has a dead link to the recipe, but if you want to make the original brownie at home without traipsing through Chicago with GPS, both Epicurious and Food.com have versions on their sites.

The First Movie Theater

Coordinates: N 41° 47.202′ W 87° 36.023′

Under the catchy name Zoöpraxographical Hall, the also catchily named Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) ran the first building where people paid money to watch moving pictures.

It was part of the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which also gave Chicago such firsts as the Ferris wheel, the zipper, the washing machine and Dr. H.H. Holmes, Chicago’s first serial killer.

But a hall dedicated to lectures on zoöpraxography, the study of how animals move, couldn’t keep up with the dancing girls, world castles and Ferris wheels of the fair. Muybridge spent $6,000 and made $213 showing his short rotating slides of animals running and athletes athleting.

In today’s cash, he spent $158,000 and got $5,600 back.

Although the Official Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance lists it as “A building of Greek architecture” and Muybridge’s book about zoöpraxography includes a nice rendering of the world’s first movie theater, there were no hints on its exact location on the Plaisance.

After checking map after map after map after map after map of the fair, I couldn’t find any damn Zoöpraxographical Hall.

One history of film site put it “close” to the World’s Fair Ferris wheel, so the coordinates above are where the world’s first Ferris wheel sat. A two-fer for Chicago firsts!

The First Skyscraper

Coordinates: N 41° 52.782′ W 87° 37.927′

William LeBaron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building from 1885 was the world’s first skyscraper, but the world’s fourth-tallest building at the time. That’s because what defines a skyscraper, what makes a skyscraper a skyscraper, isn’t its height. It’s its structure.

For thousands of years, the taller you wanted to build a building, the thicker you had to make its walls. Big thick walls giving external support — think of old castles. The innovation of the Home Insurance Building was the support wasn’t coming from big thick walls on the outside, but a network of steel girders on the inside with a thin wall wrapped around.

It’s basically how we think about buildings today, but it was so revolutionary at the time, the city stopped construction until they could be convinced it wouldn’t just fall down. It didn’t, just changed architecture forever.

These coordinates won’t send you to the Home Insurance Building. That was torn down in 1931. But you can see the building that’s at 135 S. LaSalle today.

The First Cartoon Character

Coordinates: N 41° 53.027′ W 87° 37.839′

Gertie the Dinosaur wasn’t the first cartoon, or even the first cartoon done by Winsor McKay. But previous efforts by McKay and other early animators amounted to showing off that they could make things move.

The shy, strange, laughing “Dinosaurus” who debuted at the Palace Theater on Feb. 8, 1914, was the first animated character to have a personality, interaction. Although McKay had made his newspaper strip character Little Nemo hop around in 1911 and a mosquito swell a year later, Gertie was the first character to have… animation.

A quick caveat: I’m let’s say 98 percent sure this is the spot. The Palace where Gertie debuted is not the Cadillac Palace Theater, which opened in 1926. If an old version of the Cadillac Palace’s website (kept alive on the designer’s homepage) is to be believed, there were 10 or so theaters called “Palace” in Chicago by the 1920s.

The Palace Music Hall on the east side of Clark Street between Washington and Randolph, which C.E. Kohl opened in 1912, is my guess for the proper Palace. It was the first Palace in Chicago and, in my mind, the most likely place for such a high-profile gig. If I’m wrong, apologies.

Gertie’s birthplace later became the Erlanger Theatre and is currently home to… well, you’ll see when you get there.

Happy hunting.

Find out a Bronzeville hardware store’s jazz age secret

Take an interactive photo tour through a forgotten underground street

Follow one downtown intersection over 135 years

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“They took those out years ago. Now they’re all underground at the Reg with the ~robot arms~” my friend Rachel, a U of C alumna, texted when I finally gave in and asked where to find something to read in the University of Chicago’s Harper Library.

Rachel is Rachel Hyman, editor/founder of Anthology of Chicago and my co-founder/co-organizer/co-conspirator in the Welcome to the Neighborhood reading series.

She’s small and poised, with a pleasant energy and a long mane of bright pink hair shaved back down to her natural brown on the sides. We had been asked to speak at a U of C class on Chicago writers because I guess we both are ones now.

For Rachel, it was a chance to return to the halls where she earned her own education, communing with the new crop of students to share the education that life, time and growth have given her since she capped and gowned her way out into the real world.

For me, it was a chance to show up early and spelunk Chicago’s Hogwarts.

The William Rainey Harper Memorial Library was dedicated in 1912, named after the U of C’s first president and designed by the architects who created the Art Institute of Chicago. The Gothic design, twisting stairwells and general “Indiana Jones should teach here” of it were based on King’s College Chapel at Cambridge and on Magdalen College and Christ Church College at Oxford.

It was meant as an academic castle, a bit of Oxford and Cambridge on Chicago’s South Side.

Although it had the tops of book-getting technology at the time — telephones and pneumatic tubes — the library eventually was turned into a place for classrooms, offices and study. In 1970, the university transferred nearly two million books from the Harper and 11 departmental libraries into the then-new Regenstein Library, which apparently according to Rachel has ~robot arms~.

And god, it’s beautiful.

I got lost among the halls’ gray stone and students’ gray MacBook Pros repeatedly, earning some odd looks as I passed the same chatting couple as I variously headed north, south, up, down then somehow left-west. I caught myself wondering if I had gone through the same five-foot-high hidden hallway between towers before. I had to go out of the building, then in, then out again to look up and confirm that, yes, there was actually a great hall at the top even if the elevator didn’t seem to want to take me there.

It was academia, of course, with all the trappings that entails. There were gabbing, flirting students and dour-eyed, frustrated professors. When I finally found my way to the massive great hall, I found the usual mixture of laptops, panic, whispered jokes and public naps any college common area will bring.

Among the offices, there were snarky signs on doors and occasional pots of coffee brewing inside. One locked door hidden around a gray stone corner by a restroom where the M had been painted in now-chipping curlicue housed a professor who had apparently been there so long, the sign listing his hours had been made on a typewriter.

Tenure must be nice.

Eventually, it was time for class. Rachel showed up and we hung out with Professor Durica’s students for an hour. Nice folks. Good questions. Time was up and we left. That was it.

I headed north to catch the bus, cutting through the campus and running into two of the students from the class. One was a computer science major who wanted to talk about the possibilities of integrating GPS technology and mobile apps into literature.

As we chatted about startups and digital platforms, I cast an eye back at the academic castle, stunned and humbled that all these things can exist in the same world.

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A bit on the Harper

A bit more on the Harper

A really sarcastic child and a clown