It’s Tri-Taylor.

B67. Still Desirable. “Jewish infiltration has started along the edges and may be expected to continue because of favorable reputation and location.”

It’s Ravenswood Manor.

D74. Hazardous. “[The then-upcoming Ida B. Wells federal housing project] has the realtors guessing as to what the ultimate result will be when so many of this race are drawn into this section from the already negro-blighted district… Already Washington Park at the south, a very fine park, has been almost completely monopolized by the colored race… Washington Park is doomed.”

I’m reading about the history of America. I’m reading about redlining.

A wonderful, horrifying project from the University of Richmond in Virginia has put 150 of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “Residential Security” maps online. HOLC was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, compiling massive national lists of neighborhoods and other areas based on mortgage lending risk.

The program brought together real estate professionals, loan officers and appraisers to determine how likely it was a Depression-era lender would get stiffed if they were dumb enough to loan to someone in a certain region. Then HOLC put the assessments on a series of color-coded maps. Green meant an area was “Best,” and a good place for banks to invest via loans. Blue meant “Still Desirable.” Yellow, “Definitely Declining.”

Red meant “Hazardous.” Don’t loan there.

The maps determined which areas were which colors based on a number of criteria, but the main one that horrifies today is race. Neighborhoods were given the best scores for Northern European whites, less for more “ethnic whites” and down a sliding racist scale to black people at the bottom.

The federal government compiled maps telling banks not to lend to people of color.

I knew this in a sort of squishy liberal enough-history-to-pass-the-midterm-and-forget-it way, but the University of Richmond project has given an unparalleled chance to connect these maps to my actual life, to search and see why my parents’ Rockford house was put in red in 1939 (poor residents and a nearby creek tended to flood), why my sister’s Seattle apartment was blue (recent construction and white-collar Scandinavians) and why the North Center rental I’m typing this in was yellow (older homes an 25 percent foreigners).

What horrifies me is the equivalence of race and just… housing stuff.

C49 in Portage Park was “definitely declining” because “Many of the houses are of a substantial age and those with stucco features of design are not only unattractive but difficult to sell at the present time.”

C66 in Rogers Park was given the same destination despite the real estate agents’ promise “There are only a minimum of Jews.”

Jews and stucco. Black neighbors and being downwind from the stockyards. Anglo whites and convenient shopping. The maps run types of humans through the same formula they use to figure noise, undesirable odor or any other factor in home choice, in no place put more blatantly than D64 in Brighton Park: “Class of inhabitant, noise, and undesirable odors do not tend to any improvement.”

The federal government put out documents putting black people on the same level as a rotting smell, and Jews on par with a momentary downtick in the popularity of stucco.

What also horrifies me is how much these maps look like the city today. When the banks — and the federal government through the G.I. Bill’s zero-interest mortgages for returning WWII veterans — poured money only into the HOLC-designated better areas, the rich got richer and the poor didn’t.

The new interstate system ran highways through poorer neighborhoods, scattering the residents to find new homes. People of color could legally move anywhere, after the Supreme Court killed racially restrictive housing covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) because, yes, until 1948 it was legal to put bans on specific races into your home sales. (The specific covenant in Shelley v. Kraemer banned “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from ever owning a particular house in St. Louis.)

When people of color started moving next door, those same highways became pretty attractive ways for white people to move to white suburbs and still get to work in the Loop by 9.

It’s not just Chicago. A National Community Reinvestment Coalition study released earlier this year showed that 74 percent of the HOLC-designated “Hazardous” sections are low- to moderate-income today. 64 percent are still minority neighborhoods. These maps served to strengthen the inequalities they highlighted. They were a self-fulfilling prophecy our tax dollars created.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 supposedly put an end to the HOLC maps’ influence, but the difference too often was banks and other lenders had to find euphemisms and excuses for being more generous with loans in rich, white areas. “Redlining” became a general term, removed from the actual red lines that would wrap around a “negro-blighted district,” to quote D74.

So take a look at the maps. Explore. Play. But remember as you do that this segregated city was made to happen, that there were programs and policies and power dynamics that grouped people by the color of their skin and the contents of their pocketbooks.

It was the eat eat eat of the herring, pelmini, pierogi and chilled vodka shots.

It was the schvitz, dunk, schvitz, dunk, heading from blistering Russian dry or Turkish wet steam rooms into a 41-degree plunge pool that had to be skimmed once in a while for stray leaves that had stuck to the Russian men when they beat each other with bundles of tree branch in the steam.

The windowless building on Cicero had indications of what went on inside, of course. Letters near the top of the single story declared “SAUNA… BANIA… SCHVITZ.” But other than that, the Chicago Sweatlodge is featureless from the outside, another awning over another door in Portage Park.

Inside the door, past the young guys handing towels, keys, sandals, a short restaurant area where men ate in none but towels. Past that, chairs where men watched March Madness or endless soccer promos for a match hours away.

The signs and instructions dropped F-bombs with precision. The instructions for the near frosted plunge pool led with the phrase “Man Up!”

But they also had ferns lining the walls, photographs and descriptions of traditional steams from the Navajo, Japanese, Turks, Finns, Irish and a dozen cultures in between.

It was comfortable but classy. It was, simply put, nice.

I don’t know how to write this without sounding like a review. The review of the Chicago Sweatlodge at 3500 N. Cicero would be: Go. It’s fun.

But I don’t write reviews. I don’t tell you about where you should go to spend your shekels. I write about human moments in a dehumanizing city.

Of those, there were many.

Tattoo-clad old Polish men laughing and telling stories. A group of young friends pushing and shoving and cajoling in what I think was Ukrainian. Friends telling tales over heaping plates of food from a half-dozen countries. A father and son silently sipping beers, each thinking about how far they had come.

I’m sure there was some fronting and push-shove angriness, the showing off that groups of men muster. I’m sure a few chests were pumped out and stomachs sucked in. Laws of probability dictate.

But I didn’t see that. I just saw men taking a break from having to be men, the exhausting process of having to show the world you’re better, stronger, smarter, that you kick more ass, fuck more women, down more shots and have cogent things to say about the world economy the whole time.

We could be friendly there. We could be social or just talk to our buddies. We could relax, stretch, get a massage and a heap of food or just sit and sweat alone.

I have my moments, my little human tidbits amid the hustle, my little leaves floating on the water. I’ll keep these memories for me.

I’ll leave you instead with the chatter chatter chatter of Spanish, Ukrainian, English, Russian, Pole. I’ll leave you with the scent of steam and Epsom filling the air.

And I’ll leave you with a room full of men who, for a few competition-free hours, didn’t have to show the world how much more ass-kicking and clever they were than all the others.

We didn’t have to be men there. We got to be.

Read the Sweatlodge’s Yelp (their main site got hacked)

A designer who pursues the feminine

A bubble wafts through River North

Help support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

But when the hip-hop pumps, the banker’s on the floor. She flips, she turns, she toprocks and down. She 6-steps and Indian steps and freezes, flares, swipes.

This is Miss Sweetfeet, B-Girl of Chicago.

The 35-year-old breakdancer loves jazz, funk, soul, the rockabilly she spends some nights vibing to and the boleros her father used to play her when she was growing up.

And of course, hip-hop, soft spot always for the jazzy old-school.

“When you hear music, it’s like I want to move. It moves you,” she said, wrapped in a dark coat as autumn leaves tumbled around her. “Growing up in the ‘90s, hip-hop was just a new thing and coming in from all different places. It was a thirst.”

Goofy of Zion

The suburban community of Zion, Ill., was formed in 1896 as a “Christian utopia” for a sect created by a Scottish faith healer named John Alexander Dowie. Small and conservative, it didn’t even allow alcohol until 2004.

It wasn’t the best fit for the little low-rider girl nicknamed Goofy who wanted to house dance at high school parties and Chicago clubs.

“Being rebellious, I would sneak away and come down here. One of my cousins was dating a bouncer, so we would go into the clubs, dance,” she said, bursting out in laughter at the under-21 memories. “I wouldn’t drink. I just wanted to go and I wanted to dance and I wanted to house. I craved it.”

Moving to Chicago 15 years ago, she connected with B-Boy Kid Jungle over MySpace. She soon started hanging out with him and his dance crew at the time, Phase Two.

The future Miss Sweetfeet started asking her new friends to teach her some moves.

“It was kind of hard to get someone to take you serious when you’re asking them like (adopting a slight valley girl voice), ‘Hey, you know, will you teach me how to break?’”

Her friends would show her a basic move or two to quiet her — an Indian step or a 6-step — but she wanted more.

A friend was teaching an after-school program at a community center in Pilsen. There, Miss Sweetfeet found a class on breakdancing from a B-Boy named Stitches.

“From there, when I showed everyone — like my friends that didn’t want to teach me — ‘Look what I learned!’ And they’re like (gasp), like all amazed,” she said. “Slowly they started taking me in and showing me things, investing time into me. And then once I got into a comfortable place, I started teaching other females.”

Bananas

She took over a Kuumba Lynx class Kid Jungle had been teaching, making an effort to invite in women and girls who wanted to learn to break. All ages, races and regions. One woman drives in from suburban Schaumburg for the class.

“It’s kind of hard for a female because there’s not that many people that will be willing to teach,” Miss Sweetfeet said. “Usually, girls they want to learn for the wrong reasons, like ‘Oh, I have a boyfriend that does it,’ or ‘Oh, guys will want to talk to me if I do it.’”

Teaching someone to breakdance is a time-intensive, demanding investment. Dilettantes of either gender are, if not discouraged, then not actively sought as students.

Also, women drop out more, Miss Sweetfeet said. Sometimes it’s for family reasons, like pregnancy or parenting. Sometimes they just move on to something new.

At 35, Miss Sweetfeet has become something of an elder stateswoman.

“I think the girls that come in now, they’ve seen the older women,” she said, listing off a few names like Lady Champ, bgirl pilot and Bgirl Sindee. “They’ve seen some of us older women out there still breaking, still dancing, doing things. And I think that inspires them.

“I know a few girls that have come up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen you dance and after I seen you dance, I’m like, whoa a girl.’ And then they’ll tell me that I inspired them to start too. That meant so much to me. Like whoa, bananas.”

The Moves

Chicago’s a powerhead city. That means the local scene veers toward power moves — windmills, head spins, flares, 90s — moves as frenetic and frightening as the names imply.

“Basically anything where you’re whipping your body to a fast motion. That’s a good description,” Miss Sweetfeet said, laughing before turning to a pleasantly self-mocking tone. “Anything where you’re basically throwing your body on the floor at a fast pace.”

Despite Chicago’s powerhead rep, Sweetfeet is more proud of her toprock, more into style and footwork than to big power moves.

She’s also more of a cipher head, preferring the collaborative back-and-forth of a cipher to a competitive breakdance battle.

“I kind of like that feeling more because it’s more like a camaraderie. You’re with a group of friends and you’re vibing out to music. It’s not high pressure. You’re just kind of having fun — you go in, I go in, we’re going back and forth — it’s just having a good time.”

Free Style

It had gotten darker in the park where Miss Sweetfeet read about samurai. A bit colder too. Squirrels chased each other by, making that odd chirpy barky sound a lot of people don’t think squirrels make, but they totally do, man.

Miss Sweetfeet has arthritis in her feet, making it hard to walk some days. She has asthma, too.

But if she can breakdance when she some days can’t walk, she figures she can do anything. She took up running to increase her stamina for dance. Now she wants to run a marathon, asthma and arthritis be damned.

“Just breaking and overcoming little things that you put your mind to, I have taken that with me into my regular daily life,” she said.

When Miss Sweetfeet started breaking, she plunged full into classic hip-hop style. Adidas jumpsuit. Fat laces.

“I still rock my fat laces,” she clarifies, laughing. “I’m not in the same place. I’m growing up, I’m older. I’m a woman. So I slowly began to incorporate my own personal style into that style.”

Now, her style is a fusion of hip-hop, rockabilly and just plain her. She wears dresses now.

But she wears them with shorts underneath so she can get going when the music starts.

“It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter if I’m a female. If I hear music and I’m moved, I’m moving.”

Read about a gymnast who took Bronzeville flips to a superhero circus

Meet the storyteller who introduced me to Miss Sweetfeet

Another tale of feminism and physicality

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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It was going to be a replica of the box that held the ashes of missionary priest Jacques Marquette. Father Marquette, along with fur trader Louis Joliet, explored the waterways of what we would someday call the Midwest in birch bark canoes.

The birch bark that would hold Ralph Frese’s remains had been sitting since last summer in the yard behind the Portage Park canoe shop he built out of his family’s blacksmith shop.

“He may have collected this himself because he restored a birch bark a while ago. And it might be that this is from that restoration,” Gross said, coiling the hose he was using to fill old wooden bucket with a plastic bag of bark inside. “It would surprise me if it isn’t.”

Ralph Frese — environmentalist, educator, re-enactor, blacksmith and patron of canoeing — died in December. He was 86.

Chicagoland Canoe Base at Irving and Narragansett has about six more months left, shop employee Mike Otter said in January.  They’re liquidating the inventory for 30 to 50 percent off. The land will be next.

“The property’s for sale,” Otter said. “It’ll be sold probably within the next year or so, you know. It could be a couple months. It could be a year and a half. We just don’t know.”

Ralph Frese’s death made the Tribune and Sun-Times. More than a month after his passing, the website his family and friends set up for people to share memories is still getting posts.

And the regulars from the shop come by to help sell off the kayaks, oars and canoes and share memories of Ralph.

“We loved him,” Gross said. “We loved him like a dad. But he was a human being; he had his moments. Everybody has their moments. We remember the fond moments and some of the funny moments.”

Otter, the canoe shop employee and part-time puppeteer, and Gross, a mechanic turned firefighter turned suburban high school biology teacher, talked with me about canoeing and workmanship and about when the strip mall across the street was all prairie.

We talked about how a neighbor drafted into World War II and a mental hospital across the street from his dad’s blacksmith shop started Ralph on canoeing. We talked in the shop where Ralph made his amazing canoes by hand.

Gross and Otter said everything better than I ever could, so I left it be. You can download snippets of our talk below.

As we talked and the birch bark soaked, Gross eventually went back to work on a replica canoe he had been building. Ralph taught him how to make canoes. The technique he was using was even one Ralph invented and jokingly called “genuine artificial birch bark.”

Ralph had traced the birch bark pattern for the silkscreen by hand. One day, Gross, Otter, Ralph and a few other of the shop regulars set up a silkscreening operation right in the shop to put that pattern on canoe coverings.

That was about two weeks before Ralph became too sick to work, Gross said. He would die a month after that.

Ralph had other things going, other projects in the hopper right until the end. One unfinished canoe is going to a Chicago police officer. A half-complete fleur-de-lis from the blacksmith side of Ralph’s business is owed to a customer in California.

But to Gross, the canoe he’s building with the birch bark pattern he and his friend made together, that will always be Ralph Frese’s last canoe.

Click on the links below to download segments of my interview with Rich Gross and Mike Otter.

Part 1: Dumping Ralph in the Gulf of Mexico (7:44)

Part 2: An “addictive” shop (6:06)

Part 3: Ralph’s technique and German dads (6:17)

Part 4: Environmentalism, the Chicago prairie and imagination (6:23)

Part 5: How Ralph got started (2:38)

…

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Share memories of Ralph Frese on a site his friends and family set up

Read when I first heard of Ralph

“Have you seen our store superheroes?” she joked. “I was eating a Starburst and started choking. Spider-Man saved me.”

She gestured with a pair of nerd glasses to two young boys — maybe 6 or 7 years old — who had apparently talked their parents into letting them go to the costume shop in costume. One was dressed as Spider-Man, the other as Hawkeye from “The Avengers.”

The boys gaped, walking around with mouths open and head turned every which way to take in all they could of Fantasy Costumes, the costume shop the length of a city block.

Fantasy Costumes, which everyone I know calls Fantasy Headquarters, is by a long length Chicago’s most famous costume shop. It’s where the local morning shows do their Halloween segments, where local clowns get their make-up, where drag shows get their wigs.

Unlike the little pop-up shops momentarily filling a fraction of Chicago’s abandoned storefronts for two months, Fantasy Costumes is a year-round affair. The painted walls as you walk the length of the store try to sell you on other times to get costumes — Mardi Gras and Purim — and they do get regular business from clowns, mall Santas and mascots. But it’s all about Halloween for Fantasy.

There are 12 to 13 employees for most of the year, the young woman at the spinner rack said.

And during Halloween season?

“More,” she said, serious for the first time.

At the make-up counter, a woman with the most ghoulishly realistic mock wound on her hand guilted me over my make-up choices. She approved of my plan of oatmeal for texture (“That’s the best.”) but seemed a little horrified when I said I would use baby powder to set the greasepaint I was buying (“You know that doesn’t work, right? It sweats off.”)

I went a little pricier than I planned to on the face paint, but I did not buy the special barrier spray when baby powder works just fine, thank you very much.

She was very nice, though. And her planned costume, “a cracked porcelain doll like you would find in your grandmother’s attic,” sounds amazing.

In the packaged costumes, there was the usual assortment of slutty nurses, schoolgirls and Wonder Women, but there was also a disturbing trend of cleavagy, leggy, micro-skirted versions of male characters. You can be a slutty Joker now, or a slutty Flash, Green Hornet or guy from “Top Gun.”

There was at least one lady version of a Simpsons characters. Someone will spend this Halloween as a slutty Duffman.

“Have you seen when there’s a line?” the young woman putting glasses on the spinner rack said. “You think it’s busy today? It’s not busy. Sometimes there’s a line all the way down the street.”

She gestured outdoors with the nerd glasses.

“It’s when we go 24 hours,” she said, poking the glasses to a hanging sign behind me saying the store turns all-night from the 24th to the 31st. “People come from all over. Some people come from Indiana.”

When she said “Indiana,” she prounounced each syllable separately for emphasis.

There’s a lot that could be overblown on Halloween — block-long lines, slutty costumes, overly serious make-up experts. And, yeah, even if you love it like I do it can get a little old.

For Spider-Man and Hawkeye, it was a shop of too many wonders to process. The little superheroes were enthralled, couldn’t take it all in.

Do you remember when you could pretend so much and so well that Halloween was sacred? Do you remember when a few stitches of fabric could turn you, actually transform you into whatever you wanted to become, the reckless monster or world-saving superhero you felt you might actually be on the inside?

Seeing the boys, so proud to walk around as Spider-Man and Hawkeye, brought that feeling back for a moment. Fantasy Costumes, which everyone I know calls Headquarters, keeps that wonderful, terrifying, unholy holy Halloween feeling alive all year long.

But there’s still no excuse for slutty Duffman.

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Read about another mix of sex and costumes