And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

It was the gated dog park within the gated downtown community of Kinzie Park, an early 2000s ritzification of the stretch south of “Little Hell.” A few steps west of the crapping pedigrees, a jogger swiped his way past the security station meant to keep us scrubs out of the $2.2 million for a condo condo complex.

Beyond that, overhead Metra tracks dangled with icicles. Then, crackle-pavemented parking lots for the Blommer Chocolate Factory that scents the region. It’s a nothing stretch, a passby for passersby biking or driving out from work.

But this was once Wabonsia, Illinois, a separate legal entity from the town of Chicago growing to the south.

Layouts

Blommer Chocolate Factory is on the west side of Jefferson. Wabonsia doesn’t even get the plant, just a parking lot that charges a baseline $216 per tow and the cool, chocolatey smell that blankets the region.

…

Appearing on an 1835 plat map and an 1834 map of the newly minted Chicago, Kinzie’s Addition, “Wababsia” and the School Section, this sliver of roads and river was its own separate town or subdivision.

Owned by John H. Kinzie — son of the Kinzie Street Kinzie — Wabonsia became part of Chicago sometime between Chi-Town (1833) and Chi-Officially-Designated-City (1837).

Wabonsia, Illinois, was guarded by Jefferson Street to the west and Kinzie Street to the south. The north branch of the river did and still does cut northwest making the third side of this triangle town. As I wandered by, a police boat sped to either some emergency or the schoolteacher protest. The water waked and sloshed near condo walkways after the cops sped by.

Wabonsia was on a grid, like Chicago, but its grid cut northwest, askew from the town to the south and parallel with the river’s branch.

Every single slanted street in the once-entity — Kane Street, Dunn Street, Cook Street, West Water — is gone.

Oh my Lord Baby Jesus, Historians were Racist

Along Jefferson, Blommer to the west, cars were parked diagonal along a crackling industrial road. Pavement slow-mo shattered to reveal bricks and, further north, gravel and mud.

…

Early details are sketchy and horrible.

In her (by 21st century standards) white-man-burdenish-horrible 1856 memoirs “Wau-Bon,” early settler Juliette Kinzie — wife of John H. — recalls that her husband subdivided his land north of Chicago in early February 1833 to make it more appealing for sale to the booming town.

This would be Wabonsia’s birth.

February 1833 is a date that the editor of the equally racist 1930s “Wau-Bon” edition in the Harold Washington Library’s sixth-floor Chicago Room called shenanigans on. That pre-dates the boom by four or five months, plus why trek out to survey and subdivide in February cold?

Personally, I think the savvy and shitty John H. Kinzie probably sensed which way the wind was blowing and got ahead of Congress on this one, but whether Wabonsia became a thing in February or later in the year isn’t terribly important.

Wabonsia was a thing by the 1834 map and, according to the Chicago Room’s also retrospectively racist 1895 “Aboriginal to Metropolitan: History of Chicago, Illinois” by John Moses and Joseph Kirkland, the “’Wolcott’s addition, North Branch addition and (sic.) Wabansia addition” joined Chicago sometime after June 1836.

“The enlarged area of the town was heralded to the world, and made Chicago the center of speculative attraction for lot buyers,” Kirkland and Moses, “Aided by Eminent Local Writers,” wrote.

Speculation

The mud and gravel peaked under the Metra tracks, running a path back to bricks to crackling pavement north beyond. The tracks cut parallel to the river so it crossed both Jefferson and Kinzie, slicing along Wabonsia like its awkward roads used to.

…

Chicago’s history is basically the plot of “Blazing Saddles.”

It was a sleepy town (like Rock Ridge) that suddenly became valuable because lawmakers (like Mel Brooks’ fart namesaked Gov. Le Petomane) decided would become the center of a transportation hub (a train route in the movie, the Illinois and Michigan Canal in real life).

I had some cool stats on the land boom in a previous story (one lot went from $66 to $800 in a month), but Kirkland and Moses provided some fascinating and super-racist description of how much of an event a land auction was in early Chicago.

“A negro dressed up in gaudy colors, with a scarlet flag, and riding a white horse with harness of scarlet, rode through the town announcing the hour which the sale would begin. Crowds flocked around and followed him and hung upon his entrancing words.”

Unfortunately for this story, the Wolf Tavern, Chicago’s first tavern and the namesake of Wolf Point, seemed to be just south of Wabonsia.

Few places name a location for James Kinzie’s tavern beyond “west of the river,” which makes sense as it predates a lot of the roads. A story Chicago Daily News editor Henry Justin Smith recounted in a book commissioned by the Century of Progress World’s Fair in the 1930s put the tavern at Lake Street, but that story also got the owners wrong and told a story never heard elsewhere that the place was so full of rats it used to be called “Rat Castle.”

It’s a great story I don’t believe. But a few old sketches of the tavern in a few of the old books in the library’s Chicago Room do show a wooden bridge to the north. Kinzie Street commuters still speed down that path each day.

End of Town

Beyond the crackling path, a train tankard sat, mottled with a bit of bright graffiti. Grand Avenue sat to the north, commuters in the now-dark speeding west to their homes. A bus shelter not quite near the bus stop was likewise vandalized, a mix of paint, scrapes and stickers for an artist named “Walrus Cobbler.”

North of that, the parking lot of the “Chicago Tribune Freedom Center.” It’s a pretentious name for the printing plant.

…

The Fermilab physics lab in the suburbs is built on the dead town of Weston, Illinois.

Hyde Park, Lake View and untold numbers of other places were once their own places before Chicago swept through.

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam, as They Might Be Giants reminds.

Each part of the world is as old as the next, whether something historic happened there or whether it was just platted differently. John H. Kinzie set aside this town or subdivision to make it easier to sell to Chicago, not because he envisioned a community there.

But Wabonsia, Illinois, was a thing. This gated condo complex for richies and crackling, chocolate-scented parking lots has a past that might not be generally known.

And now you do know it.

It’s a weird bit of trivia worming its way into your brain. This little slap of condo in River West has a history of plats, possible Rat Castles and scarlet-clad slaves as advertising campaign. Whatever it is, you’re stuck with it now.

I’m sorry.

You’re welcome.

Edit: 8 p.m. Feb. 8, The original version of this story was just mixing up all the Kinzies, calling them all John. The Kinzie Street Kinzie was John. Two of his sons were John H. (owned Wabonsia) and James (owned the Wolf Tavern). All were savvy. All were shitty.

Take a photo exploration of an abandoned train tunnel running south of Wabonsia

Learn about a Roaring ’20s murderess who used to be my neighbor

A distant relative of this guy recently contacted me to say thanks

The world’s first movie theater was both Chicagoan and zoöpraxographical

Why’s there a statue of a dentist, anyway?

Help support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

The ankle bent in the proper places, the plastic and metal giving and moving along the pedals’ arc. Circles within circles as the ankle connected up to a plastic calf nearly tortoiseshell in its brindled browns and green. It moved the pedal moving the gear moving the chain in perfect precision with the woman’s other leg, the one still made of muscle and bone. Circle. Circle. I was reminded of automata.

The bicyclist with the prosthetic leg wore Capri pants. She smiled as she rode.

Above the Capri pants that hid how far the prosthetic went, the woman wore a light white cardigan over a floral blouse, the type a nurse might wear in a hospital that allows expressive scrubs. Her hair was mid-length, black turning white one strand at a time.

Her eyes were kind.

And her right leg was plastic and metal.

She rode up the bike expressway on Milwaukee Avenue. I followed a bike behind, thinking of the most sensitive way to get her to stop and talk for this story you’re reading now.

“Wonderful workmanship on the leg!” I blurted at a stop light.

“Oh, thank you!” she responded.

We stopped by a diagonal street, across from a sign shop where the owner lets American and POW flags rot without replacement over anti-Obama signs. She smiled at her leg when I complimented it, like a different woman might look at a dress just called beautiful.

“Are those shoes?” I asked, nodding toward the lacy flats she had slipped on over each of her feet. “Are they matching?”

I meant if the shoes matched each other. I don’t know what she thought I meant.

“That’s just my creativity,” she said.

She smiled and looked lovingly at her shoes while she said that. They were a light, lovely, pale turquoise.

“They match the bike,” she said looking back up. “Bianchi Green.”

The bike was a Bianchi, an Italian manufacturer noted for that light, lovely turquoise. They’re expensive. The wear on hers told she used it often.

The woman with one plastic leg rode her bike often.

The woman with one plastic leg wore Capri pants.

She smiled when she looked at her shoes.

Her shoes matched her bike and calf.

I don’t know where her confidence came from and I didn’t ask. This is the story of a moment, not an interview. The light turned and I wished her a good day. She pedaled off, automata leg circling circling. As I do with those ancient dancing, painting, writing, drawing machines, I marveled at her.

Maybe that confidence will flood over me some day, wash over me like ocean water. A peaceful sea tide, one the color of Bianchi Green.

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“You wanted that wrapped, right?” he said.

I said yes.

“Sorry,” he said, counting $16 in change. “I’m losing my mind from all these Valentine’s Day orders coming in.”

Then the big man sort of wandered off to see how my slice was doing in the oven.

Love had come to Pie-Eyed Pizzeria where Ogden meets Milwaukee meets Chicago. It came in the form of four teens at a table covered with red wrapping paper and a giant white teddy bear. It came in the form of couples gently stroking each others’ arms as they ate slices of pepperoni pie. And it came in the form of the Christmas ornaments still hanging above the counter and the garlands of evergreen adorning the awning outside.

February is a weird month for decorations.

“So people asking you to spell, ‘I Love You Becky’ in sausage?” I asked when the big man returned.

He nodded, his ponytail bouncing a touch beneath the brim of his backwards baseball cap.

“Oh yeah, there’s a lot of that,” he said. “And it’s all a surprise. ‘Can you write this on the box?’ ‘Can you keep it a secret?’ ‘She doesn’t know about it.’ It’ll be a few more minutes.”

The last part was about my slice.

“We’ve gotten a lot of attention on Facebook for our Valentine’s pies,” he said, tap tapping the glass between me and the slices with a fingernail.

There was a flier taped to the glass showing two pizzas shaped like hearts. A small was $10; a large, $15. Those are pretty good prices. I would order a heart pie for that.

The big man rubbed his unshaven face with both hands to wake himself up a little. He got me my slice, piping hot as always, and gave the friendly farewell.

Then he turned back to his kitchen. Happy Valentine’s Day. Time to make a bunch of pizza.

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