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.

Once or twice, it blinks, maybe cocks its head. They’re jarringly human gestures. They’re the little twitches and nods a man would make trying to get comfortable while you watched a movie about his life.

But the man has been dead for 30 years. At his desk, a robot sits, gesturing and blinking and being eerily almost natural as it narrates the life of Mayor Harold Washington to visitors to the DuSable Museum of African American History.

The DuSable Museum’s animatronic display is typical museum fare, a Hall of Presidents-style flesh-and-gear droid telling the story of the person he portrays. It’s beautifully done, in my amateur opinion.

This Harold Washington sits at the Harold Washington’s desk. Not the desk he had at the mayor’s office. Not the desk where he slumped over at 11 a.m. Nov. 25, 1987 in the middle of a conversation about the school board. Not the desk where paramedics swarmed, trying and failing to revive the city’s first black mayor.

Harold Washington was pronounced dead at 1:36 p.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Ald. David Orr was named interim mayor for a week before, in the early morning hours in the parking lot of a closed restaurant in Wicker Park, Ald. Eugene Sawyer was quietly and secretly sworn in as the mayor of the City of Chicago.

So it’s not that desk. It’s the one Washington used while a state representative in Springfield.

Sawyer edged out another black alderman, Tim Evans, for the City Council vote to fill the post. Evans is now chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court. Orr is Cook County Clerk. Sawyer is dead.

Sawyer was beaten in 1989 by Richard M. Daley, son of and separate only by an initial from the Machine overlord who ran the city for two decades. Daley II would return the city to business as usual for 23 years, a lighter version of his father. Daley I with flower boxes, gay rights and less overt racism.

We now have Rahm, and a robot at Washington’s desk.

Washington’s time in office was marked by lost potential. He was stymied at every turn by the “Vrdolyak 29,” a cabal of aldermen led by Machine mainstays “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak (who spent much of 2011 in prison and looks like he might be headed back) and Ed Burke (still in power, still powerful).

“The Eddies” didn’t control a big enough power block to rule, just to reject appointments, throw the city into gridlock and otherwise hassle the mayor.

He wasn’t always great. One of Washington’s accomplishments was introducing Tax Increment Financing to the city in order to spur the redevelopment of Block 37. It brought a lot of power to the mayor’s office, and gave Daley II and Rahm a great tool for defrauding and draining the finances of the schools.

Despite what the press dubbed “The Council Wars,” Washington was re-elected. He was slowly gaining a handle on the unruly board. Then cholesterol did what the Eddies couldn’t.

At the DuSable Museum, the robot lights up when you press a button. It moves and blinks and nods imperceptibly. It gives a canned speech about history, facts, figures, biography of the first black man to run this city.

And then the speech is done, the lights dim and a robot with Harold Washington’s face powers down, the servos controlling it drooping his head toward the mayor’s desk.

Read why TIFs are awful

Read about the implications of the current mayor’s missing finger

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

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

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

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

Then, life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read some of the South Side stories I have written:

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

Bill Bottoms’ popular black-and-tan, where the atmosphere is torrid during the wee small hours. Plenty of action from the colored saxophone player and the drummer, and the entertainment goes on at a merry clip. Floor shows, dancing between, exotic atmosphere, food, and the beaming personality of Bill himself. Chicken and chops are a specialty on the menu.

It’s a weed-choked field in Washington Park.

1974, Bratislava

Though the place has grown from a tiny one-room storefront (where you often had to double up at the table with another couple) to two rooms complete with bar, not much of the original flavor has been lost. There’s still a large black and white aerial photo of Bratislava, white billowing curtains, colorful print tablecloths, and John, the headwaiter who never forgets a face. He’ll probably cajole you into ordering an extra dish or two, and you won’t regret it.

It’s a Starbucks in Lincoln Park.

1886, The Chicago Express

The Express has the largest circulation of any weekly paper in the United States, devoted to Political Reform and the industrial classes. 63 years old. It circulates in every State and Territory in the Union. Has an average circulation throughout the year of 40,000. The lowest advertising rate per capita of any weekly paper in this country. Send for sample copy and terms to Express Printing Company, 192 Madison Street, Chicago, Illinois.

It’s a downtown self park that uses the works of great American poets to help you remember which level your car’s on.

2015, an apartment in the snow

I collect old reference books. Restaurant guides, children’s textbooks, newspaper ad sales annuals, technical manuals for fields I never mean to enter.

And on a blizzard night too cold for the usual eavesdropping, stranger danger chatting or pre-arranged interviews that are slowly filling these thousand and one stories, I’m snowed in with my odd old books, treasures to no one but me.

I buy them because I like them. I like knowing that my 1939 “Production and Direction of Radio Programs” advised crunching the heavy end of a small bundle of uncut broom corn for fire sound effects and listed “Adolf” as a foreign name cropping up more and more in the news.

I like picturing the schoolchildren puzzling over the word problems involving carriages, hogsheads of molasses and something called a “gold pencil” in the 1889 edition of “Stoddard’s New Intellectual Arithmatic.”

A hawk caught 2/5 of Euphemia’s chickens, a cat killed 1/3 of them, 1/7 of them died, and she had 13 remaining; how many had she at first, and how many were destroyed by the hawk and cat respectively?

The city pops up too, the weird Midwestern town I’ve devoted the next few years of my life to.

My 1930 “The New Merrill Speller” has a sample letter to Marshall Field & Co. requesting “eight yards of brown cotton cloth like the inclosed sample” (with a note at the end that “It is correct to write either inclose or enclose”).

One of the publishers listed in my 1937 “First Editions of To-Day and How to Tell Them” is Pascal Covici, whose first book was Ben Hecht’s “1001 Afternoons in Chicago.”

I’ll never use “First Editions…” to spot a first edition, any more than I’ll use “New Merrill…” to learn to spell inclosed. I’m not going to dine at Bratislava in the ‘70s, dance at the Ritz Club in the ‘30s or buy ad space in the Express in the 1880s.

But, through these odd little books, I know people did.

These are the books used in life, full of tips and secret nods that indicate more about how the past was lived than novels or history can tell. They’re the books the people of the past used to dine, dance, learn and do business.

On this cold, isolated night, the simple act of opening one of these odd little manuals makes me feel connected to a world I never knew.

And Euphemia had 105 chickens.

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