Oldest Chicago by David Witter reviewed

High-school teacher and freelance writer David Anthony Witter has just published Oldest Chicago (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2011). You may have seen the sad, beautiful book Lost Chicago, commemorating many buildings destroyed over the years. Witter's book could be called Not Lost Yet Chicago.

This is not a book of genealogy, and its historical assertions aren't sourced, but it's a great place for either a visitor or an oblivious native to catch the bug of learning about the past by visiting seemingly ordinary places and institutions that carry it on.

The book has a simple premise -- 66 short takes on Chicago's oldest church, oldest house, oldest business, oldest park, and so forth, including the suburbs -- and it's easily read in short bites as we often do these days. Each oldest place also gets a sidebar about its neighborhood. This is a back-pocket book, not a coffee-table book. If you're around Chicago researching and the repositories are closed, you'll want it handy.

You can get technical with some of the entries. The city's supposedly oldest restaurant -- Daley's Restaurant at 893 East 63rd Street -- was founded in 1892, but it turns out to have been shut down and had no building for five years during the Great Depression (p. 83). The book's aesthetics are time-bound: Witter waxes sentimental about dated commercialism (the giant dancing hot dogs at Superdawg up at 6363 North Milwaukee, from 1948), but doesn't care for current versions (pp. 196, xiv).

When I was growing up, everything in Chicago seemed ancient (nothing much had gone up during the Depression and World War II). Now, at least parts of the city are thriving, and it's interesting to see that Witter found a diner, bar, ice-cream place, and movie house in the suburbs -- each one older than its counterpart within the Chicago city limits.

Witter is also good on chronicling the ironies of history: Chicago's oldest cemetery, Oak Woods at 1065 E. 67th, houses a mass grave of 6,000 Confederate soldiers and sailors who died at the "crowded hell hole" of Camp Douglas. Also prominent in the same cemetery are many distinguished African Americans, including Harold Washington and Jesse Owens, who might have been born into slavery if those Confederates had had their way (p. 20-21).

Many stories follow a familiar pattern of twentieth-century decline followed by revival of the lucky few. Chicago's oldest church building houses St. Patrick's, center of a once-busy immigrant parish that bottomed out at 4 members in 1983 (p. 25).

Similarly, Merz Apothecary at 4716 North Lincoln was founded by a German family in 1875, and seemed destined for oblivion when the last member of the third generation prepared to retire in 1972. "The store was ready to close when pharmacist Abdul Qaiyum walked in after hearing about it from his German in-laws" (p. 66). Sometimes the preservation of the old depends on a city's being open to groups of people who are new.

Chicago Maritime History

The fate of Chicago's maritime history is a lot like the fate of all of its newspapers that were not the Chicago Tribune: for want of a wealthy present-day patron, it languishes and is hard to learn about or use. The 33 articles, essays, book excerpts, and court decisions that make up From Lumber Hookers to the Hooligan Fleet: A Treasury of Chicago Maritime History are a big step in the right direction, thanks to the Chicago Maritime Society and Lake Claremont Press. Chicago was once a major port; today's scenic green-park-with-skyscrapers banks of the Chicago River downtown used to be packed with lumber storage and boats of all kinds.

An entire industry -- several of them -- have just disappeared. This was brought home to me in a recent research project which tangentially involved a guy who lived on the opposite coast of Lake Michigan and who made his living sailing on the lake in the summers and working in the woods in the winters. Just a few decades later, when evidence of his life and death were needed, there was almost no one around who knew or remembered the 1860s maritime culture.

As one would expect, this treasury does not draw on a deep well of material, and as a result is a choppy experience to read from cover to cover. Some facts are repeated from one essay to the next; others are repeated several times within the same one. My favorites include A. T. Andreas's long quotation on the Flood of 1849 (a fine example of European settlers' ignorance of their surroundings and its cost, although that's not how Andreas saw it); Elisha Sly's too-short workingman's view of life on the Illinois and Michigan Canal; Tom and Chris Kastle on maritime music; and Ann Gordon's devastating investigation of the (non-)investigation of the worst Great Lakes disaster of all, the overturning of the excursion boat Eastland at the dock in Chicago. Chicago's maritime role in World War II is accounted for and provides the context for Richard Brady's harrowing account of living through a South Pacific typhoon with winds over 200 mph. (The story is included because the boat he almost died on was built in Chicago.)

The enthusiastic amateurism without which this book would not exist also makes it sometimes difficult. Researchers who want to follow up on a provocative statistic will look in vain for reference notes of any kind. Some articles were written by experts who lovingly describe the technical specifications of a boat or an engine, but not the context or how they matter.

But professionalism isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. As a genealogist, I was mightily annoyed with historian Richard J. Wright. He spoke on wooden shipbuilding in Chicago 1836-1890 in a 1984 presentation at Loyola, reprinted here. In it he lamented that "nothing is known of a biographical nature or of the site locations" of the shipbuilders' yards, including "Hewitt & Judd, Stephen Gosselin, Matthews & Kenefick, and Akhurst & Douglas." Had he not heard of city directories?

Anyone with an interest in Chicago history or the Great Lakes will want this book. Hopefully a new generation of researchers will do the work to make the next treasury even more of a treasure.