“… A TALL BOLD SLUGGER …”

California already lying behind me, here lies a station for brief resting on my journey back to the old continent. You cannot guess which city is alluded to in the citation given in the title? I think it is enough to mention the name Sandburg, our famous Swedish poet (at least his parents were) and continue citing him to rekindle your intellect.

“HOG Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.”

Now I think you got it: we are talking about the city built on a swampy shallow hill, which so happens to lie on the continental divide; waters running down its one side find their way to the Pacific, those swishing towards the East, soon passing a gigantic lake, belong to the Atlantic. Again using Sandburg’s expressions, I have arrived in “the place of the skunk, the river of the wild onion smell, Shee-caw-go”.

Why on earth did I choose to come to this place, reeking of raw capitalism, aptly underpinned by scholars advocating unleashed market forces as the main driver of progress? And this after my sophisticated séjour at the ivory towers on the Pacific coast!?! Well, there are two reasons for this: a prosaic and a more profound. First, the Windy City is a convenient stepping stone on a flight from San Francisco to Stockholm, if one wishes to make the trip in stages, to minimize the travail of time change. More importantly, Chicago was the residence of my granduncle Ludwig Fassl, an interesting personality, and I wished to retrace the visit Alice and myself paid him back in 1977.

The trip from SF to Chicago was uneventful, if one disregards the fact that there was considerable delay due to a tremendous thunderstorm, moving from the prairies towards Chicago, and stopping all traffic with destination thither. Once arrived, I had to deplore the minimal information service provided at O’Hare, leading me around in circles for forty minutes before finding the station for the shuttle service to downtown.

After a good night’s sleep I undertook the pilgrimage to 2304 Orchard Street, Ludwig’s former residence. My granduncle had emigrated to Chicago from his birthplace, Stegersbach in Burgenland (the easternmost province of Austria), in the ‘thirties. With only short primary education as luggage, he seemed nonetheless to be the right person for that unruly city. Starting out as handyman, he eventually found his calling, to be engineer of a respectable apartment building in a fashionable living area north of center, but close to the lake. Engineer without formal education? Make no mistake; the word denotes, in the US, the profession of caretaker of large apartment buildings. By and by, through diligent investments of his meager savings, he managed to build up a small fortune and eventually became owner of the same building.

Alice and I visited him on our trip back to Stockholm from Berkeley in 1977, after having crossed the Sierras, the great desert basin of Nevada and the Great Plains with our trusted Toyota Corona, filled to the brim with moving goods. It was a memorable experience to meet him and his wife Mary. They received us in style and housed us in their large apartment on top of the building. Both were in their eighties then, but in reasonable health. Notably, Ludwig was still active as caretaker of his own building. Although not very well versed in English, he nonetheless enjoyed the respect of people in the narrow community. I still remember him sitting at the street corner of the small greens surrounding the building, graciously receiving the “Good afternoon Mr. Fassl” of passersby on their way to the lake. He knew everyone in the neighborhood and everyone knew him or of him. Walking the streets with him gave me an excellent opportunity to study the mentality of the inhabitants. The area reeked of raw capitalism, everyone was rushing to make a buck, in particular the most recently arrived immigrants, of which there were aplenty.

Granduncle Ludwig on the right, visiting us in Austria. My mother standing in the middle

Ludwig’s eldest son Richard, after whom my brother got his name, died in WWII as war hero (on the American side). Ludwig, whose personality did not accept defeat, had long pestered the City Council to name a street after him. Since this request was recurrently denied, he finally got the folks in his neighborhood to support him in an improvised ceremony, whereupon the street corner opposite his house was renamed “Richard Fassl Square” and a street sign put up, already in the ‘fifties, which the city authorities did not dare, or care, to remove. So, when sitting on his chair at his small greens, he had the pleasure of reminiscing about his son, with the help of a square, in plain sight from the greens, with Richard’s name on it. You don’t believe this? Well, I have an old slide, taken there, to prove it. Furthermore, the fact is known back home in Burgenland, and the story has also been printed in one of its publications, Burgenländische Gemeinschaft 9/10 1992, nr. 319. You can look it up on internet by searching for “Richard Fassl Square”.

So it was with some trepidation that I took the metro to Fullerton Station and continued on foot from there the 15 minutes to Orchard Street. Would I still find Ludwig’s old house, or would the city’s raw progress have swallowed it already? Furthermore, would the good old street sign with his son’s name on it still be there to honor the war hero?

Well, to my great surprise, the street did not look a bit changed. It was still the same quiet residency area I remembered, with large trees shadowing the sidewalks and the houses all in good order. Even Ludwig’s house stood almost as I remembered it, which means that it must have been refurbished since then. Houses do not keep their appearance without aid for 35 years. I could not resist venturing closer and ringing the bell of one tenant after another, in the hope of finding someone who could still remember my granduncle, deceased since at least twenty years back. After several trials a young man answered my call, at long last, and we had a brief conversation. Apparently, none of the tenants from yore were left in the building. It had been sold soon after Ludwig’s dead and recently been reformed into a condominium: only new apartment owners were living there know. The young man was intrigued by my stories about uncle Ludwig, but could not respond with information of value for me.

Somewhat disappointed, I took nonetheless some pictures of the house and, not to keep you too long in suspense, of the street corner opposite to it, located just in front of a church. Was the sign with Richard’s name on it still there for me to admire and document? To my great regret, nothing remained; sic transit gloria mundi! If it weren’t for me and Burgenländische Gemeinschaft, the interesting story about war hero Richard and his square would now already be buried and forgotten.

You can imagine that this did nothing to keep me in good spirits. To counter a beginning depression I decided to walk back to the hotel along the lake, a nice walk of about two hours. This turned out to be the right way to get rid of my broodings. The walk went first along a large expanse of greenery and glades, called Lincoln Park and followed thereafter the lake shore in streets bordered by elegant high-risers.

Along the walk I could observe some interesting weather conditions. Although still early summer, the late morning had brought with it rather high temperatures, clearly felt on Orchard Street. Coming to the border of the lake, you could suddenly feel the air getting cooler, as the rising heat more inland was sucking in air from above the lake, bringing with it a huge amount of cool humidity, which started to build up as light fog. Just before arriving at the lakefront, the air was still relatively warm and calm and I had a clear view of the skyscraper skyline far in the distance. Close to the lake, the skyscrapers almost disappeared in the build-up of the fog; but this did not disturb me since I was comfortably cooled off by this air current from the lake.

Of course, the closer I hiked to the skyscrapers, the more firmly they stepped out of the haze and, once I was ambling between them, a clear view could again be obtained. And an interesting and educational it was at that. I am not especially fond of these monster buildings, but feel forced to concede that Chicago seems to have mastered the art of placing them out in an interesting and esthetically pleasing context. They never appear overpowering as they do in New York’s canyon-like streets, in short, they are a pleasure to behold.

After a long hike through Lincoln Park and its adjacent greens, I started to approach the downtown again. The path led me down to the lake, on the front of which some pretty impressive conservative looking residences were sitting, a bit like dowager ladies, deploring the departure, long ago, of their beloved relatives. When looking closer at the doorways and accoutrements of these elegant, albeit aged beauties, I suddenly saw that all of them stemmed from the “Roaring twenties”, some even having been finished just in time before the stock market crash of 1929, after which new buildings were hard to conceive for a long time to come. Will we, ninety years from now, have as beautiful a witness of our own excess decade to show for, as the doorway you are looking at in the picture?

As a last challenge in Chicago I decided to take the elevator to the top of the John Hancock Building, the largest scraper way back in 1977, but since then well surpassed by several others. Relatively modest in size as it is, it still provided an excellent view of its brethren, and underpinned my earlier appreciation of this ensemble of monster buildings. There was an interesting exhibition on the history of Chicago all the way up on the viewing gallery. Reading this exposé, I started to understand the reasons for this city being so brutally boisterous, but at the same time welcoming. Among the things I learned was, to my great surprise, that the city was founded by a prominent black citizen, born in Haïti, with a French father, who harkened to the impressive name of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable.

As far as is known, Jean Baptiste left Haïti for New Orleans, then journeyed up the Mississippi River to Missouri and, eventually, settled along the north bank of the Chicago River in about 1773, building a home, trading post and farm on land east of present-day Michigan Avenue, the main downtown thoroughfare. Du Sable, who was married to a Potawatomi Indian woman, presided over a frontier settlement for more than 20 years that in some ways mirrored the diversity found in the sprawling city that exists today. Du Sable's settlement welcomed American Indians as well as Canadians, British, French and Americans.

In the true spirit of white supremacy, this historical fact was conveniently suppressed in the passage of time and various white candidates were put forward as founders in du Sable’s stead. It took the city fathers until 1999 to officially acknowledge the true founder of the Windy City.

That’s about it folks; you can learn only that much on a brief stopover, even in a city plenty of excitement, such as, Chicago.