Willowbrook Ballroom on Archer Avenue in Willow Springs, IL: place of legendary music (from Count Basie to the Village People) and hauntings, notably the story of Resurrection Mary.

Labels: chicago, history, music

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  If only a photo could convey the sharp, evocative scent of burning brush in Willow Springs Woods (FPDCC.gov Region 6 - Palos Division) last week; a perfect fall day in the southwest suburbs.



Traveling a bit further west on Archer Avenue to the Red Gate Woods forest preserve area, we found this old mossy stone wall or foundation, partially buried under what could be a century or two of accumulated soil and undergrowth.



Who lived here in the woods along Illinois' most haunted highway? Early Polish or Irish immigrants who built the roads and canals along this ancient native American trail? We do know what's buried here today in Red Gate Woods: the remains of CP-1, the first sustained nuclear "reactor" built by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.

Labels: chicago, history, nuclear, photo

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Well, I'm not sure what else to call this...the "Golden Grommet"? If anyone knows the title of the piece and the name of the artist, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, just admire this for what it is ... and understand why it kept in the basement of the University of Chicago's Walker Hall, away from light and prying easily offended eyes.

I'm half-tempted to invite a couple of people to take a picture with a hand on each side of the...er...artwork. Instant "Golden GOATSE"!



This piece of wisdom comes from the women's room wall in the Social Sciences Building, University of Chicago, home of the History Department (and no longer the home of the Economics Department. No indeedy.)

Labels: chicago, history, photo

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For the uninitiated, Archer Avenue (also known as IL-171) is a stretch of road in the southwestern Chicago suburbs with an extraordinarily haunted reputation. From the legend of Resurrection Mary, the quintessential "ghost hitchhiker," to reports of mysterious chantings and ephemeral hooded figures gliding up a bluff at St. James Sag Cemetery, Archer Avenue is considered by many aficionados of the paranormal to be the "Ground Zero" of Haunted Chicago.



We visited St. James Sag (above, the bluffs where the mysterious hooded figures reportedly disappeared) right around Halloween, but the Willow Springs area is spooky year-round, from what we hear.

The intersection of Willow Springs Road and Archer Avenue, where we photographed these whimsical hearses outside the Ashbary Coffee House is a remarkably charming, quirky small town area near the Cook County Forest Preserves. If you find yourself at the Ashbary, be sure to check out the café library and upstairs meeting room - and try one of their delicious peanut butter lattés, a perfect warm-up for a chilly hike through the Willow Springs Woods.

(Be sure to click on the image for full resolution - the license plate reads "GREYL 80," and yes, the sign on the door does say, "Hearse Chicks Get More Stiffs". Claire from "Six Feet Under" would be proud!) For a fascinating look this eerie little corner of the Midwest's largest city, check out Ursula Bielski's excellent book Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City.

As Homer Simpson might say: "Mmmm...ghosts..."

Labels: chicago, culture, history, photo

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  Found in a 1954 copy of "The Demand for Meat," by Elmer J. Working [JSTOR], published by the University of Chicago School of Business' Institute of Meat Packing.

Note that while the demand for pork ebbs and flows between the war years with the economy as a whole, whole ham's popularity never reached the pinnacle of sliced bacon. No surprise there.

However, salt pork seems to remain the "red-headed stepchild" of the pork family, never matching the elegant Post-War cachet of chops. In fact, its levels drop below the horizon by the early 1950's, suggesting salt pork carried the shameful whiff of poverty.

An interesting find from the age when Meat was King in Chicago. I love the font used to caption the graphs: wouldn't that make a great T-shirt?

Labels: books, chicago, food, history, science

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Here's video from our first time at the legendary House on the Rock - a destination far stranger than I'd expected, like a day-long visit to the inner psyche of an extremely-creative-but-not-quite-sane individual. It's huge, dark, colorful, and packed to the gills (often three and four stories high) with STUFF. If this collection of collections ever had to be moved, the effort would be Herculean.

This minute of footage is the view as you enter the Carousel Room, the threshold between Tour 2 and Tour 3 at the The House on the Rock ... actually, we didn't get to Tour 3. Three-and-a-half-hours of endless ephemera was just too much for one visit, so we bailed and took the "this way to the egress" door towards sunshine, fresh air, and a semblance of sanity.

Have you ever seen the anime feature, Paprika? One of the recurring dream images virtual-reality psychotherapist Paprika faces is a juggernaut-like "Parade of Everything Under the Sun" - I have a feeling that director Satoshi Kon and writer Yasutaka Tsutsui may have been at least a little inspired by the House on the Rock for that particular part of the film.



One caveat if you plan visiting the House on the Rock...it's a bit close and pungent in many of the rooms. There's a cloying hazelnut-ty deodorizer pumped into the warren-like rooms, to ward off the stench of decay, no doubt - I'd almost rather smell mold than that saccharine crypt perfume. It's a bit offputting (note to HotR management: ventilate, ventilate, ventilate) but no need to tie an orange peel under your nose, a la the age of the Black Death. However, I would avoid any mind-altering substances while on the tour unless you want to pay a short stay at the nearest asyl..er...psychiatric facility.

Trust me on this one. One forty-something guy we kept running into apparently had a few beers at the pizza shop on Tour 2, and could have used a little straitjacket therapy.

More House on the Rock trip photos at my place on Flickr.

Labels: history, video, WI

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Imagine you've just come home from an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet with a rowdy bunch of friends. Okay; so you overindulged a bit on the General Tso's Chicken and the Dragon and Phoenix Plate. No biggie.

Then the real fun began: not only did you have a few too many Shaoxing-and-Tsingtao boilermakers, you decided to get adventurous. You had to sample the fried pork intestines, the shark's fin soup, and the jellyfish salad, didn't you? Even the octopus balls and sea cucumber started to look appetizing. Little did you know that your friend's buddy visiting from the West coast spiked those Mai Tais with something...a little extra.

You come home with raging heartburn and an aching head. The room spins, and you plunk down on the couch in front of an old Hammer Horror flick.

This is what you dream.

Actually, it's audio and video of the two-story (or is it three?) Mikado, one of the "music machines"* at the House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The structure is based on a Dutch Mortier dance organ mechanism, packed with gilded gargoyles, a full battery of robotic/animatronic instruments and leering mannequins lit up by a riot of red and gold lanterns. With a flash, it looks like this:



More House on the Rock photos at my place on Flickr.

[*Some call them "music machines." I call them "Calliopes from Hell."]

Labels: history, music, video, WI

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  Gobbler Motel and Restaurant Fans have an exciting date to mark on the calendar - the Gobbler Gala is coming to the one-of-a-kind former restaurant on June 6th! Wisconsin State Journal's Doug Moe give us the details:

...On June 6, The Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Tourism Program will host "The Gobbler Gala," a dinner and discussion at the building in Johnson Creek, just off Interstate 94, that was once the Gobbler Supper Club.

There will be a catered gourmet turkey dinner and speakers will include Jefferson architect Helmut Ajango, who designed the Gobbler, and Wright historian Sidney Robinson, formerly of the University of Illinois-Chicago, now with the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. As one who rarely missed an opportunity during a Madison-to-Milwaukee run to duck off the highway and seek refreshment at the Gobbler, I am both amused and pleased by this development.

The idea came from Jack Holzhueter, retired after many years with the Wisconsin Historical Society, and a Wright Tourism board member. He enlisted another board member, Margo Melli, a Madison attorney and law professor, and together they persuaded the current owner of the Gobbler property, Jefferson attorney Raymond Krek, to go along. Though the restaurant has been closed for several years, much of the interior is still in place and Holzhueter said there's even a chance they'll get the revolving bar operating.

The only real problem is explaining the uniqueness of the Gobbler, which for most of its years had a motel adjacent to the restaurant, to those who never experienced it... [read the full article at the Wisconsin State Journal]

You can read more about the Gobbler's Motel's history and 2001 demise at our sister site, Requiem for the Gobbler Motel.

Labels: history, WI

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  Today is Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Raise your glass, sing a song, crunch a sugary skull and remember those that have passed before us. Wikipedia sums it up:

Though the subject matter may be considered morbid from the perspective of some other cultures, celebrants typically approach the Day of the Dead joyfully, and though it occurs roughly at the same time as Halloween, All Saints' Day and All Souls Day, the traditional mood is much brighter with emphasis on celebrating and honoring the lives of the deceased, and celebrating the continuation of life; the belief is not that death is the end, but rather the beginning of a new stage in life. In Mexico and Mexican immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, the Day of the Dead is of particular cultural importance.

It's also celebrated in Eastern Europe (albeit in a slghtly less colorful way); Czechs know it as Dušičky. Memento Mori.

Labels: culture, history

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  We're big fans of cemeteries (great places to visit, wouldn't want to live there), and we recently discovered Graceland (at Clark and Irving Park) just reopened after a major cleanup following August's violent tree-felling storms.

While it's not as large or old as our old fave, Rosehill, it's much, much creepier for some reason. We took a short trip there this past weekend, and had the strange feeling we were being followed, even though no one was around whenever we looked behind us...probably just a trick of the acoustics, as the "L" tracks adjoin Graceland's east wall and the wind seems to play odd tricks.

It doesn't help matters that one of the first monuments that greets you is the tomb of Henry Graves, one of Chicago's first settlers from Ashtabula, OH. (read Henry Graves' obituary from the September 1st, 1907 edition of the New York Times) Nothing wrong with Graves' grave, except that it's fronted by the spectacularly eerie Lorado Taft sculpture*, "Eternal Silence" (above) - an amalgam of Destiny from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, and the Grim Reaper sans scythe. A cursory bit of research confirms that yes, the statue does indeed represent Death.

Lovely.

Graceland Cemetery is reputed to be one of Illinois' most haunted, but normally I don't place too much stock in that. However I do have a rather freaky story. We were followed - slowly - for several minutes...by a white balloon.



The balloon eventually blew over to the razor wire separating the train tracks from the "cheap seats" and died a violent death. Click the YouTube links, and watch the carnage for yourself. I wish I could say that no balloons were harmed in the making of this video, but I'd be lying.



* If you don't think "Eternal Silence" is creepy, consider the fact the figure stands about 9 feet tall. RuPaul's got nothin' on old E.S.

Labels: chicago, history, photo

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  I was eighteen when Chernobyl exploded. In retrospect, I realize it was one of the first times I really followed the news outside my adolescent self-absorption. The reporters' accounts of the poison fire that could not be extinguished for days on end seemed nearly supernatural - what had been unleashed there? Could the fire be extinguished?

This disaster was innocence lost - on both a personal and global scale. The local CBC television news affiliate showed Soviet helicopters futilely dumping payloads of borax and lead, attempting to quell the roaring graphite core to little avail. One copter's rotor blades came too close, and the machine crashed into the power plant, killing its pilot.

It was like fighting Godzilla, but this was no movie.

Eventually, someone proposed a last-ditch attempt to flow liquid nitrogen under the reactor floor to cool the relentless corium flow that threatened to reach bedrock aquifers. If the blazing lava flow of molten reactor fuel, concrete and metal reached it, when the intense heat split groundwater molecules into elemental hydrogen and oxygen a massive explosion far surpassing the original reactor failure would have been the result. Thankfully, the corium eventually cooled.

Researchers were detecting traces of fallout across the Northern U.S. as atmospheric movements spread the reactors' plume: it seeemed no place was truly safe. Later I would realize there was nothing supernatural about the event - it was simply man's hubris, laxity, and lack of healthy respect for the power of nature that allowed Chernobyl to happen.

At 1:23AM on April 26th, 1986:

"My friends were dying under my eyes," said Konstantyn Sokolov, 68, a former Chernobyl worker whose voice was hoarse from throat and lip cancer. "I try not to recollect my memories. They are very terrible." Mykola Malyshev, 66, was working in the control room of Chernobyl's Reactor No. 1 at the time of the explosion. He said the lights flickered and the room shook. The workers were ordered to the destroyed reactor, but when they got there, their co-workers ordered them to flee and save themselves. "They told us, 'We are already dead. Go away,"' Malyshev recalled at the Kiev ceremony.

In Slavutych, a town built to house displaced Chernobyl workers, commemorations began an hour earlier to coincide with Moscow time, which was used in the Soviet era. Residents laid flowers and placed candles at a monument as sirens blared. The explosion tore off the plant's roof, spewing radioactive fallout for 10 days over 77,220 square miles of the then-Soviet Union and Europe. At least 31 people died as a direct result of trying to keep the fire from spreading to the plant's three other reactors. One plant worker was killed instantly and his body never recovered.
Twenty-nine rescuers, firefighters and plant workers died later from radiation poisoning and burns, and another person died of an apparent heart attack.

Death tolls connected to the blast remain hotly debated, as do the long-term health effects. [from CBS2 Chicago, April 26, 2006]

A highly recommended book: Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, published last year shortly before the 20th anniversary of the disaster; the work chronicles the experiences of Prip'yat refugees and the horrifying experiences of the "liquidators"' loved ones, who saw first-hand the effects of searing radioactive fire on frail human flesh. Its most haunting quality is the raw pain and hope expressed by the friends and family of these first responders, many of whom suffered unspeakable deaths days, weeks, and months after the tragedy. See Radioactive! The Nuclear Blog for my annual Chernobyl memoriam.

As our fossil fuels drain and we restoke our nuclear furnaces to feed our hunger, let us never forget this Promethean lesson. Respect the atom: like fire, it feeds but also kills.

Labels: history, nuclear

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  This past weekend, my better half and I had the chance to briefly swing through Trenton, New Jersey on the way back from a stop on Jersey shore. What you're looking at here is the house I grew up in...well, my family lived here until I was 14 and we moved to New York State, but that's for another post. Yes, that is a lot of snow on the ground for central NJ: it's the aftermath of that nasty slush-blizzard that paralyzed East Coast air travel last week.

What I found amazing about driving down Lynwood Avenue is how little the street has changed in the past 25 years, inspite of its looking a tad run-down. No gentrified condos arose in the intervening years, no new big box outlets, no widening of the streets. As far as I could tell, most of the houses on the street were even the same color they were a quarter century ago. [And amazingly, we found our way there and back around town without a map or directions....we just drove from my memory! Of course, if we had gotten lost, I wouldn't have said a thing about it, now, would I? - L.]

At that old house (my family rented the upstairs apartment, while the landlord lived downstairs) the gutter downspouts and windows have been replaced with new white versions and the wooden wheelchair ramp the previous owners installed is gone, but the doors, the mailboxes and street numbers, and almost everything else about the place looks the same. Click on the image for a big, close-up look; click here for a Google Maps bird's eye view. Bizarrely, the couches and loveseat perched on the porch look exactly like the ones the old owners had inside their living room during the 1970's. Hell, they probably are the same brown and yellow plaid ones.

Why does this scenario remind me so much of Stephen King's IT? I half-expect a mouldering corpse in a nightgown to beckon us inside with a curved bony finger...[we ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE and you will too haaaaaaa]

(P.S) No, I did not buy any Taylor Ham® on this trip.

Labels: history, NJ, photo

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  This past week, I was perplexed by the appearance of numerous strange ice sculptures around the University of Chicago campus: armless, legless squarish torsoes a little over two-and-a-half-feet high, each bearing a Moai-like ice head and a...er, "flagstaff at attention" (although some of the statues had lost their "staffs," either through vandalism or sublimation). A white sticker was affixed to each one, bearing the Internet address herm.notlong.com. Now, the UofC campus is no stranger to odd guerilla artwork and performance pieces, but how could one not be curious when confronted by one of these on the way to work?

Turns out I've been lax in my history lessons. The priapic popsicles are a modern-day resurrection of ancient Greek hermae, protective stone statues
dedicated to the god Hermes. In 415 B.C., saboteurs from Syracuse (the one in Greece, not the one in Upstate New York) were alleged to have defaced the hermae of Athens, thereby threatening the success of the Athenian expansion in the Peloponnesian War.

Creating and deploying the UofC Ice Herms was no small task - each one reportedly weighs 140 pounds. Just think - the UofC Humanities curriculum wanted to phase out Western Civ recently. Lesson: you can set up dozens of bephallused ice sculptures on this nerdiest of campuses and they'll stand until melted. Try doing is almost anywhere else and you might get arrested for "endangering public morals." You've gotta love this place! Even though the hermae are melting, their brief presence surely put a smile in many people's day...I'd love to hear what some of the resident bluestockings (of all genders) had to say about the herms. ;)

How'd he do it? See the laborious step-by-step process at "The Erection of the Ice Hermai" (ha, ha). Since they will all likely be gone after today's 40°F thaw, view them for yourself at Neoherm's Ice Herms Flickr gallery (Image above from Neoherm's Flickr set; this one was set up outside of Regenstein Library). [Note: one of the links on the "Erection of the Ice Hermai" is broken, but with a little experimentation I found the right URL - http://picasaweb.google.com/neoherm/TheMakingPartII, where Neoherm freezes heads, torsoes and phalli after creating molds in Part I. This shot, depicting frozen phalli next to packages of hamburger in the icebox (possibly NSFW depending on where you work) is especially amusing.]

UPDATE - I took this shot of what's left of one of the ice herms Wednesday afternoon: not much to speak of.

Labels: chicago, history, humor

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