Haunted South Side Pt. 1

The South Side of Chicago is known for many things: Irish pubs, the White Sox, the South Side Irish Parade (now defunct), John C. Reilly, violence, Catholic churches, Michael Flatley, and did I mention Irish pubs? However, most people forget that the South Side is lousy with ghosts.

One of the most haunted sites on the South Side is the Beverly Unitarian Church or "The Castle." The Castle is located on 103rd and Longwood in the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago. Robert Givens, a successful real estate developer turned author, built the Castle in 1886 and requested that it be modeled after the ancient estates in his native Ireland. Some people say that Givens built the house as a gift for his fiance who died before the house was finished. At any rate, Givens lived at the Castle until 1894 when it became the Chicago Female College. According to legend, a young woman died there in the early 1930's from a serious case of influenza. 30 years later after the Castle had been bought by the Beverly Unitarian Fellowship, a custodian encountered a woman in a long dress standing in one of the rooms. The custodian claims that the two talked for several minutes about how much the place had changed since she lived there. After the custodian left the room, he remembered that the Castle had been a church for more than 20 years and realized that she could not have possibly lived there. The custodian then rushed back to the room where he had seen the woman and discovered that she had vanished. After examining the Castle, the custodian noted that all the windows and doors were locked and there were no footprints on the freshly fallen snow.

More recently in 1994, the church's pastor saw two small hands embrace her husband's waist. Others believe the woman's spirit takes the form of a candle flame which has been observed passing by windows and floating up staircases while no one was in the building. Unexplainable noises have also been attributed to the ghost and a former pastor said that he often tried to track down the source of the noises but was never able to.

Directions:

Driving from the West:
I-294 to 95th Street East
95th Street to Longwood Drive
South on Longwood Drive to 103rd Street

Driving from Downtown:
94 East (the Dan Ryan) to I-57 South
Take I-57 South, exit shortly at Halsted
You exit onto 99th Street Westbound
Take 99th Street west to Longwood Drive
South on Longwood Drive to 103rd Street

The church parking lot is on the west side of the castle.

The Chicago Transit Authority's 103rd St. bus stops near the church.

A Letter Composed in my Head, to Eric Larson, Whilst Riding My Bike Through the City, Later Transcribed Here

Dear Mr Larson,

I was recently assigned The Devil in the White City as reading for a class I am taking, and was secretly excited, because I had been avoiding reading your book due to all the hype surrounding it. However, being a lover of Chicago history, in particular turn of the century Chicago history, I have had a secret interest in your book for quite some time. Having it as assigned reading was perfect because I "had" to read it. Although armed with the excuse of, "I'm reading it for a class," I was still embarrassed to read your book in public. I therefore spent most of my time reading it in the privacy of my own home.

I did once find myself in the unfortunate situation of having no other reading material while in a coffee shop. I considered hiding it behind a news paper, but it proves to be quite a difficult task to hold a book, a newspaper and sip a hot drink all at the same time. So I made sure there were no scholarly types, potential publishers, or cute boys around, that I might embarrass myself in front of, and then I not so proudly read your book.

That being said, I would like to extend my congratulations to you, for your ability to do research. You must be a pro at the micro film as well as most search engines. Your collection of data and multiple page bibliography is impressive. However, this does not overshadow what I can only call shoty and embellished prose. Your attempts at literature are an embarrassment to yourself as a writer as well as Dreiser and Sinclair and any other real authors you refer to in your text. Stick to the facts Larson, stick to the facts. On top of this, your lack of credit to the intelligence of your readers is insulting and yeah I'll say it, rude.

In conclusion, I find it offensive that you received an award that has the name Edgar Allan Poe in it as your name and his name should never be used together.

I hope this letter finds you in high spirits, rolling in the dough of the unsuspecting consumer.

Hoping to hear back from you, and with warmest regards, I remaine,

Maria Ortiz

Devil in the White City - Photos

Here is the link to the flicker photo album for the 1893 Columbian Expo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2575640274/

and here is another album

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum/2784216625/

The Devil in the White City

I know this blog entry doesn’t go along with the timeline of what we’re talking about, but since people were posting about The Jungle, I figured I would as well and wait till after to throw my thoughts about Burnham and Holmes in the mix.

While we were all getting started with the book, we discussed in class that the more interesting chapters were the ones about Holmes and the chapters filled with endless information about Burnham’s architectural meetings were the ones we would skim through. For some reason, that changed towards the end of the book, and everyone seemed to be more interested in Burnham and not so much in how Holmes was caught by the detective. I have to say that I may have been one of the few who didn’t feel that way. My interest in Holmes continued to thrive, and only increased upon the entry of Detective Geyer and his saga. Perhaps it could have been edited better, but after flipping back and forth from Burnham to Holmes in each chapter, it was nice to read a consistent story and not have to remember where the plot had been left off. I was surprised that nobody else was as interested as I was in wanting to see how such a sneaky mastermind who left an exceedingly difficult trail to follow, was indeed caught.  Just as Burnham and Holmes were brilliant in their own rights, you have to give Detective Geyer some credit for holding his own. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Law and Order, but Geyer barely had any facts to go on, as the majority of the ones he received upon interviewing Holmes were fabricated and exaggerated, yet he still managed to use the letters written by the children to figure out Holmes’ logic well enough to discover the truth. Reading the details about the conditions that Holmes kept the children in as he forced them to travel from place to place were so eerie. Not to mention the body parts Geyer found during his search. It really makes you wonder how one person could be so evil and heartless without thinking twice about it.

The detective Geyer chapters were equally as interesting to me as the ones about Harrison’s murder. I felt like the mayor’s murder kind of came out of nowhere, and like Professor Urrea reiterated in class, he died angry because nobody would believe how severe his bullet wound was.  Who dies like that? Most people are too scared to argue with anyone upon being shot at, but apparently Harrison was a fighter till the end.

I also found it amusing and somewhat appalling that Holmes’ charm continued to work for him while he was in his jail cell, “Holmes became a model prisoner—became in fact the model of a model prisoner. He made a game of using his charm to gain concessions from his keepers. He was allowed to wear his own clothes ‘and to keep my watch and other small belongings’ “. How creepy that these people knew he was being investigated for murder, and yet succumbed to his so-called charm. Were people that worked in prisons back then really that naïve? All in all, this twisted story was as creepy as it was intriguing, and I enjoyed reading it. Although there were a lot of unnecessary facts thrown in which took away from the story and made the reader aware they were reading a story instead of being engrossed in it, and there was the annoying way that Larson pretended like he was there during every single scene, knowing the way that Holmes’ “icy blue eyes would piercingly look at women”, and the cryptic way in which he would end each chapter with a single sentence that was supposed to keep the reader hooked when all it really did was make us roll our eyes, I still enjoyed the story for what it was. 

Response to “You’re in The Jungle, Baby”

After reading Brenda’s response to The Jungle, I have to say I agreed with a lot of her opinions on it. I also read this book back in high school, without any recollection of my teacher having pointed out to us that the book was written to be propaganda, even though it was an honors English class! You would think that being in an honors class would purport heavier and more meaningful discussion topics on the reading, but I guess not. It took reading the book the second time around for me to see the reasons behind why the characters were in fact highly under developed. Again, like Brenda said, if the characters had been described in more detail and their emotions focused on for more than a few sentences at a time, it would have made it a much more compelling read for me. Relating to the characters and being able to feel their pain is what pulls me in, and the fact that I couldn’t do that for Jurgis and his family made it much harder for me to care what ended up happening to them as I kept reading. Since Jurgis was the “main character”, perhaps the book could have been written from his point of view, but then, historically speaking, Sinclair’s purpose of showing the whole system, and the way in which Jurgis’s family was just a cog in the so called machine wouldn’t have been portrayed to its full potential.

I did appreciate the effort that Sinclair put into getting his point across, especially after Professor Urrea pointed out to us that he even posed as an immigrant and lived in the slums and worked in the slaughter house in order to better illustrate the plight of the working class families, but I didn’t quite understand the reason behind the lack of a sense of climax or completion. Granted, their lives were weary, but as a reader, seeing how the slightest ray of hope was rewarded by some catastrophe really discouraged me from wanting to continue reading to see how the characters would evolve or even, god forbid, prosper. For example, when Jurgis gets the hundred dollar bill and goes into the bar to get change, but the bar tender steals the hundred dollars and Jurgis ends up in custody for fighting in a bar. Its like, did I really just go from having a smile on my face (because something nice actually happened for Jurgis) to pissed off and thinking “I should have known this would happen” in the course of two pages? How many more times is this going to happen? Oh wait, for the rest of the book...

 

As disgusting as all of the descriptions of the slaughter houses and the rats that went into the vats and the meats were, I was more disturbed and mortified at the conditions in which the men and children were forced to work: “the men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by night time a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer”. This not only makes my heart go out to these workers, but also churns my stomach as well. 

Its no surprise that after the death of Ona and his son, Jurgis completely loses all direction in his life, and eventually turns into the complete opposite of everything he was throughout the book by joining labor unions. A little convenient that a socialist rally is where his life starts to come together again, but after four hundred pages of unending misery, I’ll take whatever ray of hope Sinclair throws my way! 

Chicago Poems

A reading practice of mine, particular to poetry, is that I write a list of words on the inside cover of the book as I'm reading it. The list is a record of the words that I notice appear in the book multiple times, and is written in the order in which I notice them. These motifs provide a kind of atmospheric reading of the book. Most of the words are usually nouns, and so the list is also a collage of images. This way of reading a collection of poems makes visible the poet's lexicon, and when I return to these books over time, I first read the list, which brings the feeling of the book in its entirety back to me.

My list for Chicago Poems is as follows:

bones
salt
dust
stars
fog
night
smoke
sun
rain
blue
voices
throat
street
lake
wind
silence
steel
blood
remember
river
mist
gray
sea
dawn
day
laughter
death
mouth

___


William Carlos Williams criticized Sandburg for what Williams deemed was a lack of attention to craft. I wonder, though, if this judgment may have been in response to the form of Sandburg's poems, rather than the content. Even if, at times, Sandburg's poetry veers towards a more journalistic style in both form and subject, it is grounded artistically in metaphor and sound.
The specificity and vibrancy of metaphors such as "a pair of fresh lips and a kiss better than all the wild grapes that ever grew in Tuscany" ("The Shovel Man") and "a voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January" ("Fish Crier") are powerful examples of Sandburg's attentiveness to language.

A through-line of Chicago Poems is sound. Many of the poems, regardless of their subject, resonate with street-sounds, night-sounds, and sounds of the natural world. A number of poems specifically relate to music and indicate Sandburg's sentiment towards music as a impetus for both happiness and hope. Three poems of note are "Happiness", "Fellow Citizens", and "Bath."

The narrator in "Happiness" seeks out "professors who teach the meaning of life" and "famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men" in his search for the meaning of happiness. He is given no answer until the poem's culminating lines wherein he comes across "a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their woman and children and a keg of beer and an accordion." That Sandburg places the accordion last in this list, and as the final word of the poem, emphasizes its significance. In "Fellow Citizens", Sandburg writes of the "maker of accordions and guitars" who "not only makes them from start to finish, but plays them after he makes them" and who "had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch and the mayor when it came to happiness."

"Bath" makes reference to violinist Mischa Elman (1891-1967). It is an Elman concert that prompts the sudden and thorough change in the protagonist's perspective from one of despair to hope. Unlike the other two poems, the central idea of this poem is the amazingly transformative capacity of music. With graceful accuracy, Sandburg delineates his protagonist's transformation before, during, and after the concert.

I was not familiar with Mischa Elman's music, but was compelled by this poem to seek out some of his recordings. You may listen to Mischa Elman play Schubert's "Serenade" at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQw1s6YAdVU&NR=1

An eight-minute black & white Vitaphone film of Elman playing the violin may be found at:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31uJT2IKsR0&feature=related

Jenn

Random Blog

Here is my random blog one, about the olympics in Chicago

While the mayor has been running around the city touting the Olympics in what many feel to be an attempt to secure a legacy for himself, many have been asking, “Why do we need the Olympics? “ It is a good question. And there is a good answer. At this moment in history, there exists a chance to do a great good for the people of this city. Show the world that we are indeed not the “second city.” A chance to prove once again to the world that we in Chicago can be a “perfect white city,” as we were for those brief months during the World’s Fair over a hundred years ago. Or we could host the Olympics, and plunge the city into a canyon of debt that we may not emerge from for another hundred years.
I argue that, rather than spend the incredible amount of money (and it will be an incredible amount of money- the 2012 games are already set to cost London 5.3 Billion pounds, or 8.5 Billion US dollars) we should give the money to the city, and fix many of the problems that plague Chicago, problems like crime and poor schools. This is what is needed. This is what all of this money should do; it should not build temporary buildings to house pools, but permanent buildings to house families. Let us not use this great sum to build structures intended to glorify athletes; let us build a community whose very existence glorifies mankind.
Let us build schools, fund after school programs, and, rather than give the children of this city a fleeting, two week extravaganza, let us give them a chance at a future. Let us train them to work, and work to instill in them the values of hard work and personal achievement. Let us do things like make them safe, and hire adequate numbers of police officers, firemen, and paramedics.
Let’s hire teachers that can get the job done. Let’s give them things like computers, books, and working sports equipment. Let’s allow there to be gym classes all week, as the state requirement mandates, a requirement that thus far the city has ignored.
If we spend our billions on programs like these than host a sporting competition. We can actually help people. We can give the homeless homes, the hopeless hope, and the ignorant knowledge. We can make a better tomorrow for Chicago’s youth.
Of course, I do not believe that $8.5 billion will solve all of the city’s problems. There will still be poor, still be crime, and still be indigent. There will still be poor. There will still be people who will squander their talents on crime, drugs, and alcohol. There will still be those that will seek to harm others. But there will be less of them.