Rainbo Gardens in "Silent Movie," a Work in Progress

Thanks to Dave S. for the head's up on this one. On Live Journal there is a novel in progress called Silent Movie, part of which takes place in Uptown's Rainbo Gardens:

Silent Movie

Chapter thirty-four

November 21, 1923, Uptown, Chicago, Illinois

Outside the hotel, the Uptown streets were lit up with a neon glow. Men and woman walked the snowy sidewalks arm in arm, bundled up in their winter coats, trying to stay warm as they headed out to enjoy the city's nightlife. And one thing was for certain, the bad weather wasn't going to put a damper on anyone's night.

The front door of the Sheridan Plaza Hotel opened. Bam and Ville ran out to the awaiting taxi, with smiles on their faces, and quickly got inside...

Read more at Silent Movie

Flapper Girls at Wilson and Sheridan, Nirvana by Ben Hecht

Flapper girls had their origins in the 1920s with the popular contempt for prohibition. The term referred to the “new breed” of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was considered decent behavior. The flappers were seen as brash in their time for wearing makeup, drinking hard liqour, and smoking. This gorgeous painting of a flapper girl graced the cover of the February 2, 1922 edition of Life Magazine.

Novelist and prolific screenwriter Ben Hecht (1893–1964) grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. As a young man he moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter for the Chicago Journal and the Chicago Daily News and contributed to Margaret Anderson’s literary journal The Little Review. At the Daily News he wrote the sensational column “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” where this short story about Uptown was first published (text courtesy Project Gutenberg). He later went on to write 35 books and more than seventy films.

***

The newspaper man felt a bit pensive. He sat in his bedroom frowning at his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man’s thought from day to day with an irritating blur.

And for eight years or so the newspaper man had been fumbling around trying to get it down on paper. But no novel had grown out of the blur in his head.

* * * * *

The newspaper man put on his last year’s straw hat and went into the street, taking his pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense.

At Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road the newspaper man paused. Here the loneliness he had felt in his bedroom seemed to grow more acute. Not only his own aimlessness, but the aimlessness of the staring, smiling crowd afflicted him.

Then out of the babble of faces he heard his name called. A rouged young flapper, high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes. The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur in the newspaper man’s mind.

She was one of the things he fumbled for on the typewriter—one of the city products born of the tinpan bacchanal of the cabarets. A sort of frontispiece for an Irving Berlin ballad. The caricature of savagery that danced to the caricature of music from the jazz bands. The newspaper man smiled. Looking at her he understood her. But she would not fit into the typewritten phrases.

“Wilson Avenue,” he thought, as he walked beside her chatter. “The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.”

* * * * *

Thus, the newspaper man thinking and the flapper flapping, they came together to a cabaret in the neighborhood. The orchestra filled the place with confetti of sound. Laughter, shouts, a leap of voices, blazing lights, perspiring waiters, faces and hats thrusting vivid stencils through the uncoiling tinsel of tobacco smoke.

On the dance floor bodies hugging, toddling, shimmying; faces fastened together; eyes glassy with incongruous ecstasies.

The newspaper man ordered two drinks of moonshine and let the scene blur before him like a colored picture puzzle out of focus. Above the music he heard the childishly strident voice of the flapper:

“Where you been hiding yourself? I thought you and I were cookies. Well, that’s the way with you Johns. But there’s enough to go around, you can bet. Say boy! I met the classiest John the other evening in front of the Hopper. Did he have class, boy! You know there are some of these fancy Johns who look like they were the class. But are they? Ask me. Nix. And don’t I give them the berries, quick? Say, I don’t let any John get moldy on me. Soon as I see they’re heading for a dumb time I say ’razzberry.’ And off your little sugar toddles.”

“How old are you?” inquired the newspaper man abstractedly.

“Eighteen, nosey. Why the insult? I got a new job yesterday with the telephone company. That makes my sixth job this year. Tell me that ain’t going good? One of the Johns I met in front of the Edgewater steered me to it. He turned out kind of moldy, and say! he was dumb. But I played along and got the job.

“Say, I bet you never noticed my swell kicks.” The flapper thrust forth her legs and twirled her feet. “Classy, eh? They go with the lid pretty nice. Say, you’re kind of dumb yourself. You’ve got moldy since I saw you last.”

“How’d you remember my name?” inquired the newspaper man.

“Oh, there are some Johns who tip over the oil can right from the start. And you never forget them. Nobody could forget you, handsome. Never no more, never. What do you say to another shot of hootch? The stuff’s getting rottener and rottener, don’t you think? Come on, swallow. Here’s how. Oh, ain’t we got fun!”

* * * * *

The orchestra paused. It resumed. The crowd thickened. Shouts, laughter, swaying bodies. A tinkle of glassware, snort of trombones, whang of banjos. The newspaper man looked on and listened through a film.

The brazen patter of his young friend rippled on. A growing gamin coarseness in her talk with a nervous, restless twitter underneath. Her dark child eyes, perverse under their touch of black paint, swung eagerly through the crowd. Her talk of Johns, of dumb times and moldy times, of classy times and classy memories varied only slightly. She liked dancing and amusement parks. Automobile riding not so good. And besides you had to be careful. There were some Johns who thought it cute to play caveman. Yes, she’d had a lot of close times, but they wouldn’t get her. Never, no, never no more. Anyway, not while there was music and dancing and a whoop-de-da-da in the amusement parks.

The newspaper man, listening, thought, “An infant gone mad with her dolls. Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She’s the symbol of new sin—the unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the cabarets.”

* * * * *

They came back from a dance and continued to sit. The din was still mounting. Entertainers fighting against the racket. Music fighting against the racket. Bored men and women finally achieving a bedlam and forgetting themselves in the artifice of confusion.

The newspaper man looking at his young friend saw her taking it in. There was something he had been trying to fathom about her during her breathless chattering. She talked, danced, whirled, laughed, let loose giggling cries. And yet her eyes, the part that the rouge pot or the bead stick couldn’t reach, seemed to grow deader and deader.

The jazz band let out the crash of a new melody. The voices of the crowd rose in an “ah-ah-ah.” Waiters were shoving fresh tables into the place, squeezing fresh arrivals around them.

The flapper had paused in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories. Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man’s ear above the racket:

“Say this is a dumb place.”

The newspaper man smiled.

“Ain’t it, though?” she went on. There was a pause and then the breathless voice sighed. She spoke.

“Gee!”—with a laugh that still seemed breathless—“gee, but it’s lonely here!”

Killer on Argyle Street

A faceless killer is murdering the members of a car-theft ring, and Paul Whelan is hired to find a boy who may have seen the murderer, a man with a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance. Whelan’s search leads him to Argyle Street, the busy, exotic Asian strip at the edge of the Uptown neighborhood, where all the evidence suggests that the murderer may already have gotten the boy. Along the way Whelan learns that another man is involved, a boyhood friend Whelan had believed to be dead, and Whelan comes to believe that more than one person is involved in the murders.

Killer on Argyle Street is part of the Paul Whelan mystery series developed by Uptown author Michael Raleigh. His other books include Death in Uptown, A Body in Belmont Harbor, The Riverview Murders, and The Maxwell Street Blues. Raleigh currently teaches English at Truman College.

The Beggars' Shore by Zak Mucha

From the Asian shops on Argyle Street to the Darlington Arms to the religious community living in an old Wilson Avenue hotel, Uptown residents will recognize the landscape that inspired The Beggars’ Shore

Publisher's description: Chicago’s notorious Uptown neighborhood is the last stop on the down elevator, a dumping ground for people who have run out of road and choices. Joseph Askew, raised in a rigid and insular religious commune, walks out one day, searching. He starts his journey where the world’s failures end theirs.

The “Word” on which Joseph was raised plays differently on the streets. The teenager learns a new set of rules from his teachers: transvestite prostitutes, small-change thieves, ex-pimps, and other denizens of a bleak shadowland where every occupant is constantly shape-shifting between predator and prey. The only exit sign is double-arrow neon: the jailhouse or the graveyard.

The Beggars’ Shore is a story of pilgrimage, a journey where the destination is only “not here.” Joseph tries to carve out a place for himself while working at a liquor store and squatting in a dilapidated flat with his girlfriend and her drug habit. Waiting for his big payday from the man known only as “the Printer,” he dreams of building a future of his own. As the boy seeking manhood tries to gather the pieces of his life, he learns how much of the world can fall away from him. Evocative, powerful, and compelling, The Beggars’ Shore is a masterful debut.

Uptown Chicago Novel: City Dogs by William Brashler

I was tidying up my office today, and I came across a stack of books I've been meaning to read: fictional accounts of life in Uptown. They span the decades, the first came out in 1921, the most recent one just last year. I'll post the titles and descriptions on the blog as I get the chance, but thought I'd start with this one first, which I actually did read: City Dogs by William Brashler. Here's the description from the cover:

Chicago’s seamy North Side—Uptown—is the setting for City Dogs, a powerful story of several weeks in the lives of a handful of petty thieves, derelicts, ne’er-do-wells, delinquints, con men, whores, salesmen, maniacs, gloms, and clergymen, all scratching to get by.

Its protagonist is Harry Lum, 57-year-old wino, welfare bum, and petty thief down on his luck, who falls in with two young punks, pimp Jimmy Del Corso and pill-popping hillbilly Donald Ray Burl. From simple purse-snatching Harry graduates to robbery and then breaking and entering. In the process he makes and breaks a deal with the police and moves in with his long-suffering step-sister, Helen, against her better judgment. Before the novel drives to its dramatic climax, the lives of all of them are altered—some violently.

In its uncanny ability to capture the language, rythms, smells—the very essence—of this special world and its polygot mix of people, City Dogs is a remarkable achievement. Author William Brashler was a police reporter on Chicago’s North Side for two years. “For months I met my characters,” he writes; “prostitutes who danced on station house tables, bums who played trumpets, cops who talked to Jesus and carried guns on their ankles.” His first novel, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, was made into a major motion picture.

City Dogs was published in 1976, about the time that Uptown was at its worst. It's well worth the read not only for the story line, but because it is in many ways a snapshot of how the neighborhood once looked.