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Article on history of the 47th Street neighborhood.
December 1, 2000 - Chicago Reader
Whose Blues Will They Choose?
By Jeff Heubner
Gerri Oliver, who's 81 years old, presides over her storied joint like a museum
curator. Rummaging near the cash register, she brings out photo albums, a stack
of magazines, sheaves of newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia, and spreads
them across her art deco bar. They document the nearly 45 years she's run Gerri's
Palm Tavern, the fabled nightspot at 446 E. 47th St. that's among the last living
links to Chicago's "Bronzeville era"-and to the city's blues, jazz, and
black entertainment roots. Now she's showing me the petitions and postcards urging
Mayor Daley to save Gerri's Palm Tavern. She's worried that the city, in the name
of honoring its musical heritage, will put her out of business.
The black-and-white photographs on the walls tell their own stories. Here's a youthful
Oliver posing with Josephine Baker, a frequent guest. Here she is with Dizzy Gillespie.
And here's Oliver with Dorothy Donegan, the jazz pianist and screen star who grew
up in the neighborhood and became her close friend. Then there are all the pictures
of Oliver and Harold Washington, who celebrated his 1983 mayoral primary victory
here. The place was packed that night, and the street was lined with people trying
to get in.
"You know who that is, don't you?" says Oliver, nodding at a 1950s photograph
hung near the front door. I admit I don't. The distinguished looking man alongside
her is James "Genial Jim" Knight, the Pullman porter turned businessman
and policy king who opened the Palm Tavern in 1933, a year before he was elected
the first "mayor of Bronzeville"-a tradition that continued for three
decades and was revived last year. Policy games, which flourished in black Chicago,
were the forerunners of today's lottery.
When the Palm Tavern was new, the Chicago Defender called it the "most high
classed Negro establishment in America." Lore has it that the club was one
of the first in town to receive a liquor license after prohibition was repealed;
later it was one of the first to install "talkies," or booth-side minijukeboxes.
With its spotless white tablecloths, gloved waiters, and posh pseudotropical setting,
Gerri's Palm gained a reputation for fine dining-for a time the kitchen was run
by Bill Bottoms, personal chef to Joe Louis, himself a regular-and as a meeting
place for black Chicago's political, professional, and artistic elite.
In the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s, the area around 47th and South Parkway-later renamed
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive-formed the commercial and cultural heart of the
"Black Metropolis," or Bronzeville. It was a mecca for African-Americans
migrating from the impoverished south, and it bustled with black-owned businesses
and with well-dressed men and women. The Regal Theatre, the Savoy Ballroom, and
the Metropolitan Theatre ranked with the city's premier entertainment venues. In
the postwar years, the country blues of the Mississippi delta gained a hard, electrified
edge in clubs along 43rd and 47th Streets.
Geraldine Oliver came north from Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1940s to study mortuary
science-funeral directing was the family trade. But during the war she worked in
a Western Electric plant and eventually she became a manicurist. She met "Genial
Jim" Knight because she did his nails, and in 1956 he sold her the Palm Tavern.
A few years later a reporter asked why she got into the nightclub business. "I
just like people," Oliver said.
Located between the Regal and the Sutherland Hotel, where many of the theater's
performers booked rooms, Gerri's Palm was in the center of the action. She dropped
the fine cuisine but served up home-cooked meals at least one day a week, and she
became known as "Miss Red Beans and Rice."
Over the years, some of the biggest names in show business came in-Duke Ellington,
Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles"
Robinson, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Quincy Jones, Miles Davis, James Brown,
Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Redd Foxx, and Nipsey Russell. There were groups like
the Temptations, literary lights like Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Lerone
Bennett Jr. Ebony publisher John Johnson patronized Gerri's. The list goes on and
on, across the "wall of fame" that dominates the back of the club, next
to its small stage.
Cardboard placards present the names of over a hundred friends and customers, the
famous and not so. But these days, to get your name up there will cost you. One
day Oliver told me $200, another day $20.
Gerri's Palm Tavern can use the money. Like its neighborhood, it's seen better days.
The tropical murals have faded, the pressed-tin ceiling has been patched, and the
booth seats have been duct-taped. Today Gerri's exudes a dingy, tarnished splendor.
Not even that can be said of the scene outside Oliver's door. Like all of Bronzeville,
47th Street declined after the war, done in by decades of disinvestment, social
change, job loss, and urban renewal. When restrictive housing covenants were eased,
many blacks who could move did, leaving houses that would stand abandoned for years.
High-rise public housing developments brought in low-income residents. Businesses
and nightclubs shut their doors-the Regal, Savoy, and Metropolitan all were eventually
shuttered and razed. By 1990 Bronzeville's population was a third of what it had
been in 1950. While 47th Street is still a shopping district with an active street
life, the strip abounds with vacant lots, blighted buildings, and low characters.
The inner city's underside is on full display here.
"Seems like almost everybody on this street is either a dealer or a user,"
says Oliver. But somehow she's managed to stay afloat-perhaps the Buddhism she practices
helps her cope. She's seen her club's fortunes rise a little in recent years, as
it's become a showcase for jazz and blues musicians, for poetry readings, for staged
dramas. For the past two years, bluesman Fernando Jones has brought thousands of
visitors to Gerri's Palm for his weekend presentations of I Was There When the Blues
Was Red Hot, a play with music that Jones wrote, directed, and performs in.
"A lot of people have contributed to the history and continuity of this place,"
says Oliver, looking around the room. "There are spirits here." But though
the city has recognized Gerri's for its role in fostering black music culture-it's
a highlight of the Department of Cultural Affairs' Neighborhood Tours program, and
in February Mayor Daley issued a proclamation honoring Oliver as a "cultural
icon" who'd refused to give up on 47th Street-it might also have decided that
today Gerri's Palm is simply in the way.
Department of Planning officials and Alderman Dorothy Tillman want to transform
various parts of the area into a blues nightclub district and "African village"
offering a bazaar plus African/Caribbean restaurants, coffeehouses, music stores,
and other shops. Also planned are a Second City comedy club, a plaza with a statue
honoring Quincy Jones, and a roller skating rink.
The theming has already begun. Two years ago, Tobacco Road street signs were installed
along East 47th. That's the title not only of the 1964 hit song by Lou Rawls, who
grew up in the area, but also of a nonprofit community development organization
with close ties to Tillman. Tobacco Road Inc. is building the 47th Street Cultural
Center and Lou Rawls Theater, which after a troubled history is finally taking shape
at 47th and King on the former site of the old Regal, demolished in 1973, and the
South Center Building, torn down in the late 1980s. "We're building [the African
village] out from that center," says Cheryl Cooke, who's assistant planning
commissioner for the South District and the city's point person for the project.
Do these Disneyesque plans allow for preserving the remaining pieces of the street's
authentic history? The Midwest Real Estate Investment Company bought the building
that houses Gerri's Palm Tavern in a 1989 tax sale for $8,000, according to Gary
Fresen, an attorney who has been advising Oliver on a pro bono basis. Oliver offered
the new owners $25,000 but was turned down. In 1998, Fresen and other potential
investors tried and failed to work out a deal with Midwest to buy the building,
whose asking price had gone up to $75,000. A year ago the city filed condemnation
proceedings against it, seeking to acquire it through eminent domain. All along,
Midwest has rented to Oliver on a month-to-month basis.
Last year the city began notifying business owners within the so-called 47th/King
Drive Redevelopment Area-a strip between 44th and 51st streets that's bordered on
the west by the Green Line el tracks and on the east by Saint Lawrence Avenue-that
their buildings would be purchased too. While eminent domain cases can take years
to be resolved, property owners can challenge only the compensation they're offered,
not the purchase itself.
Gerri Oliver is wary of being quoted because she fears roiling already troubled
waters. But she says that neither Tillman nor the Planning Department has been in
contact with her; and though she thinks the city doesn't want Gerri's Palm where
it is, at least not in its present state, she doesn't know if the club eventually
will be moved, closed, or allowed to stay. "I don't want to create waves-I
don't want confrontations," she says. "In terms of the city, whatever
will be will be."
Some of Oliver's supporters are more active. "It's not the fact that it's gonna
be done, but how it's being handled so far," says Bronzeville historian Nathan
Thompson, who's written a book on Chicago's policy kings that will be published
next year. "There has been virtually zero input from business owners and residents.
They're shouldering over a lot of history in the name of progress-not that [progress
is] a bad thing-but tell the fuckin' truth about what you're doing. Bronzeville
was built on strong black business acumen, and now there's nothing left to point
to. That's why it's important to keep Gerri's standing. A certain amount of people
have held down the fort this long, but don't just kick them to the curb.
Everyone wants to see that area improve, but that doesn't give you the right to
walk in and steal everything and not consult with the community."
In recent months a group that includes Thompson and Fresen has been campaigning
to save Gerri's Palm Tavern. "The question right now is, who's gonna run the
show?" says Thompson. "Is Gerri gonna run it, or is Dorothy Tillman gonna
muscle the property and do whatever she wants with it?" This group has come
up with a business plan, and it's applied for empowerment zone funds to help renovate
the club. "The run-down condition of the building isn't Gerri's fault,"
says Fresen. "It's solely attributable to landlords who have charged her $450
a month since 1989, never gave her a lease, and never put a dime into the building....It's
gonna be a hell of a black eye to the city if Gerri's evicted."
Chicago may take over the property-Fresen says Midwest Partners is asking the city
for $60,000 for it-but Fresen and Thompson hope to assemble a team that will eventually
obtain the title. "We are proceeding with the idea that Gerri's consortium
will be able to put together funds to acquire the building," says Thompson.
"We're just trying to come up with all the different angles of saving the place."
So are preservationists. Last year architectural historian Andy Pierce helped compile
a report nominating Gerri's Palm Tavern to the Landmark Preservation Council of
Illinois's Ten Most Endangered Historic Places list. "Our goal was to get some
official recognition, get it on the map again so we don't lose it," says Pierce,
who often takes out-of-town friends to the club. "A lot of people don't fit
into DisneyQuest or Clark Street blues bars. We don't feel comfortable there."
Gerri's Palm Tavern, he explains, "is the real deal. It's the roadhouse for
everything that's gone. Aside from the Lenox Lounge in Harlem, which just got renovated,
I don't know of anything else like it in the country, of that vintage of black entertainment
and cafe culture. It'd be like if you tore down the Aragon, the Riviera, and the
Uptown, and the Green Mill was all that's left. It's the Green Mill of Bronzeville."
Pierce says Gerri's is not architecturally significant. But the preservation movement
has shifted its focus from just saving structures to "providing a context for
the way people lived," and in that light the club merits special attention.
"This is about a business bought and sustained with black money. It's about
use, the neighborhood, entertainment, Bronzeville culture. There's no excuse for
not saving that place. If they're going to develop a district, they should find
a way to keep the last best piece, find out how it could fit in. It doesn't make
any sense not to include it in redevelopment plans-why bomb what's left? I just
wish we could put up police tape around it with a sign that says Do Not Disturb."
Gerri's Palm Tavern didn't make the LPCI's Ten Most Endangered list for 2000, but
advocacy coordinator Julia Evans says it'll be nominated again next year. She says
that last June the LPCI sent a letter to Alderman Arenda Troutman (20th), who chairs
the City Council's committee on historical landmarks and preservation, expressing
concern about the club's status. The organization didn't bother writing Tillman.
"We didn't expect to hear back from her," says Evans, "so we sent
it to Troutman. But we haven't heard back from her either."
Troutman admits she isn't up to speed on Gerri's Palm Tavern. "In terms of
its landmark status, right now, I don't know," she says. But she'll look into
it.
Tillman didn't respond to numerous requests for an interview. But the 1999 LPCI
report quoted her chief of staff, Robin Brown. "I don't know," Brown said.
"The alderman is doing everything she can to save it, to make sure Gerri's
Palm Tavern remains. She is interested in working to make sure it remains a presence.
It may not be at that location-wherever it can be relocated."
"We want to keep the fabric of 47th Street-it has a very rich history,"
says the city's Cheryl Cooke. "We don't plan on demolishing [Gerri's Palm Tavern].
We're willing to work with Gerri."
In Chicago, as in other postindustrial cities, the gap between the real cityscape
and the stage set is shrinking. As a new urban economy emerges that's based on education,
tourism, sports, recreation, shopping, culture, and other forms of leisure, cities
try to revitalize their downtowns and inner-city areas with mall-like "urban
entertainment destinations."
As John Hannigan argues in his book Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern
Metropolis, such projects reflect the middle-class desire for urban experience and
its parallel aversion to risk, especially risk posed by actual contact with the
lower classes. To deny the realities of poverty, homelessness, social injustice,
and crime, these projects become themed simulations. They filter, sanitize, gentrify,
and historicize the messy and unpredictable vitality of cities into "landscapes
of consumption" based on virtual reality and spectacle.
"Today, the profession of urban design is almost wholly preoccupied with reproduction,
with the creation of urbane disguises," architecture critic Michael Sorkin
writes in the anthology Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the
End of Public Space. "Whether in its master incarnation at the ersatz Main
Street of Disneyland, in the phony historic festivity of a Rouse marketplace, or
the gentrified architecture of the 'reborn' Lower East Side, this elaborate apparatus
is at pains to assert its ties to the kind of city life it is in the process of
obliterating."
Obliterating, he says, "by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the
presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work."
In recent years, Chicago has graced many of its neighborhoods with ethnic touches.
Whether through public art, monumental forms, landscape design, or streetscaping,
it's hellenized Greektown, Italianized Little Italy, Asianized Chinatown, and Hispanicized
Pilsen, Little Village, and West Division Street. Now the city has turned its sights
on 47th Street. "Using Chinatown, Greek Town, and the Mexican neighborhood
of Little Village as models," says a 26-page Planning Department study, "local
residents and city officials are working to create a busy commercial area with an
African Village theme. This concept will enable Chicago's African-American community
to combine with the city's African, Caribbean, and West Indian populations to operate
a variety of businesses in a neighborhood with a history of black-owned businesses.
Thus, the diversity of Black Chicago's culture and history will be featured in a
commercial and cultural setting that can serve as a catalyst for broader neighborhood
revitalization."
"It has been alderman Tillman's vision for a long time to return 47th Street
to its former glory," says the planning department's Cheryl Cooke.
"She loves music-her first husband was a jazz musician. She wants people coming
back there and having a good time-to eat, live, work, and play." The transformation,
she says, will begin in earnest next year.
A blues district, let alone an African village, doesn't happen overnight.
Case in point, its planned centerpiece. The Lou Rawls Theater and Cultural Center-as
it was originally called-is considered a pet project of Tillman's. But it was in
the works for a decade before ground was broken.
Tillman and Rawls both claim credit for coming up with the cultural center idea,
according to an article by Mark Ruffin in the April 22, 1999, issue of N'Digo. Tillman,
now in her fifth term, said that Harold Washington "gave" her half a million
dollars to raze the South Center Building, which sat on the southeast corner of
47th and King, just north of the vacant parcel once occupied by the Regal. Tillman
has said she always wanted to put something back there. Starting in 1990, these
city-owned lots became the site of the annual Bring It On Home to Me Roots Festival.
Rawls, a noted philanthropist through the United Negro College Fund, envisioned
not only a theater there but also a music education center for young people.
After performing at the first year's festival he took his idea to Tillman.
She hooked him up with Mayor Daley.
Tobacco Road was incorporated in 1993 to raise funds to build the center.
Rawls was originally the nonprofit corporation's president, but he eventually stepped
down, citing the distance between Chicago and his LA home. The organization, run
out of an office in Tillman's Third Ward headquarters at 4645 S. King, pieced together
financing and in early 1998 bought the land, appraised at $280,000, from the city
for $1.
Besides an 800-seat theater, the 40,000-square-foot center was going to include
a music school, an audiovisual training center, stores, concessions, a museum, a
library, and a jazz-and-blues-themed restaurant and banquet facility. The developer
was East Lake Management and Development, an African-American-owned company with
an office next door to Tillman's headquarters. The complex was originally billed
as a public-private project, but in April 1998 the Sun-Times's Lee Bey reported
that it was being funded almost entirely by government money, with little public
oversight. Of the $4.27 million raised up to that time, all but $23,000 had come
from state grants, federal empowerment zone funds, and general obligation bond revenues
earmarked for educational and cultural activity.
Tillman has said that African-American projects of this scope deserve a slice of
the government pie. "We have a right, too," she told N'Digo, citing the
"$10 million" in city funds given to the Loop's Oriental Theatre. "This
is the first time this kind of money has been given to any kind of cultural thing
in the black community."
Bey reported that Tobacco Road's board was salted with Tillman associates.
One of them, soul singer Otis Clay, was president. Another, Bemaji Tillman, was
the alderman's son. (He's since left the board.) Terrence Bell, a campaign contributor,
was the board's treasurer. Robin Brown, her chief aide, was its secretary.
Bey wrote that no research had been done to show if the area around 47th and King
could support something the size of the Rawls center, which was planning to book
the kinds of shows already presented at the New Regal Theater on 79th near Stony
Island.
Tillman was undaunted. "Contrary to what you've read in the paper, this facility
has a lot of support," the alderman told a cheering crowd a few weeks after
Bey's story ran, during groundbreaking ceremonies that featured the Dunbar and DuSable
high school marching bands. "We hope to open our doors to this theater so the
students can come in." Vivian Carter, Rawls's aunt, handed Tillman a check
for $100,000.
Rawls continues to be involved in the fund-raising, and contributions-some of them
from his show business friends-have passed $5 million. Nonetheless, the singer no
longer has top billing. Last year, the name was changed to the 47th Street Cultural
Center and Lou Rawls Theater, casting the spotlight on a street whose musical culture
has been decimated but whose fortunes may yet rise again. Rawls's song "Tobacco
Road" is about a man who rebuilds his poor hometown after making it big.
The birth of the 47th Street Cultural Center has paralleled the much-vaunted rebirth
of Bronzeville, the currently fashionable name for a narrow swath of the old black
belt that once stretched from 22nd Street to 55th Street and whose spine was State
Street. Earlier in the century its downtown was centered at 35th and State; by the
end of the Depression 47th Street had become the community's commercial heart.
A city within a city, long neglected and isolated from the larger urban fabric,
Bronzeville is starting to reap the benefits of the economic boom rippling across
Chicago. Pockets here and there are already coming back to life thanks to public
and private development. Vintage commercial structures and elegant houses have been
preserved and rehabilitated. And new homes are springing up from desolate grassland.
A campaign is under way to reinvent Bronzeville as a heritage tourism site.
In 1986 activists and preservationists landed six surviving buildings, some of them
vacant and dilapidated, and one public monument-the World War I black soldiers'
memorial at 35th and King-on the National Register of Historic Places. The so-called
Black Metropolis Historic District, bounded by 31st and 39th Streets and State and
King, now consists of eight buildings plus the statue; it was granted landmark status
by the city two years ago. Community organizations have been working with the city
and the private sector to find new uses for some of these structures.
Several years ago a public library branch opened in the Chicago Bee Building, built
in 1931 at 3647 S. State. A block north, the Overton Hygienic Building, erected
in 1923, is now owned and being developed by the Mid-South Planning and Development
Commission, a coalition of community groups. The Eighth Regiment Armory at 35th
and Giles was acquired by the Board of Education two years ago and turned into the
Chicago Military Academy.
During the Great Migration and afterward, men could always find a room at the YMCA
at 3763 S. Wabash. Though that Y closed in the 1970s and stood vacant, it was designated
a landmark of the Black Metropolis Historic District. Last summer, after a four-year,
$9 million rehabilitation by the Wabash Y Renaissance Corporation, it reopened its
doors to Bronzeville's homeless and poor.
But the Y's an exception. Bronzeville is booming with new construction-single-family
and town houses designed to appeal to young African-American professionals. Some
residents fear a gentrified middle-class neighborhood-and a resultant tide of upscale
commercial development that could engulf what remains of Bronzeville's physical
and spiritual heritage.
For example, on the 4500 block of Saint Lawrence, in Tillman's ward, ten model homes
in the $250,000 range are being constructed by members of the African-American Home
Builders Association; the vacant city lots were given to the builders for $1 each.
Activists point out that aside from some new rental units, such as those around
49th and Saint Lawrence, little housing is being built in the area that could be
afforded by the low-income residents who'll be displaced by the slated demolition
of nearby CHA high-rises along State Street in the next few years.
To longtime community organizer Harold Lucas, the 47th Street plan raises a larger
question: Who owns Bronzeville? Will economic redevelopment be driven by the community
or be imposed by City Hall? Can the public and private sectors find a middle ground?
A self-described "Alinsky-ite urban preservationist," Lucas, who's head
of the five-year-old Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, has been trying
to balance business development with the preservation and promotion of Bronzeville's
historic character. Working with the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, he led the
campaign to create the Black Metropolis Historic District, and in 1995 his council
saved the Supreme Life Insurance Building at 35th and King from the wrecking ball.
The council, which now owns the Supreme Life building, has hoped to work with the
city in turning it into a $3.5 million retail and office complex housing a Bronzeville
visitors information center, though at the moment it's in court challenging the
size of the city's offer to acquire the building through eminent domain.
Lucas fears that "money doled to outside groups will come in and regentrify
our community" at the expense of its soul. He illustrates his point with the
subhead of an Inc. magazine article last August on the economic boom in Harlem,
which is being fueled by outside corporate projects-"Harlem residents hotly
debate who will lead them into a prosperous future: Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington,
or Mickey Mouse and Starbucks?" Says Lucas, "That's what we're talking
about!"
He paraphrases the five guidelines the National Trust for Historic Preservation
offers for preservation-based development: "Focus on authenticity. Use the
same site. Make the site come alive. Find a fit between community and enterprise.
Collaborate."
Lucas, a fourth-generation south-sider, doesn't think any of that will be followed
on 47th Street. "I don't know of any community participation, and I've lived
around the corner [from 47th and King] for 15 years. What we're talking about is
maximum feasible participation and citizen involvement....Do political agendas supersede
the will of the people? In this case, I guess they do. It's absolute demagoguery.
"The question is, how can we share in the development of an international African-American
heritage tourism destination? Are we going to respect our culture, our history and
heritage, to create an authentic African-American cultural experience? Or will it
be business as usual? I'm talking about corruption, gangsterism, and political clout
being used over the citizenry."
The Bronzeville campaign dates back to 1990, when the city and the Illinois Institute
of Technology, supported by the McCormick Tribune Foundation, produced a comprehensive
plan for the area bounded by 22nd and 51st streets, the Dan Ryan Expressway, and
Cottage Grove. A two-year-long planning process that brought together residents,
city officials, and institutional and business representatives led to the creation
of what would become the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission and to a
30-year strategic plan, "Restoring Bronzeville."
The plan's mission was "to enhance the quality of life and maintain the cultural
heritage" of the people who lived and worked in the area. But Lucas, who was
part of the planning process, says there's been "a lot of work done by the
community that hasn't been respected....The city wants it on their terms-that's
the problem. They want to take your idea and rewrite it. They should represent the
entire community, not just your own fiefdom and act like a lord over the people
and violate the public trust."
For instance, he says, in the early 1990s residents proposed enhancing the 37th
and State area-site of the Bee branch library and the Overton Hygienic Building-with
African-themed amenities. More recently there was a grassroots effort to create
a blues district along 43rd Street, not 47th.
This would seem to make sense: in 1985, a stretch of 43rd Street was christened
Muddy Waters Drive, in honor of the Mississippi-born musician who's arguably the
most influential bluesman of the last half century. In the late 1940s and 50s, Waters,
who died in 1983, and bandmates like Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, Otis Spann, and
Willie Dixon pioneered the amplified Chicago "urban blues" in a variety
of south- and west-side clubs and recording studios. Pepper's Lounge, home base
of Waters's band in the 1960s, was on 43rd Street, as were the Jukebox Lounge and
the Checkerboard Lounge, which was opened by Buddy Guy in 1970 and is still in business.
The 47th Street area was home to the 708 Club, at 708 E. 47th, where Waters and
other musicians played in the 1950s, and to Theresa's Lounge, where Guy, Junior
Wells, and others helped shape the Chicago blues sound in the 1970s and 80s.
Several years ago, Bronzeville community leaders held a series of meetings with
city officials, architects, and contractors to examine the idea of a blues district.
"The feeling was it would be on 43rd Street," says Paula Robinson, managing
director of the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, a consortium of six
neighborhood groups. "The Checkerboard was there, Muddy Waters's home is at
43rd and Lake Park, and the street was already designated. In the community planning
process [you ask], 'What do we have here? What can we build?' The Checkerboard is
an authentic building, valuable. What else is on 43rd we can build around? How can
we begin to commodify these elements to get to development?" But Robinson cautions,
"It's important not to take this out of context.
There have been a number of blues district plans, feasibility plans. The bottom
line is, plans are just that-they're feasibility."
"Forty-seventh Street was not known as a blues street," says 81-year-old
Timuel Black, a historian and longtime Grand Boulevard resident.
"Forty-third Street-if there was a blues district, that was it.
Forty-seventh Street was always a small-business street, many owned by blacks. If
there was music on 47th, it was primarily big bands, jazz. The blues concept is
very new-it was never a part of the culture of that street. It may become a blues
street."
Black-whose book Bridges of Memory, a study of three generations of African-Americans
who have grown up in Chicago, will be published in 2002-leads frequent tours through
Bronzeville and says he has to talk about a lot of vanished history. It doesn't
help, he says, that 47th Street was given the Tobacco Road designation. It's a tag
that suggests poverty, shanties, and ragged clothes, but the street Black remembers
was a place where everyone dressed up to see a show. He thinks that marketing the
street as a blues district will only make matters worse.
"In a sense, it prostitutes the street historically," he says. "They're
just looking for revenue for the city and whatever nomenclature they can give the
area. They're trying to revitalize it through historical falsehood, and it's not
fair to the community and the history of the neighborhood. To sell 47th Street as
a center of black culture is an insult to us who were born and raised here, to the
people who are a part of black culture in Chicago. It's an insult to Langston Hughes,
Billie Holiday, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson."
Veteran saxman Jimmy Ellis, a product of the neighborhood, has his own memories
of 47th Street. Starting out in the late 1940s, he played at the Regal Theatre and
at many other south-side venues, and today he can recite the names of the music
clubs in the 47th Street area-the Regal, of course, and also the 113 Club at 47th
and Michigan, the Congo Club at 48th and King, the Cue Lounge at 48th and Indiana,
the Savoy on King just south of 47th.
"It was strictly jazz-it wasn't about no blues," says Ellis, who at 70
still plays around town with his quartet and runs a music workshop at the University
of Chicago. "I love Dorothy Tillman and like what she's trying to do, but somebody
didn't give her the right information about 47th Street. She's not from the area.
I'm not knocking anything, but I don't like what they're gonna do with that-it's
not a Tobacco Road.
Chicago Reader ( http://www.chicagoreader.com) - 12/1/00