Old Chicago

Headline in Thursday's paper: "Block 37 in continuing difficulties". That block's been empty, across the street from Daley Center, since sometime in the early 1980s at least. I worked in an elegant old building on Block 37, before the block went down. My job lasted an unusually long time because I was the last person in the company who knew how to open the old safe on the fifth floor. That building had some elegant marble staircases, and happy humming offices on its third floor; Gaper's Catering was on another floor, and a huge competent grocery store used the ground floor and the large bright basement floor. Every year, for a few days in strawberry season, candymakers used to sit in the decorated windows dipping fresh strawberries in chocolate while the passersby flooded in to buy them. A system of Personal Shoppers survived from the early part of the century; the names of the cheerful people who answered that phone were retained as one "Miss Belle" reached retirement age and another "Miss Belle" began.

There were more basements below the one that the shoppers knew. The one that shoppers knew sold Tide and bread and ham. Below that, there was a level with capacious doors that opened onto an old Chicago street way below present street level, and the doors opened onto a large Lazy Susan arrangement next to freight elevators. You could bring your produce in the standard Chicago-size truck/trolley right in those doors, onto the big wooden Lazy Susan, and after the product was unloaded, helpers would revolve the wooden staging around so the horses could pull the truck back out onto the street again.

Going up to the fifth floor was something to be cautious about; there were lofts nearby that stored not only produce and coffee but recent releasees from County jail. People joked that on release from the jail, the address of those lofts was passed out, to supply quick housing, short-term.

The head bookkeeper on the third floor was Dorothy, she'd had that job for years. She could remember when they used an IBM system to hold punched cards in a large room that stretched the size of a soccer field. I don't think in the beginning that the cards went into a computer, I think they were handled mechanically. Around 1975, Dorothy retired, spry and sassy, with silver hair.

The location was wonderful for me, because at lunchtime I could spend an hour with the tract books and records in the County Building. Wills and court cases were sent to the warehouse when they aged, and their indices were all downstairs in the County building. I did a lot of research for one group, to find out the original contents of the old Clarke house that was moved from south to north, and later from north to south again. It's surprising how much stock in electric railroad companies was held by early residents. It was also surprising at first to me that in more and more cases I researched, where pious families had a father or mother who "just left", all the details including all addresses and testimony from years like 1905 could still be found in the old divorce cases. Keep the truth so close in the family that only the court know, not the grandchildren?