Hidden History of Lincoln Park

Ward

LINCOLN PARK HAS BEEN HOME TO SAINTS, SINNERS, GENIUSES, AGITATORS—AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

Until recently, members of the John Dillinger Died for You Society gathered shortly before 10:00 p.m. every July 22 in a bar across the street from the Biograph Theater on the 2400 block of North Lincoln Avenue to commemorate the exact moment when America’s then most notorious stickup man was gunned down by G-Men, as the late Chicago ghost hunter Richard Crowe liked to put it.

To the tune of a bagpipe dirge, the throng of mourners, which had grown to several hundred since the onset of the Great Recession, made their way to the glittering marquee, where Crowe explained how the widely admired bank robber spent his last hours on earth watching Manhattan Melodrama with sometime girlfriend Anna Sage, who agreed to keep the FBI informed of Dillinger’s whereabouts that evening in return for her not being deported to Romania.

Tonight we’ll follow the very steps John Dillinger took from the theater to the alley where he died that night so long ago, Crowe intoned as the faithful filed around the telephone pole where the mortally wounded Dillinger fell for the last time. There, the assemblage sang Amazing Grace as Crowe and theater impresario Mike Flores poured a tributary bottle of whiskey on the pole; half a dozen women in scarlet dresses competed in the annual Lady in Red contest.

These telephone poles were where John Dillinger died after being gunned down by FBI agents after leaving the Biograph Theater just a few steps away on July 22, 1934. Photo by Patrick Butler.

Then the congregants returned to their beers to ponder the similarities between bank misbehavior during the 1930s Depression and today and recall how Dillinger had more than once referred to himself as a modern-day Robin Hood.

Veneration of a far more serious sort has been going on since 1917 at the former Columbus Hospital a few blocks away from where the medical center’s founder and the first American citizen to be canonized died in her room, reconstructed by agreement with the developer of the luxury high-rise going up on the Columbus site at 2520 North Lakeview.

The developers, architects and St. Frances Cabrini’s Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart also broke ground for a national shrine honoring the Italian-born nun who founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages and hospitals throughout the United States, Europe and South America to serve the poor, especially poor immigrants. At the entrance of her shrine there is a piece of her leg bone on display for veneration by the faithful.

While Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini has been dubbed the Citizen Saint for being the first naturalized American ever accorded the Catholic Church’s highest honor, she might also be called the patron saint of rehabbers for the way she kept everyone honest during the 1905 conversion of a former hotel on the 2500 block of North Lake View Avenue into Columbus Hospital.

Early on the very morning she was to sign the closing papers on the property, she had two of her nuns survey the site just to make sure they were getting what they were paying for. By noon, she had all the proof she needed that someone was trying to cheat her out of a twenty-five-foot strip of land at one end of the block, a deception that would have substantially reduced the value of the site and made future expansion infinitely more difficult and expensive.

No sooner had she straightened everything out and left for Seattle to start an orphanage than it was discovered the contractors were trying to run up huge bills for all kinds of unnecessary work. Mother Cabrini returned to Chicago just as some creditors were about to foreclose on the property. She immediately fired all the scheming contractors and refused to pay for the phony renovation.

The budding saint vowed that from that moment on, she would personally supervise all the work. Within eight months, Columbus Hospital opened with one hundred beds in a dedication ceremony attended by more than four thousand Chicagoans.

The determined Mother Cabrini founded her own order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, after being rejected by two other religious orders that thought she was too frail. She made thirty ocean crossings before dying of malaria at sixty-seven. She was between trains when she stopped in at Columbus Hospital, intending only to make a quick inspection before moving on to yet another project. She never made that connecting train.

Lincoln Park may produce yet another saint who also dedicated her life to working with the poor—social activist Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement whose elevation to sainthood by the Catholic Church has even been promoted by some members of All Saints Episcopal Church, where Day worshipped for years before converting to Catholicism at thirty.

On March 12, 2000, exactly eighty-nine years from the day she was baptized at All Saints, more than one hundred Catholics and Episcopalians, led by Cardinal Francis George and Anglican bishop William Persell, met to kick off the canonization campaign and celebrate what one Episcopal priest called her feisty discipleship.

Columbus Hospital in the 1920s. The site has since been converted to condos but still includes a shrine to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library.

That was putting it mildly. Day, who died in 1980, was an often-controversial figure vilified for her support of organized labor, her harsh criticism of the capitalist system and an unbridled opposition to both the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War. Her middle-class family tolerated her flirtations with socialism as a youthful aberration but thought she was getting too close to the proletariat by taking up with anarchists and founding the Catholic Worker movement and its more than sixty houses of hospitality for the homeless in more than sixty cities.

Despite her status as a revolutionary back in the Cold War era, when anyone who advocated sharing the wealth was suspect, Dorothy Day wouldn’t be that unusual a saint, Cardinal George told the ecumenical prayer service. Read the lives of the saints and you’ll find they all challenged the attitudes of their day, said George, adding that while it’s much too early to tell whether Day merits the Church’s highest honor, it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise.

Dorothy Day, on the other hand, made her own wishes clear after a talk at DePaul University during one of her last Chicago visits. Don’t call me a saint, she said. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.

HOW LOCAL ALTAR BOY JOHNNY WEISSMULLER SCALED OLYMPIAN HEIGHTS TO BECOME LORD OF THE JUNGLE

An entirely different sort of local hero was Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, who grew up at 1921 North Cleveland, was an altar boy at St. Michael’s Church and turned to swimming as therapy after being stricken by polio when he was nine.

By his mid-teens, Weissmuller had not only regained full use of his legs but was also taken under the wing of Illinois Athletic Club swimming coach Bill Bachrach.

During the summer of 1921, he won the national 50- and 220-yard championships and set world records in the 100- and 400-meter freestyle events in the 1924 Olympics in Paris.

Four years later, during the Olympics in Amsterdam, after winning the 100-meter race, he retired from competition. A year later, he was discovered by the movies while working out at the Hollywood Athletic Club. In 1935, Weissmuller was hired for the title role in Tarzan the Ape Man after a single audition.

They gave me a G-string and said, ‘Can you climb that tree? Can you pick up that girl?’ I could do all that, he said.

Although he wasn’t the first Tarzan, Weissmuller became the most popular, especially since he and his brother, Pete, both lifeguards at the Oak Street Beach, played real-life heroes at least once, rescuing survivors and recovering bodies from the July 28, 1927 sinking of the excursion boat Favorite after a squall off the North Avenue Beach.

Legend has it you knew you were in Old Town if you could hear the bells of St. Michael’s Church. Shown here is a wedding around 1948. Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library.

Schmeissing’s Bakery, 1988, was a local treasure for more than seventy years. Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library.

After deciding in 1948 that I’ve been wearing animal skin scanties for too long, a fully clothed Weissmuller became Jungle Jim, moved to TV and left films in 1968 to promote a series of health food stores, cocktail lounges and the General Pool Corporation in suburban Addison, Illinois.

Voted the greatest swimmer of the first half of the century by the Associated Press in 1950, Weissmuller was finally inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in October 1950—three months before his death at age seventy-nine in Acapulco, Mexico.

WHEN AL CAPONE WAS SCARED ENOUGH TO SEND THE VERY BEST (WITH APOLOGIES TO HALLMARK CARDS)

Lincoln Park, it seems, has always been home to all kinds of extremes. Where else would you have had the world’s first Ferris wheel moved to what was once a prison camp for captured Confederates? Or the grave of what has to be one of the grandest con artists in Chicago’s history buried with honors befitting a national hero? Or a gargantuan chain once used to keep British ships from getting close enough to attack West Point? Or grisly crimes that made the depredations of Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger seem like the tantrums of the kid next door having a bad day?

The best known, of course, was the February 14, 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that some historians believe was ordered by Al Capone to keep the Irish mob led by George Bugs Moran from taking over the Chicago rackets. Reportedly believing Moran was planning to eliminate Capone and take over his North Side gambling, vice and liquor operations, Capone ordered a preemptive strike while he himself was vacationing in Miami.

To make it look like a routine raid on a well-known Moran haunt, the SMC Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark, two of the Capone gunmen wore police uniforms, while three others wore plain clothes with tommy guns tucked under long trench coats. Everybody arrived in a touring car identical to those used by the Chicago police at the time.

Inside, the five Moran gang members and two wannabes were hanging out, waiting for Boss Moran. Moran, credited with perfecting the drive-by shooting, often taunted Capone in press interviews, calling him a lowlife and even believing himself to be a better Catholic than Capone because, unlike Capone, Moran didn’t run whorehouses.

Capone had had it! Moran had to go.

Ironically, Moran was on his way to join his men when he saw the bogus police car pull up in front of the SMC warehouse. Moran turned around and went back home.

A neighbor who heard a lot of noise coming from inside the building called police, who found a very agitated German Shepherd dog and one of the gang members, Frank Gusenberg, climbing out from under a pile of bodies.

Gusenberg lived for about an hour and a half at nearby Alexian Brothers Hospital, insisting to the very end that nobody shot me despite having fourteen bullet wounds.

According to Chicago crime historian Richard Lindberg in his Return to the Scene of the