It’s the late 70s. I’m taking a time-out from college to work. I’ve earned my public chauffeur’s license and I’m driving for Plaza Limousine. I’ve been assigned to the money car. It’s a burgundy stretch Lincoln. In back are two facing banquettes, plus a bar with top-shelf booze, a built-in TV, and – wait for it – a deluxe eight-track tape player.
Plaza is headquartered in a big high-ceilinged garage on West Superior Street in Chicago. There’s a hand car-wash and auto detailing business in the back run by a tall, skinny guy with a million-dollar smile called Junior. There’s a dice game in a side room if you know to ask.
It’s in a very Chicago slice of Chicago. Nearby is the Mirage Tavern, where investigators and journalists teamed on a Chicago corruption sting I worked on just a few years prior. It will become an Irish bar “that used to be the Mirage,” a stop for tourists.
On Orleans is Mr. Beef, where you want the Italian beef combo sandwich with sausage, hot and sweet peppers, and jus to wet the roll. Down at Franklin and Illinois, near the Merchandise Mart, is venerable Gene and Georgetti, right out of a Scorcese flick. The wise guys, City Hall bag-men, and Blackhawks fans dine there on huge steaks, veal piccata, the crispy, thin, cottage-fried potatoes, and the “garbage salad.” You want the upstairs room, trust me.
Plaza’s limo bookings were always by phone. But one day in strolls a black guy in a tweed fedora, tweed sport coat, and dress slacks and shoes. Budget-minded. He’s here to book a ride for a few days later. Don’t come pick him up. He’ll come to the garage again to start the outing and save on billed hours.
Time comes, I’m his driver. We’re in the Silver Coupe de Ville limo because the burgundy stretch Lincoln is pricey. He’s named Hiram. No airs. Nice guy. I drive him to a family gathering at Queen Of The Sea on South Stony Island Avenue. A soul food buffet restaurant. He asks will I join them inside for the meal? I have to stay with the car. The job ends soon enough and he gives me a $10 tip. For the size of the bill, I really appreciate it. Wages aren’t all that much. It’s the tips that make a good week.
A few days later I’m in the silver Caddy again to get the wardrobe manager of The Jacksons. Michael and family. They’re playing that night. The pick-up is at the Continental Plaza Hotel, Delaware and Michigan. It’s late morning Saturday and the client wants to see the town. Cafe au lait complexion, crushed velvet jumpsuit to match his skin tone. Smoove.
First go to a sporting goods store, he says. He’s buying jockstraps for the Jacksons to wear under their stage outfits. I guess the deal is not to wash used Jackson jockstraps. I wonder to myself, what, they just throw them out after each show? Which for a big act, okay maybe. I know a place on Roosevelt you can get them wholesale. But I think, never mind.
Mission accomplished, Jumpsuit says he wants to see how the other half lives. He uses a certain ugly phrase referencing lower-income blacks. Take me to where they live, he says.
I head to 63rd and Stony Island Avenue. Under the El tracks back then. They’ve cut them short, since. Woodlawn. I grew up a few blocks to the north. Very different vibe. We’re driving around and who should ease on by? It’s Hiram.
With that same hat. He’s in a worn Dodge Dart. It’s got that classic copper-brown hue all Darts seemed to have in 1970s Chicago. And the usual black vinyl roof with nicks and gouges. Little spider webs in the windshield from high-impact pebble spray on the expressways.
Hiram sees me behind the wheel. Gives a big grin and waves, which I return.
Jumpsuit is watching. Asks, “who was that?” I reply, “oh, just another customer. He was sitting right in your seat recently.”
A Math Problem For Mr. Smoove
Now: crickets.
More crickets.
It’s a symphony of crickets. I think they’re playing Haydn.
Jumpsuit has been struck dumb. His math is in flux. “These people” don’t ride in limos, like he does. Do they?
We’re on the deluxe Southeast Side tour now. Further sociological implications included.
Making sure to point out the South Shore Country Club and that they barred blacks and Jews from membership until just a few years ago.
Down to Rainbow Beach at 75th and the lake, where in July 1961 the sons and daughters of local black steel workers, with white allies, staged an NAACP “freedom wade-in.” They were pelted with rocks by white punks while Chicago Police idly stood by.
Past that diner on 71st Street east of Jeffrey where my Dad and I used to go in the early 70s and one morning World Heavyweight Champion Muhammed Ali busts in with an entourage of ten. Goes straight into the kitchen shouting about how he is The Greatest, The Greatest, the Absolute Greatest Breakfast Cook In The World and starts banging it out for everybody. Pots and pans clattering like an earthquake. The displaced cook smiling broadly, nodding to himself and tapping out a smoke from his pack of Newports.
The Ali story whets his appetite. Jumpsuit wants to eat. Do I know any authentic South Side spots? We head west to JoTee’s BBQ. Northeast corner of 87th and Ashland. From when I drove the reigning Miss Brick House. Maybe you know The Commodores hit.
She sang back-up for the Ohio Players and I ferried her in the limo from her South Shore Drive high-rise to the recording studio on Huron Street next to the Gaslight Club in the wee hours to put her tracks down. Mercury Records paying the tab. Other times to the Sheba Lounge on 87th and nearby to Jo Tee’s.
Best rib tips in town. A thrifty cut slow-cooked over wood smoke to crazy tender. The fleshy bony nubs laid out on Wonder Bread and napped with JoTee’s smoky, spicy, tart sauce.
Jumpsuit springs for my $4.65 tab. The job is winding down. I take him to the Mill Run Theatre in Niles where The Jacksons are playing. Moving through the limo’s door frame, “Hey, maybe I’ll tip you next time.”
Stiffed. Goddamn.
Normally airport runs rate a five-dollar tip. Longer trips maybe ten or twenty or often more, based on fifteen or twenty percent of the bill. Today has been about four hours plus tour guide services.
I recall baritone singer Fred Cash of the r&b group The Impressions slipping me a twenty-dollar tip after a simple run from O’Hare to the studio downtown. With a twinkle in his eye, adding, “handle that.”
I bid Mr. Crushed Velvet Jumpsuit au revoir, thinking about class. I have an idea of how it walks. So did Hiram, and Fred Cash.
Just Barely Hacking It
It turns out there’s too much low-paid downtime in the limo biz, waiting for orders. I hook up with Yellow Cab. The guy who hires me almost doesn’t because I’m under twenty-five but I regale him with limo driving stories. I move to the first square of the Taxi Driver Monopoly Board.
The Great Chicago Blizzard of my time struck twice. First in 1967, when we built igloos in the alley between Cornell Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard, 54th and 55th. Next in January of 1979, when I was driving a limo. That storm was of Biblical proportions. We sat that one out. Famous photos show lines of cars stranded on Lake Shore Drive.
So what follows must have been in the winter of 1979-1980, when there was no famous blizzard. It was the only winter I drove the cab. Out of the old garage on Halsted north of Belmont where if you wanted help from the mechanics you brought a box of donuts. The snow this night wasn’t quite epic, but bad enough to shut down transit and a lot of driving.
It’s 3 a.m. The pink and white Miller High Life neon sign flashes from my apartment’s window at Sheridan Road and Loyola Avenue in Rogers Park. That four-plus-one structure, perched on thin concrete stilts over sheltered parking, is now long gone. I set out extra food and water for Ripley, my orange tabby cat. Mercifully exfiltrated from the P.M. Club, a Howard Street dive with an abusive barkeep.
The elevated trains haven’t ceased quite yet. I make it to the Yellow Cab garage on Halsted, north of Belmont. I take some supplies I’ve brought and craft big cardboard signs that I tape to my rear windows. Each says “Sheridan #151.” That’s a key north-south bus route. I’m going to break the rules and turn my cab into a mini-bus.
It’s one of those huge Checker Motors taxi sedans with two pop-up seats in the back and the bench seats in the front and rear. Besides me at the wheel I can fit seven inside.
Following the 151 route when morning dawns I begin making pick-ups driving south down Sheridan Road from the Evanston border, through Rogers Park and Edgewater. Then east at Hollywood Avenue into Lake Shore Drive and all the way downtown. Where I load up on Michigan Avenue for a northbound trip. Side streets are a mess, but you can slog through on the Drive and the big arterials.
My “151” signs are immediately understood. At five dollars a rider it adds up nicely. I have to turn them away, pointing to my full load and making a “what can I do?” gesture. I can lip-read the two different four-letter responses. Chicagoans. God love ‘em. Inside the sedan food and hot beverages are shared, including spiked coffee.
After driving limos and then the cab, I’ve got the perspective I need. By autumn of 1980 I’m back in college. This time around at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Near Boston and morphing from an old textile town to an early tech hub.
I live on South Street in a student slum. I’m on the top floor of a three-flat painted brown and known locally as “Big Shit.” I guess as opposed to Big Pink, a famous house in Woodstock, New York. I’m told another Brandeis student named Abbie Hoffman once resided in my building. He studied sociology at Brandeis. As did Angela Davis.
Many Brandeis students are Jewish New Yorkers. My people. Walking to campus up the hill on South Street one day townies driving by in a Chevy Nova lean out the window and angrily chant at me, “Jew, Jew, Jew.”
Another time in town I walk past one young guy in his chain-link-fenced front yard on a side street. My sheepskin coat might be triggering. He mutters, “Wanna fight?” Same offhand tone as, do I wanna buy a dime-bag? I say no. Thanks. He leaves it there.
I’m being force-fed Marxists in my sociology classes. At the time this is probably a good thing.
Slinging Cheese, Here And There
Now it’s 1983. I’ve completed work at Brandeis and gone from peddling cheese in Cambridge, Massachusetts mall to toiling on Capitol Hill for an Illinois Congressman. Same thing, more or less.
By November I’m back in Chicago as a cub reporter for a big community publisher called Lerner Newspapers. Covering a few towns in DuPage County including one right next to O’Hare called Bensenville. Politicians, junk yards, mean dogs. And the odd gangster or two.
Like the ten who gathered in a Bensenville basement rumpus room in 1986 to beat to death Tony “The Ant” Spilotro and his brother Michael. Tony had run amok in Vegas, bringing heat to The Outfit. His “Hole In The Wall Gang” robbing jewelry stores and violently shaking down gamblers. Michael too had been adjudged out of line. Joey “Doves” Aiuppa had had enough.
The brothers were lured to Bensenville on the pretext of Mob promotions and then beaten to death right there. In a basement. They were buried in an Indiana cornfield. But not beaten right in the cornfield, as Martin Scorcese had it in his great flick “Casino.” And not buried alive there either, as legend has it. The two Spilotros had been ended in Bensenville.
But one thing almost never ended in Bensenville. That was the jets going to and from O’Hare. From the early morning until late at night. Over homes, schools, churches, and even an historic graveyard the City of Chicago would one day dig up and relocate to accommodate O’Hare expansion.
During extra-hours research at Northwestern University’s Science and Engineering Library on the Evanston campus I ferreted out acoustics journal articles and EPA and NASA reports about the health effects of environmental noise. The chamber of commerce line was that you get used to it. Not really, it turns out. I began to write about airport growth plans, and politics.
My beat extended to Wood Dale and Itasca, the next two towns west of Bensenville along Irving Park Road. A Teamsters labor union local was trying to organize Wood Dale police. I checked into the local’s financial records at the downtown Chicago office of the U.S. Labor Relations Board. I couldn’t figure out the $60,000 of spending in one annual report just for “flowers, gifts, and miscellaneous.”
I called the Teamster unit’s business representative in Berwyn to ask, $60,000 in gifts and flowers for who? How much of the $60,000 was for “miscellaneous”? And what sorts of things does that cover?
Zip it on all that, the Teamsters guy advised me. Or your knees are going to get broken. This was the second time in my young life that a guy from Chicago whose last name ends in “o” had threatened to do that. The Teamsters story ran as planned and I didn’t get knee-capped.
After four-plus years at Lerner I’m hired in 1988 as an organizer and communications strategist by a coalition of twelve suburbs including Bensenville and Wood Dale. They want a greater say in decisions about O’Hare expansion and a new regional airport.
Kabuki Theater, And A New Airport
By 1990 our parent group the Suburban O’Hare Commission (SOC) and it’s O’Hare Citizens Coalition are solidly on the map. I’m working regularly with daily newspaper reporters, columnists, Chicago television’s top political reporters, and national media. This thing is getting big. A growing number of poorly-disguised City moles ask to be added to our mailing list for legislative alerts. We welcome them.
One day early in 1990 our agitation for a new airport appears to have borne fruit. Not even one year into his new job, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley seemingly agrees a new facility is needed. Rather than continued growth at O’Hare, we’re suggesting an ex-urban third airport in the southwest reaches of Chicagoland, within a 45-minute drive of major population. Near a farming community called Peotone.
We argue that a new regional airport authority should run it instead of just the City of Chicago. Daley’s play is to go big, and keep control. He unveils elaborate plans for a new airport within Chicago and run only by the city.
It would be at Lake Calumet on Chicago’s far southeast side, obliterating the 10th Ward including the Hegewisch neighborhood. A working-class community full of Croats, Slovaks, and Poles. Their homes, churches, and schools would be rubble. Then tarmac and terminals.
The O’Hare communities team up with the Hegewisch neighbors. We both prefer the “green grass” site. They love a good buffet spread. Always with toothsome pierogi, pork shank and sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage rolls, and that high-octane plum brandy called Slivovitz. They’re brawlers. Union members. Gun owners. Pissed-off Democrats.
Daley’s proposed new airport was in a major migratory bird path. Air traffic conflicts would likely have required closing the region’s second airport, Midway. A consultant to the city’s proposal whom I knew chose to quit his job in disgust at the fakery of touting newly-built wetlands to replace those that would be destroyed by Daley’s airport. The whole thing was patently ludicrous. And yet had to be taken seriously.
Mayor Richard M. Daley was following in his father’s footsteps. Sensing O’Hare might not be up to handling future air traffic growth, Mayor Richard J. Daley leading into 1970 had proposed a new airport in Lake Michigan east of Hyde Park.
There would be a five-mile diked enclosure on a portion of the lake’s bottom connected to the mainland by a causeway. It was true fish would be “expelled” from the lake for construction but hindrances to marine life would “be localized and quantitatively unimportant,” the city’s consultant wrote in a 1970 report.
Hyde Parkers and others in the budding environmental movement were opposed. I remember cars all over Hyde Park with bumper stickers of, “Don’t Do It In The Lake.” Activists worried about the health of the Great Lakes, jet noise, and overwhelming traffic on Lake Shore Drive. They worked the process and the media. By 1972 Daley put a fork in it.
Daley The Younger swore his Lake Calumet Airport was no bluff. By this time factories were dying, he said. So: jobs, jobs, jobs. Others said it was all Kabuki theater. Like so much of public policy debate. The legislature sank the Lake Calumet Airport proposal. Led by a Republican Governor the state eased away from its role in getting a better site built. But over the years, kept land-banking around Peotone.
This wasn’t just a political board game. O’Hare really was overstuffed. Midway was smack amidst the city and could only handle so much. Much of the region’s black population lived, and still does, on Chicago’s South Side and in the city’s south suburbs. They were denied the huge jobs generator which a properly-sited new airport in Chicago’s Southland would have been. The Machine had its reasons.
Now it’s early 2021. I’ve just spent more than two months living in Chicago, to do field work for my book. I’m headed back to Seattle with my wife and rushing through a jam-packed O’Hare on a Tuesday morning to get to our gate. Everyone is moving fast and with purpose. Except for three guys pushing a maintenance cart. They appear to be in some sort of Monty Python sketch. They are depicting the world’s slowest walkers.
These are beefy Chicago guys. Bears, brats and beers guys. If they were on break they’d be sitting in a break room eating cheese Danish. They’re on the clock. They’re playing the clock. Laughing and chatting and – what to call this? It doesn’t even rise to the level of dawdling. It’s a comical series of tiny mincing one-sixteenth steps. No. The steps are only half as big as one-sixteenth steps.
It’s breathtaking, in its way. The Payroller Shuffle To Nowhere.
O’Hare Airport. A timeless essence revealed.