Chapter 9 - CHICAGO: West Signal Park
Blowing on the Sparks of Gentrification
It’s no easy task to find a truly untouched ward in the Windy City that shows promise, and yet has not been spoiled by the predations of frozen yogurt entrepreneurs and scented candle magnates. And yet raw intelligence and no small amount of late night street-view surfing online led me to a real find: West Signal Park, an ethnic district of factories and row-houses, encircled by the railroads and their iconic signaling towers. No Prairie Progressivism for this burg, it is perhaps, then, to be expected that “West Sig”, as it is known, is often described as a place of “narrow lawns and wide waists.”
Bounded by once powerful lines—now all owned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe—with evocative nicknames like the Route of the Towering Snowdrifts, also called the ‘Not So Grand Trunk,' the Flying Teeth-Bared Red Fox Route, the Copper Plate Road, and the dependable Molasses Mainline (“Sweetest Service South and Beyond!”), hard-scrabble, work-a-day West Sig harkens back to a time of lunch-pails, factory whistles, scratchy underwear, and shouting. Resisting gentrification like vinyl siding resists paint, you will not find a Portabello Panini here. You will, though, find bedraggled Mournwood Cemetery (459 Null Ave. Open to the Public). It’s the burial place of minor figures, such as the last “funeral mute” in the United States.
Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Theodore Dreiser. Their very names draw literary maps in one’s mind of the sprawling lakeshore cosmopolis of Chicago—just not including West Sig.
There are few museums and even fewer restaurants. Indeed, West Signal Park’s own tired waist is cinched by a dark, dirty border of still hard-worked iron rails. And, this industrial tableau is overshadowed by the empty, hulking, partially-renovated shell of a once-mighty factory, the defunct Imperium Flame Match Co. (“Light’um with Imperium”), (Match Works Lofts, 1889 Phosphorus Ave.), and locally called The Match Works. It’s a hard-luck place. What might have been an economic hydraulic-lift for West Sig is stuck in receivership, and home to a diverse array of artists, squatters, mice, birds and a few, very sour, early loft condominium buyers, now “underwater” with their investments.
I can’t report the area is magnetizing hipsters, so far. Yet, tantalizing redevelopment breezes are blowing across its grease traps, with rumblings of craft-brews and organic city-grown greens. Rumor has it that a restaurant connected to a celebrity chef had queried for space amidst its tired-out storefronts.
Meanwhile, West Signal Park’s down-at-the-heels mien offers little ostensible encouragement for the standard urban professional. Community theater: moribund. Independent coffee houses: nope. Chachkas-from-developing-world-store: not yet. Farmer’s Market? Adjacent neighborhood.
But it does have history. West Sig is, after all, famous for a series of 1930s pet-snatchings and a factory explosion. And those are the benign events—it’s now known for prostitution rackets and indoor marijuana grow-houses. Stolen laptops are reputed to be wiped clean at hidden locations here, before being shipped overseas. There are few sit-down eateries and fewer public restrooms.
“West Sig don’t look like much, I’ll emit,” Janice Treska, the owner of Piggy’s Lunch (1023 W. Signal Park Ave.), told me, in her thick Chicagoland accent, “but if you take away the EPA brown-field site, back of the Match Works, the strip clubs, the potholes, the pet-unfriendly rep–totally undeserved, let me say–the taggers, the prostitution, the beer riots back in the day, and these new grow-houses, and the fact it’s even colder than Duluth, not to mention the Loop, it’s really a place where you can be very, very happy.”
Local legend has it that, as tough as winter weather is in northern Illinois, it is worse in this once-heavily Slavonian section of Chicago. Everyone I’ve spoken to swears summers here are a few days shorter, leaves drop faster, and the flocks of birds that summer in the nearby T.H. Vast Forest Reserve (1302 N. Harebell Blvd.) escape quickly when winter hits.
Described as being “west of the Loop and South of St. Paul, Minnesota,” the aging area’s alderman admits it’s the home of a lot of “bald tires and bald heads.”
It also lacks places to stay. Which left me hanging my toiletry kit at the only hostelry around, in the adjacent neighborhood: the Do Drop Inn of Signal Park (1961 Grand Signal Blvd., Signal Park), a sprawling motel-like 1950’s accommodation, with its own bowling alley-cum-event space that uses a dizzying mixture of lavender-tinted mirrored columns, composite gravel-based tiling and translucent glass, to lure the unlucky last-minute bride, or the insurance agents’ regional luncheon.
Sinking into the naugahyde banquettes of the Do Drop’s coffee-shop, I felt like I was being embraced in one of Lyndon Johnson’s famous bear-hugs. Finishing what passed for coffee, I hoofed it to the target district. A short walk along Grand Signal Boulevard brought the row-houses and factories into view, punctuated by short streets of larger, Victorian-era bungalows, row-houses, porches sagging, chimneys askew, paint peeling. Flags of the POW-MIA cause, various Balkan soccer clubs and ships of the Pirates of the Caribbean films fluttered from porch columns and windows.
With all this, word had still percolated up through West Sig’s un-remediated earth, that an upscale restaurant would open, but it seemed hard to believe. Along West Signal Park Ave., I shopped as never before for plebeian stuff, like thread, a plastic kitchen drawer organizer, the last box of Fudgetown cookies extant in America, and a bumper of malt liquor. As I looked around at the weeds poking up through a curb stone, and at a 1975 Pontiac Grand Pix, body side-molding long-ago lost, sitting stolidly at said curb, questions presented themselves: was West Signal Park, in fact, a wrongly-accused conflict-diamond of a Chicago hamlet, waiting to be plucked from its dingy Carter-era, apnea-style sleep, thence to be shined up and placed on the finger of a public hungry for yet another dimly apprehended meal, tiny tea-light flickering playfully against an original brick wall released of its history from a dry-walled coffin? Would, say, Janice Treska, wearing devils-pitchfork press-on nails, and a monster-truck-rally t-shirt, eat bits of smoked duck sausage swaddled in a thimble’s worth of caramelized onion, rhubarb and Paprika reduction sauce?
I wasn’t sure, but I vowed to dig further. Speaking of which, the muck in the brown-field site adjacent to the Match Works—once the Imperium rail spur, loading dock and storage area—is being transformed, grassroots-style, into a “Prairie Demonstration Garden,” by artists squatting in half-finished lofts. Pre-World War II, the works ran three round-the-clock shifts from their flagship factory, loading boxes of match-books onto rail-cars next to the factory, and shipping them around the globe. Post-financial crisis, many of its gas fireplaces provide bicycle helmet storage.
One artist, Marram Beachpea,greeted me there, and volunteered to be an unofficial guide. With nary a budding restaurateur in sight, Marram offered us some trail mix from a freezer bag, and began our ersatz tour.
“That’s why concrete floors are so great, you can light a fire to keep warm and it doesn’t damage anything,” noted Marram, and then returned to her hearth on the floor to lean downward so she could blow on a small bonfire of kindling and chopped-up pallets, before showing me around.
Marram works in glass, acrylic and wheat-paste—not all at once. Beachpea, together with another Works resident, font designer Trent Budvar, have applied for a community grant to transform the Match Works, which shut-down in 1973, into an artists’ live-work cooperative. Bought in 2004 for $4.38 million by a California investor group aiming to rehab it into luxury condos, The West Signal Park Signal estimated the building’s current value at roughly $95,145.56, if you throw in some floor-waxing equipment, and a disco ball from the farewell “We Can’t Be Matched” Christmas party of 1973.
Most of the condo-purchasers fled with the economy, but a few are hunkered down in the finished part of the building, reportedly in a foul mood while they await some movement on renovating the rest of the complex. Our artsy pair developed the demonstration garden on their own, amid an
overgrown loading dock and the rail spurs; they expressed excitement about its prospects. Together they moved us to a large window in an un-renovated area of the factory, and we peered out of the large window, spidered with cracks. They’d also heard the restaurant rumor, but discounted it, saying, “people here want real food, man, not little white plates with colored squiggles.”
Below us, I saw an overgrown loading dock. Yet, Marram and Trent pointed out that among the rusting railroad car axles, the old file cabinets, a busted wing chair with the stuffing popping out and a toilet sans seat, that here, a botanical festival of native Midwestern flora was, slowly, assuredly, taking shape. Bluestem grasses and dogbane and flowering spurge could be glimpsed with Marram’s help. Quite slowly the ailanthus, that botanical hallmark of neglect, was being pushed aside for the sand prairie and moraine of Father Marquette’s time. Of Hiawatha's, even.
“See right over there near the refrigerator door?” asked Marram, as we followed her hand to the horizon, pointing from her third floor window. “There’s an actual prairie dog burrow under there, and near it are some bottleflower and some goldenrod and black-eyed susan that will come into bloom.” We all waited for a minute to see if any dogs would pop up their little heads out of the ground, but they didn’t. Marram and Trent hope they’ll ultimately grow herbs and heirloom vegetables, as well, for a future Farmers’ Market.
Postcard courtesy of The West Signal Park Signal newspaper archives:
Reverse: Famous statue in West Signal Park, Chicago, Ill. “Victory, Hand bloodied by War...1923, by M. Saint-Jardin.
October 12, 1933
Mrs. H. Diggity
932 West Shrike St.
Bathsheba, Ind. 7
Heloise,
Tom is poorly. Many nice houses here, paved streets. Indian summer heat. Talk of house-pets goin' missing. Hope they ain’t all dead.
Bless you, Celia
I looked hard for traditional promising signs of renewal in West Sig: handmade soaps and crafts, healthy meals with tongue-thickening vegan desserts, transgressive art or freshly de-grimed historic buildings – and found little to comfort me. I did find a junk shop—sometimes a precursor to an infection of more artfully-staged shops with the same junk, but fumigated and dusted—with the remainders of a thousand yard sales, and the expected blenders, old Clue sets, gas station premium glasses, boxes of snap-shots, ugly ashtrays and saints-day statues.
Is it any wonder then that cucumber slices, and feelings, are still raw, at Signal Subs (1189 Lathe St.), where the owner indicates he’s been slightly ripped-off by a major sandwich chain: “I’m not saying nothing about it,” said Petey Korbacik, who then said, “But let me say this about that; you know the major chain that helps you build your sub as you move along the window? Well, we done that in 1962. Put everything on a long table, and said “have at it.” Do they owe me a fee or something? Lawyer buddy in Lombard says I could be a friggin’ millionaire from this. Dick Butkus was here twice.”
If you’re wondering—and I wasn’t—there is also a branch on the Southwest Side, off Brenham Ave. (pronounced ‘Bren-HAIM’). Petey waved away rumors about celebrity chefs and his small-plates eatery.
“Small plates?” asked Petey,” what would we want with that? We eat large in West Sig.”
I ran into Trent on Lathe St., and promised to drop by later for a short-story reading at The Works. It was to be sponsored by The New Porker, an avant-garde Midwestern literary magazine for free-range pork farmers. It’s a winter-months-only ‘zine, aimed at the stir-crazy porcine agricultural practitioner, holed up inside a stuffy farmhouse, dreaming of artisanal sausage wins at state fairs.
I was outside The West Signal Park Signal offices. The seventy-year old shopper is published bi-monthly, and now on the Web, except in July, when the publisher, Clara Dusselhoffer, summers at Walloon Lake, in Michigan. Dusselhoffer is widely viewed as a neighborhood historian, an avocational code enforcement expert, and a crank. Her nephew Ron is head of the newly re-constituted West Signal Park Chamber of Commerce (“re-founded 2004”) and has labored for several years to get new eateries to locate here, so far unsuccessfully—he’s now running the family-owned beer garden.
“Well, I’ll tell you Ron’s working on a number of things; he’s been pondering whether she shouldn’t just try to spin ‘Slavonian’ as ‘Moravian’ and just promote that whole thing – simple religious folk move here from the old country, like in Winston-Salem. Maybe license some furniture designs. Lots of clean-lined chairs, and aromatic candles, maybe? It don’t make sense to me, but apparently if you’re escaping persecution, you end up with candles that smell like pine, which you can sell for 10 dollars a pop,” she wryly observed.
Clara also lives in the only West Sig property connected to the legacy of Midwestern architectural legend Frank Lloyd Wright—however tenuous. A sometime draftsman in Wright’s famed workrooms designed the large one-room house, which looks like a giant Norse lodge (4513 S. Casement Pl. Tours Suspended), with sloping roofs to keep the snow from accumulating and essentially one room around a giant four-sided fireplace. Clara has spent decades attempting to get Illinois to put the house on the state historical register of sites. It’s advertised as being open for tours by appointment, but when I asked about it, Clara peered over her half-glasses and mumbled that she wasn’t showing it. Something about a design that people misinterpret, because of the door-less bathrooms.
“I’m not runnin’ Tally-Watcha, Wisconsin, here—it’s my house, for Pete’s sake” harrumphed Clara.
Meanwhile, the spry old gal had just put Dusselhoffer Biergarten (2380 Grand Signal Blvd.) in Ron’s hands.
“Quite a few writers gathered at the beer garden, in the early twentieth century. No one famous now, but they were well-known in their time. Claude Boozle, Jr. was one. H.J. Soberlin was another. Peter Rennet, you may have heard of; he wrote a lot of poetry—including the one on the Saint-Jardin statue in West Signal Park Park.”
“It was nominated for a Governor’s Prize in 1926—didn’t win. We’re not a neighborhood of winners, here, really. Just do-ers,” pronounced Clara.
West Sig is famed for one doing though: the pet-napping spree of Cyril Dismas, ultimately sent to Joliet Prison. Although evidence has come to light suggesting he didn’t exactly kill the pets, but rather sent them to a friend in Arkansas (receipts for rail freight were recently discovered in Dismas family papers, I learned), this 1930s noir aspect bumped up the neighborhood in my eyes from sad to mildly creepy, auguring, perhaps, a renaissance amongst the well-heeled of the Goth set.
Chicago Elevator & Mercury-Times
Dismas Descendant Disgraced Via Devilish Doggie Doings
Dismal Day for Dynasty; Descent of Dismas
Chicago, IL, Sept. 15, 1923 – The stunning outrage of pet-nappings and possible creature killings ended Thursday with the conviction of Cyril Dismas, grandson of Imperium Match founder Augustus Dismas, on charges of felony pet stealing. Dismas was convicted of absconding with pet feline Petunias and canine Fidos, from residences in Signal Park and West Signal Park. The unrepentant match company heir is to be remanded for six years to state correctional custody. Sentence is to be served in the state prison at Joliet, the Chicago District Attorney’s office announced, following trial and sentencing in Cook County Court.
Imperium founder Augustus Dismas commissioned a statue by noted turn-of-the-last-century sculptor, March Saint-Jardin, commemorating the sacrifice of employees in World War I; this bronze piece now sits in the neighborhood’s main park, West Signal Park Park (W. West Signal Park Ave., at Bozen St. and Clump Ave.). Once known as Patootie Park or Horse’s End, for its former role as the terminus for the tons of manure that Chicago’s working horse population generated in those days, Dismas acquired the dumping ground, and then spent his own money to convert it to a public retreat, while the horse excrement repository was relocated to a different neighborhood that people liked even less. The ‘Park Park,’ as it’s known, is the on
ly site in the district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The docent is a Dismas descendant. A small allee, of six trees, three on either side, leads to the statue. A wrinkled sign-up sheet protected by a removable hard-plastic cover that fell off when I lifted it, on a community board near the statue, had earlier allowed me to schedule a date for a tour.
Andrew Dismas, the factory owner’s great-grand-nephew, gives park tours every other Saturday, except in the winter, in August, and when Saturday comes after a federal Monday holiday, or in the same week as a local or state election, owing to some obscure Chicago political custom that I was advised not to question, by a mix of local barflies and cops.
Andrew, a tall man of indeterminate age, grew up in the Dismas Mansion (1033 Trevithick Ave., private), before his parents moved to more affluent Culloden Grove, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. He's back now, living in the house, and attempting renovations.
Cleaning out his grandmother’s effects from the manse, after her death last year at 101 from chronic rheumatism (“Grandma claimed she drank a shot of apple-cider vinegar every week, but we think it was probably schnapps”), Andrew had recently discovered a cache of papers that he says pointed to Cyril’s innocence of the charges of killing pets; he had apparently shipped many of the pets he’d taken to a person unfamiliar to Andrew, living in the South. He’s turned the papers over to the University of Chicago.
We proceeded from the sign-up sheet to Saint-Jardin’s creation in the park’s center. It’s informally called “Match Lady,” and officially known as Victory, Hand Bloodied by War, With a Limb Severed, Lighting the Underworld with a Match in Darkness and Eternity, Comforting the Wounded, Bringing forth the Light of Eternal Redemption.
Andrew told me Augustus had commissioned it in 1921, to commemorate those workers who survived a Match Works explosion in 1913, only to lose their lives in battle in World War I, a short time later. The Aurora-born poet Hanceford “Peter” Rennet, a contemporary of Carl Sandburg, wrote the inscription, which we read silently.
Conflagrations
In life, we were a workaday lot
Making little fires to burn, tiny and hot
In death, we wield
No get up. No go
Where we strike, a fire dost blow
But not in the factory didst we leave
It is on the field, the rifle smoke must hang
A queer reminder of that for once we sang
Of antimony, and of phosphorus
Of chlorates and others still more nox-ious
The conflagration hereabouts didst not fell us
No! It was over there we entered cursed Erebus
O! But once we were sanguine in our cups.
Never thinking we’d be blown up
Yet, o’er the sea, we did roam.
Now the leaves of our youth have turned to loam.
And we are home.
We are home.
-Hanceford Rennet
Andrew piped up, after waiting a moment.
"Queer meant something else in those days," he said.
"Yes, I know," I replied.
And, that exchange signaled the tour's end.
On my way from the park to the beer garden, I discovered in that serendipitous way of expert travel writers, the ostensibly charming district-within-a-district, tiny Carpathian Village (roughly around Pantograph St. and Dreary Ave.). It’s now-tumbledown bungalows designed in the best-forgotten Chicago Grasslands Style (1911-14), sit side by side; they're a grimace-inducing cross between English farm cottage and Arts & Crafts aesthetics, if that cross had been parented by a centuries-old Eastern European chicken coop. Developed by Kermit Cordovan, a failed architect who jumped from a Loop skyscraper after the 1929 stock market crash, the style is also known as “scary urban farm shack.” However, after noting a very high foil-in-the-windows and body-piercings count, it’s clear that grow houses are all that’s growing here. Also, if you’re considering talking to the people sitting on the front-porches, don’t. In fact, I advise skipping the area altogether.
Ron Dusselhoffer, Clara’s nephew, is trying to create a kind of mini-craft-brewery on a budget, in the Dusselhoffer’s Biergarten, so that illegally-squatting artists or budding urban marijuana farmers, or muttering old match-factory workers can slake their thirst with seasonal brews. Ron’s first effort, along the self-described theme of “winter food storage,” seemed promising: Olde Composte Delighte, a smokehouse-and-pickling-inflected ale. Vinegar, wood-ash, dusty shelving and baking soda were some of the flavors I caught; the venting of a 1960s Electrolux vacuum cleaner was another. He’s just been in contact with the heritage yeast movement to begin trying to create some new, unique flavors for the warmer months, and hoping a Homeland Security bio-terror initiative targeting dangerous yeasts doesn’t put the kibosh on that effort.
The American Philumenological Guild, (3102 Bourbonnais Ave.) is run by former Imperium Match workers, and contains an impressive collection of matchboxes, matchbooks, and strike pads of various kinds. They also have torches and a working flamethrower (Demonstrations: Sundays, 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. winter; call for summer hours). Displays about the various chemicals used in creating matches and the history of the safety match are detailed. Some of the original machine parts found after the famous Imperium factory explosion are preserved here, as is a photo record of the incident. One of the volunteers does an interesting demonstration with lighting his hair on fire, after covering it with flame-retardant. Check that one out, why don’t you.
A day or so later, I returned to The Works for a last look, and a visit to Marram and Trent. A train passed along the Copper Plate Road tracks, and Marram walked in the direction of them to see if she could find some cast-off glass for her next art project. The wind seemed to be picking up.
“Oh look!” shouted Marram, a few seconds later, pointing to a tiny reddish-brown creature wheeling in the air in front of her, circling a clump of native grasses. It adroitly rode the stiffening current of air. “It’s a butterfly—we’ve been finding more of them, as the demo garden leafs out. Wow,” she said,” that might be a Red Admiral from over by the lakeshore.”
As we watched it dip and swoop, the fall-out from greasy food, the effects of cold weather, and the musty, industrial odors of West Sig, all lifted a little.
Marram took a closer look as the creature alighted on a yellowish-green stalk, then looked back, and seemed a little more shaken than butterfly-spotting warranted. There was a pause.
“Well, I was wrong,” she announced, pursing her lips. “It’s not a Red Admiral. Actually, it’s not even a butterfly.”
“It’s just a really colorful moth,” she said resignedly, and then brushed past the rest of the garden and continued moving toward the railroad tracks on her quest for broken glass. Just then, an SUV pulled through the open gate, crossed the spur tracks and onto the dirt apron of the crumbling loading dock. The SUV's driver and passenger came walking over to us. The passenger, a tousled-haired man, about 30 years-old, now stood before us, looking at his cell-phone screen for information, and then looked up.
“Would you happen to know where I could find a Ms. Beachpea? I’ve just signed a lease for some space in the Works.”
He paused while the Windy City’s calling card buffeted us with greater energy. “Well, I wanted to talk with her about some art for the interior, and I was told I could find her here.” he announced, pointing back to The Works. "I'm putting in a restaurant."
We looked at each other, realizing that this individual—whomever he might be—had arrived to help catapult West Sig, albeit elbows out, and grunting, into the ranks of gentrified city neighborhoods.
And, Marram, about 100 feet away, sensed she needed to return to us, and began to make her way back. Just then, we heard distant shouts from the far end of Furnace Way, and looked to see a man running and waving his arms; it looked like Ron Dusselhoffer, and it looked like he was excited. Ron’s shouts were, however, drowned out quickly
, as a long freight train came thundering along his left, making his sprint seem almost leisurely, and somewhat silly, by comparison.
As he pulled up to our group, breathless and struggling to speak—not realizing we had already heard his news—a powerful Chicago gust blew up, and combined with the draft from the passing freight, the demonstration garden was now caught up in a stiff whirlwind that blew everyone’s hair amiss and silenced any chatter. Old fast-food takeout bags, a plastic bottle, labels of every description and mangled cigarette butts, it all flew into the air, as everyone protectively bent down a little. Grit gyrated about bowed heads. The wind reminded me of where we were, as even the trash that had been caught on various garden branches now dislodged, rising upward, sweeping the area, if only for an instant, clean of human residue.
And then, as the turbulence died down a little, the wind re-settled it all, just feet away, in patterns new to the West Sig ground, once again.
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Endnotes: More About the Author
Nate Molino is the pen-name and alter ego of a journalist, writer, and editor, based in California. He takes great pleasure in presenting you with this, his first book of creative writing, and satire. You may find out more about him and his work at https://www.natemolino.com. Also check out a related blog at https://www.tripscrawl.com. The latter is a humorous take on travel Thanks for reading and look for further work from Nate Molino.
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