If you live long enough in Chicago, you learn that firecrackers sound like gunshots, and gunshots sound like dud firecrackers. Bullets leaving a gun have a lulling Champagne-cork like pop that belie their fatality. If someone fires off three rounds in front of your house, it might even conjure the 2005 White Sox World Series locker room celebration. But, who would pop bottles on the street, you wonder? Disbelief gives way to more disbelief. Did someone just strafe your block? Your fifteen-year-old son shouts from his room, “I think someone is shooting.” You are relieved that the owner of that voice has not caught a stray bullet, like so many babies of this city have. You can’t accept that this happened, but it did.
You can’t accept it because you love this city almost as much as you love your family. You remember coming here, a Detroit kid, who thought cities were mostly historical ruins with a few cultural opportunities and the world’s best hockey team. After a day of chain-smoking clove cigarettes, housing Gino’s sausage-patty-larded casserole pizza, and a long night of watching The Drovers at The Metro, you went back to Michigan, but you’d already moved to Chicago.
Your affections were rewarded. You discovered punk rock and Pappy Van Winkle at Delilah’s. Your job sucked badly, but then you made your own job. They let you, a crayon-scribbler, scrawl your stuff in the Alinea restaurant cookbook. They made the same mistake at Saveur magazine where you got the cover story on Burt’s pizza. You lived in a Greektown loft. It was a movie.
Third act came fast. You had kids and you moved to Logan Square. It was still a dream, but you woke up a few times in the middle of the night. Even before the pandemic and the gunshots, familiarity bred discontent. Winters shut down Lake Shore Drive or forced you to round the block past metal folding chairs, traffic cones, and an old microwave. You were dibbsed out of a parking spot. You spent fourteen years with a low level of stress about a high school selection process reportedly more competitive than the Ivy League. There is a list of grievances. We don’t need to go in to it all. For the first time you wondered if it was time to dance with another.
The thing they tell new parents is you gotta make time for each other. The same goes for the city. You need to have date night. It’s not enough to pandemic pace the neighborhoods wearing a hole in your Adidas NMD trainers. You can’t zoom your way to joy with this one.
And so you booked tickets for an annual walking tour of Prairie Avenue mansions, the old millionaires row where Pullman, Field, and Armour once lived.
But a walk requires sustenance, so you thought about the millions of places you’ve eaten and, as usual, couldn’t figure out where to have lunch, because knowing everything means you generally remember nothing. You think, hey, Publican Quality Bakery opened a retail bakery this week. You reject the idea because they get enough coverage. The red state tourists may hate our antifa-stronghold, but you know they regale their friends back home about the suet-fried-sausage-finger-sized frites they ate at Publican brunch. You do not want to be in amity with the Jan 6th mob.
But, you do it anyway because you love defunct Blackbird as much you love Chicago. You think Avec, the original, in its imperfections (‘hey, sorry, I know you’re in the middle of those bacon-wrapped dates, but can you stand up so we can seat these people next to you at the communal table’) is basically perfect.
You arrive late on the first weekend the bakery is open, which means the hipsters and and the influencers have pretty much eaten everything that would be ‘grammable. You are left staring at the dregs, some “big sandwich”, a mushroom tartine (you’re not even vegetarian), and a pistachio and cherry maritozzi. You don’t know what a maritozzi is, but you’re positive it keeps two jars of giardiniera in its refrigerator at all times.
The tartine is a crispy bark of bread, the kind they’ve baked in the old world, or Little House books. It’s studded with grain and things that will make you regular. It is slathered with a lick of ramp and garlic confit, and heaped with mushrooms shrouded in a translucent blanket of Manchego shavings. The mushrooms taste not like supermarket-variety wet dirt, but of Perigord truffles. The cheese melts like creamy nutty snow on your tongue. It is the best thing you have eaten in weeks, maybe months.
The “big sandwich”, it’s crusty-roofed-bubble-crumbed pizza bianca envelops peppery arugula, creamy mortadella, and a cumulonimbus mountain of stracciatella. It would be too rich, but for the parting tart kiss of sour cherry.
The maritozzi looks like Pacman foaming at the mouth with pistachio cream. Though it had been chosen last, it should be the first round draft pick of the pro pastry league. But there is no pro pastry league, you say. Surely, you have missed the memo that everything is a competition, even cooking. Head baker Greg Wade mops the floor with them all in service to his bosses, which include the Lou Reed of our culinary scene, Paul Kahan, founding chef partner of the group.
Kahan, having sacrificed so long at the altar of a hot kitchen pass spends many hours these days in the woods of Wisconsin, ice fishing, and you hope, reposing in the glory he has begotten.
Buoyant with Kahan and Wade’s carb-induced mirth you float up to the mansion of a man who was allegedly preparing for his own hunting excursion up in Wisconsin, Marshall Field Jr.. His is the kind of richness that instructs architects to carve the faces of the family in gargoyles embedded in to the red stone columns of his spec-built home. Field’s visage stares you down as the guide tells you that Field Jr.’s death in 1905 was mysterious, that he accidentally shot himself while cleaning a gun for the trip. Field was alone. There was no comment from his butler.
We are so uncomfortable with suicide or murder, especially of those who seemingly have everything, that 117 years later we repeat the lies told to us in the coverup. It is possible the shooting was accidental, but the doctors who treated Field clammed up or refused to declare the shot as entirely accidental. Then again, who would not be embarrassed if your menage a trois at the cities most notorious whorehouse, the Everleigh club went wrong, and your mistress took you out? We do not talk about Bruno, or brothels.
While the exterior remains, the interior, save for a Harry Potter-castle-level red stone fireplace relegated to the basement of the condo-conversion of the mansion, is gone.
You saw many more houses, including the Kimball mansion which now houses the United States Soccer Federation. You’re amused by the juxtaposition of web cams and wainscoting, the modern conference table presided over by a portrait of the home’s former owner, William Kimball, a piano magnate. You wondered if this was the place the federation strategized about suppressing equal pay for the USWNT, the most dominant soccer team in the world. It would explain Kimball’s stern gaze.
You wish you could visit the interior of the Pullman mansion across the street to see how the train car titan lived, but Pullman saw that the Palmers and new money were moving up north. He willed his own property to be destroyed after his death, lest it remain as a monument associating him with whatever disrepute he’d imagined might come to the neighborhood.
You came for the houses, but you ended up at church, the Second Presbyterian church (2PC). Like Taco Burrito King #2, it got its name because it was next up in the franchise launched by First Presbyterian church. You had walked by or driven past this spot for 25 years, and you did so on that college trip to The Metro, but you had no idea of the wonders, the arts and crafts interior of Howard Van Doren Shaw backdropped by nine stained glass panels from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studios.
Like Field Jr., Comfort Tiffany was a rich man’s son, the scion of the Tiffany and Co. jewelry fortune. He took his wealth and made more, becoming one of the most innovative glassmakers of his time, pushing for the manufacture of opalescent glasses that glassmakers disregarded because of their chemical impurities. Like Tock’s Nick Kokonas, a restauranteur frustrated with the dinosaur-like business practices of reservation monopolist Open Table, Tiffany saw the majesty of what others believed was broken, and built his own company to manufacture glass that made the most glorious panels.
Comfort trademarked the word favrile (from an old French word for “handmade”) to refer to his work. Climb up to the second floor balconies and you can flirt with the most fantastic favrility. You will see that where lesser glass artists painted detail, Tiffany and his collaborators used striated and confetti glasses, and layered panels to create three-dimensional effects. Most of Tiffany’s collaborators were women, the so called “Tiffany Girls”. The panels at 2PC were overseen and designed by Tiffany artist Agnes Northrop.
You will also notice that most of the panels are dark, caked with a hundred years of soot like a turn-of-the-century Maxwell Street urchin. This is because one of the central panels, the “peace” window pulsates with vibrant lapis that conjures Paul Newman’s eyes. It is one of the few panels that has been restored, over 7,000 pieces individually deconstructed, hand cleaned, and rebuilt. If a pane of glass was beyond restoration, there’s a factory in Kokomo, Indiana which makes opalescent Tiffany-spec glass for just such an occasion.
What’s more breathtaking than the panels however is the decay of the caning, the rot of the plaster on the glass which has yet to be restored. These are national treasures, testaments to Tiffany and Northrop, the kind of big plans that move men and women’s souls, and they are tenuously dependent on some kind of fundraising drive if they are to survive. Thoughts and prayers have not sufficed.
There is no city or federal budget line item. If Mayor Lightfoot had allocated only half of her $12.5 million taxpayer-funded vote-buying pre-paid gas card scheme to this effort, everything could be restored now.
That there are preservationists and a fund however, is an opportunity. A Manchego mushroom tartine and these glass panels have made you realize in your complacency that Chicago is still very much a city you don’t know, a mystery you must make time to discover. Hopefully there’s still time.
My stats suggest thousands of you are reading these free posts, and only a few hundred of you have paid for a subscription to get access to the other good stuff. I totally understand. Credit cards are never around when you need something digitally, unless you’re drunk shopping on Amazon. However, now’s a great time to find that card and subscribe. One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to give back some of the subscription money to the organizations that need it. As you can see I was blown away by the Tiffany panels, and so I will donate all funds from any new subscriptions I receive in the next week to Friends of Historic Second Church, which runs the capital campaigns to restore the church interiors. For the price of a grande venti latte, you can save one of Chicago’s great treasures. In return you’ll also get hours and hours of long form idiocy and me telling you where to eat. I guarantee the eating recs however will not be idiotic.
Bullets, Bakeries, and Billionaires
I also went by 2nd Pres dozens of times before I ever went in, but in 2010 I saw an announcement about a docent training and signed up, so that the first time I was inside was also my first training date. I was a docent for 10 years before moving out of Chicago. It's an incredible treasure. I'm so glad you discovered it and are sharing it.