Wednesday Post Post-Debate OT – This Intersection in the "Gateway to the West"

This is the location where it happened. When I say 'it' I mean the events of The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. When I say 'events' I mean the apartment where the character Frankie Machine lived. I don't mean the dental studio either. The address in the book is 1860 W. Division. Ora Dental Studio is 1854 Division, and the apartment across the street is 1890 Division, so right about where the dark SUV seems primed to turn is where the apartment would be. A complete fiction which just happened to be quatre corner from Algren's real apartment at the time. 

He was a very good writer who's never been truly accepted and celebrated the way he deserved in this slope-shouldered town, partly due to charges by the Polish community here who claimed his books were anti-Polish, and who I assume, like most folks in the pro pre-banning camp, had never read a word of the work they were ridding the world of. When he's funny he's very funny, but beneath it all is an aftertaste of burning diesel and coffee grounds, his words those of a weary punch-drunk angel. There's a chapter in Chicago: City on the Make in which he, a Southside Sox fanboy involuntarily moved to the hostile crosstown turf of the Baby Bruins, is interrogated by his childhood peers about his favorite Cubs players. An experience he compares to being in the hot seat at the HUAC hearings. I tell ya. Buncha little McCarthyite hoods, those Cubs fans. This dumb ol' town's rejection of him, and those decades of lousy Sox teams still bearing the shame of the Black Sox Scandal, those slightly less lovable losers, broke his heart over and over. The city shambles on.

Directly across Division, roughly the POV of the above shot, is the site of LaSalle II Magnet School, standing pretty much where the Hans Christian Anderson School would have stood in 1949, when The Man with the Golden Arm was published. 

This message was brought to you for absolutely NO REASON whatsoever, except that I'm choosing to ignore the world as it is right now. But it's what I'm serving so like it or leave it. BYOB and shuffle the food around the plate.

So how was your day, sweetheart? Take a load off, I'll fetch your pipe and loafers. Tell me about your day or tell me about some places where stories are set or filmed but don't actually exist IRL.