At State and Lake (Route 66 )

Chicago’s State Street makes a brief appearance in the Route 66 episode “Voice at the End of the Line” (October 19, 1962). I put together two Route 66 screenshots to make a Google Maps-like composite.



[Click for larger views.]

Seno Formal Wear (“since 1919”) is still in business in Illinois and Indiana but no longer has a store in Chicago. Bob Elfman’s Sandwich Shop (“famous for corned beef since 1933”) closed in 1985. I cannot figure out what sits between Seno and Bob Elfman’s, and I can find no record of State & Lake Fruit and Nut, named of course for the two streets that meet at this corner. That’s the business I most want to know about too.

Moving upward: I like the second-story signage for the beauty school and beauty supplies. I admired such signage often on the Bronx’s Fordham Road. Arthur Murray Dance Studio, are you still there?

The clanking that comes from the 2009 Google Maps image is the sound of chains: Johnny Rockets and the Halsted Street Deli form what is called a “co-branded fast casual restaurant.” The delis, named for a Chicago street, can be found in twelve more Illinois cities. There is no Halsted Street Deli on Halsted Street. The company website lists no Johnny Rockets now on State. On June 20, a Chick-fil-A opened at its address.

Yelp says that the Triple 1 Chinese Restaurant (which occupies the second-story corner in the 2009 photograph) is closed. In 2009 the second story also housed a Montana tourism office: the URL visitmt.com is visible on the window, though not in this photograph. Is the office still there? The Chicago Tribune took note of MT’s marketing in 2011 and just last month.

The one constant in these photographs: the Chicago Theatre, now with a smaller marquee. We saw Brian Wilson there on his 2002 Pet Sounds tour.

I like watching the crowd watching the famous Corvette driving down the famous street.

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September 6, 2013: Last night I received an e-mail from Katina Callas, whose father, Spyros Papagiannis, owned the State & Lake Fruit and Nut Shop. Katina says that her father was “a very kindhearted man”:

I have many memories growing up and going there. He used to sell his fruit baskets to Marshall Fields. Sometimes he would make me walk down State Street with two baskets one in each hand to make the delivery if his employee didn’t show up. I would have to go back and forth until all baskets were delivered.

He had the best and largest fruit you can imagine. When I go to fruit markets now I never see the quality that my dad had at his store. He had customers from Fritzel’s come in and purchase after their dinner.

Fritzel’s, as I learned last night, was a celebrated State Street restaurant.

Katina had no photographs of the store’s sign. So now she has one to share with her family. The Internet: it’s wonderful.

[E-mail used with permission.]

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Bert Stern (1929–2013)

Yes, he photographed Marilyn Monroe. But also: with Aram Avakian, he created the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. It makes 1958 look like the coolest year in history.

Bert Stern, Elite Photographer Known for Images of Marilyn Monroe (New York Times)

[A jazz fan looking at the program for the 1958 festival will wince upon discovering who’s missing from the film.]

E-mail widget betterment

A reader suggested adding a widget to allow for e-mail subscriptions. So I’ve added one to the sidebar. But I couldn’t resist tinkering with Google’s prose. Before and after:



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12:33 p.m.: Blogger’s e-mail widget looks like this in iOS:


I thought that deleting the word here might allow me to shrink the text box and fix Subm-it. No luc-k. So I’ve changed Subm-it to Go. Little details like this one remind me how little interest Google seems to have in the iOS-user experience. For a while it was impossible to edit Blogger drafts in iOS.

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4:22 p.m.: Lo: it is possible to offer an e-mail subscription without Blogger’s semi-ugly widget. The correct link is all that’s needed. The sidebar now offers the feed and e-mail by using nothing but the English language (and HTML).

A related post
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DOMA

From this morning’s Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority:

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Supreme Court Bolsters Gay Marriage With Two Major Rulings (New York Times)

[I’m glad he got this one right.]

Feeding time

If you are reading Orange Crate Art in Google Reader, you’d better choose a new reader before July 1, when Google shuts things down. Otherwise, we will be torn asunder posthaste. Of the 13,295 readers now subscribed to Orange Crate Art, 12,835 use Google Reader. That’s a lot of asunder.

It’s easy to keep reading all your feeds by exporting them from Google Reader and importing them to another app or service. To export from Google Reader, go to Settings (the gear icon), Reader Settings, Import/Export, Download your data through Takeout, Create Archive. Then use the Archive to import your feeds elsewhere. It’s quick and easy.

I would imagine that many Reader users are still wondering which way to go. I’ve settled on two alternatives: Feedly and The Old Reader. Feedly is slick; The Old Reader is dowdy. I use Feedly on my Macs (with a Chrome plug-in) and as an iPad app. The Old Reader is available from any device. My main misgiving about Feedly: it takes too many liberties with images.

Here, if you need it, is the feed for Orange Crate Art. The link is also available from the sidebar.

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A reader suggested adding a widget to allow for e-mail subscriptions. There’s now one in the sidebar. Thanks, reader.

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Nope, widget’s gone. All that’s needed for an e-mail subscription is the right URL to follow.

Shoeless scholarship

[“Girls w. their shoes kicked off as they sit at desks listening to lesson in classroom at New Trier High.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Winnetka, Illinois, June 1950. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

There’s something startling — to me, anyway — about the feet. If bare feet in class were ever a norm, the norm is long gone, I think.

Notice that no one is taking notes. That norm: not long gone. Perhaps the students are listening to a recitation. Or perhaps they’re just not taking notes. It’s June. No shoes, no notes, no problem. School will soon be out for the summer.

New Trier High School was the subject of a Life magazine article, “A Good High School” (October 16, 1950). The article describes what we see here as “shoeless scholarship,” “regularly indulged in, spring and fall.”

[In New York City and some other places, today is the last day of school. New Trier was done on June 7. The school is the subject of a Wikipedia article.]

Grammar and writing resources

From the University of Chicago Writing Program, Grammar Resources, “an annotated collection of grammar and writing resources from around the web.”

Strawberry tips

From Oregon, tips on refrigerating and freezing strawberries.

Elaine and I have been eating locally grown strawberries from our farmers market like there’s no tomorrow — which there isn’t, as the season (we’re told) will be quite short. Any strawberries are better than none, but store-bought strawberries will be bitter fruit indeed after the real thing.

Present&Correct

Stationery supplies, old and new, and a beautifully designed website: Present&Correct.

A poem for RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky figured out his pantheons and stuck to them. Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King. Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost, John Keats, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats. I may have left someone out, but I don’t think so.

On June 13 Rob sent an e-mail with a sampling of Yeats poems to mark the poet’s birthday. So our last e-mails were about Yeats, his genius and his self-regard, both of which we both acknowledged. Rob loved Yeats more than I do, or at least with greater fidelity than I can muster. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” seems very Zseleczkyesque to me right now. I post the poem in memory of my friend, angler and poet.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)