Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters Over the Gilded Age

By Martin Billheimer

Chicago lauded as hog-butcher by poet Sandburg, then damned as a cannibal in Sinclair's The Jungle, was also a city of wanderers, truants, and delinquents. It was home to the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in the country, as well as a dizzying number of public and private institutions for wayward children, indigents, the mad, and the poor. Chicago's socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviors of the immigrants and "lower classes." Yet, the savage race riots of 1919 laid bare the eugenic truth of an ongoing, second Civil War operating as the Northern status quo.
Mother Chicago is the story of three of these institutions – an obscure juvenile experiment called the Chicago Parental School, the great Municipal Sanitarium, and the amalgam of poor house, asylum, and cemetery that occupied the far northern boundaries of the City. This sector of quarantine and detention built on stolen lands acted as a limiter on the production of dreams and an orphan zone for people cast adrift by societal decree. Outside its walls, City power worked in ways both mysterious and transparent while the land harbored peculiar hallucinations that still must be banished.
As the City grew larger, these institutions became fissures in the streets and the transport lines, odd reminders of the Gilded Age, which had made them. Mother Chicago tells the story of the corporeal specters used against the working class: real estate, redlining, property speculation, racism, and collateralized debt. Like the game of snakes and ladders, the City lays her traps for the unlucky and benighted on a numbered grid.
Billheimer turns a life-long obsession with the ephemera of Chicago history to tell the City's story through the relics of her forgotten places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Feral House
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781627311175

Martin Billheimer

Martin Billheimer was born in 1970 in Chicago's working-class Uptown neighborhood, then a hotbed of radical activism. His family moved to Bradford, England, a city in the industrial north, where he spent his childhood, before returning to Chicago in the early '80s. Billheimer founded the semi-notorious noise-punk band the Devil Bell Hippies in 1983 and participated in anti-fascist organizing in the music scene. After dropping out of high school, he continued his education working as a dishwasher, house painter, construction worker, and furniture mover. He continues to perform and record music in various projects around Chicago and has acted in pantomimes, puppet theater, and agitprop. He writes on culture, art, and politics at Counterpunch online and the Chiseler.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

by Theodore Van Alst

If you can hear Roger Whittaker whistling Amebix tunes, you’ve come to the right place.

Please indulge me for a few minutes as I struggle to write for the smartest, most well-read person I’ve ever known. Fierce autodidact, fiercer friend, The Rt. Rev. Martin Billheimer has produced a book to which I’ve been asked to contribute a foreword. I’m not sure I can do this, but his publisher is, and I don’t want to let her down. Even less so, Martin.

I used to read Martin’s work but couldn’t actually read it until I went to college. And then I couldn’t understand it until I was deep into grad school. Whether liner notes, art installation reviews, live reading critiques in real time, or the letters we’d each other write after I’d moved away from the hometown, far, far away to the wilds of Northern Maine, I was both mystified and motivated by each exchange. A high school dropout myself, I knew what I knew because I’d sought it out, and thought I was doing okay. But Martin existed and worked on another level entirely.

The first time I visited him at home back in the late ’80s, I found out why. He lived then much as he does now. An ascetic’s life of the mind; there were books, and books, maybe some more books, a record player, and some books. It’s really extraordinary. I’ve never known anyone like him. A ktefa of meaning and reference awaits you in this effort he’s offered here. I envy the time you’ll spend with this gift.

Why me, then, likely inadequate to the task of introducing this work? Brothers we are, sons of Mother Chicago, with starts and fits in Uptown and then across the broader North Side, we’ve toted a shared and particular heritage which has shaped us in ways that have bonded us, I think, like no others in our wider group of misfit toys that first met more than thirty years ago in a squatty cold water apartment above an abandoned bowling alley. We were part of a crew that listened to Coven 45s and Sanduskian Schlagermusik on an ancient console and wrote snotty punk love sonnets to Jack and Rexella Van Impe, mocked Benny Hinn for his unorthodoxies, audio-recorded hours of Fisher-Price pixel cams and untunable walls of Zenith black-and-whites, keytars, toy pianos, and Martin’s inimitable vocal stylings along with his ever-sexy harmonica work set to the same unwavering beats drilled out by an ex-Nazi skinhead drummer no matter the content, melody, tune, or lack thereof. Heady times after eight years of Reagan. Hope inhabited no foreseeable horizon, but liquor and drugs were relatively cheap. We dreamed of moving to Berlin, or Helsinki, or Dubuque, the grass greener everywhere.

Though I am a few years older physically, Martin’s battered soul outweighs my own by millennia, its well-earned fatigue leavened by a wicked sense of humor and generosity obviously acquired by many rings around this plane’s rosie. Herein you will encounter psychogeography of city and word laced with love and driven ardor hammering thin and rich the layers of each sentence, the strata of meaning in the cutaway staggering – read with careful caution and syrupy attention – languid reflection argues with frenetic visuals from streets limned in Bruce Li and early morning Cutty Sark, contemplating Bakunin’s heavy hand in Archie, Jughead, and early Reagan. Anarchy was always with us, we just never saw it coming, never believed in it like we should have. Bonzo was a true visionary, a revolutionary who inspired the spirit of the morons who clamber over the currently decaying corpse of American democracy, annihilating the country it occupies faster and with more vigor than any suburban anarchist could ever hope to muster. Three decades later and the great American experiment crumbles under the groaning weight of petty republican greed, cheap and trashy in its low prices, the fat-faced loyalty of business students and pre-law jerkbros who sat in the back of literature classes and haltingly heckled now sweating in legislatures across the land taking five-dollar-level handys to sell out their neighbors for generations. Russia delightedly if resentingly finally figured out the way to destroy the United States was not through its disorganized and ineffective Left, but through its whorish and dimwitted Right; though both wings were without vision or dreams, neolibs and neocons each horny for cheap franchise dinners and humid bedbug infested vacation homes on fetid manmade lakes that could barely support shoreside vermin, let alone the hopes and dreams of sad buttondicked Chads who got through the Atlas but not the Shrugged; in the end it was the Conservatives who cost the least. The late 80s screamingly presaged the fall of empire but drugged and drunken frogs in slowly boiling pots we were and felt it not.

Those years were ones of change in our great city. La oscura dama della gentrificazione stalked our streets in ways we’d never anticipated, those spaces we felt forever safe from wonder bread and mallow blandness that fluffed out from suburbs whose names we’d never known were in the sights of Biffs and Muffys and Skips bearing cash and an utter lack of morality. Multimodal aposematic predators from Naperville, Iowa, and Evanston descended on our neighborhoods in waves, Wheaton khakis beating paths for Hinsdale New Balance, Downers Grove Oakleys peering east, waiting for a Chili’s to open at North and Damen. Poison runners of gentrification-seized veins housing cheap decrepit boulevard brownstones and shutdown arteries of everything-a-dollar hot dog huts, sclerotic suburban desire atrophied corner taverns, here a Foot Locker there a Starbucks everywhere a waking death by dullness. We could see the creeping princes of capital even as we refused to acknowledge their arrival in our midst. It’s how a water buffalo goes down in the middle of the herd, no one believing they might be next even as her screams bubble the mud and her blood slicks the veldt.

Through it all, Martin wrote, scribed, and recorded. Indeed, his production these interceding decades has been varied and steady, a particular discipline residing in a space where it might’ve seemed unexpected at best. We have each the other proposed a variety of books together we might write, drunk and sober, ranging from a Maoist reinterpretation of Y Gododdin to our one sentence book, The English (with at least a thousand branching footnotes) Hate the Irish (repeat same). Dreams and future projects aside, here we are, planned collaboration finally finding fruit in this odd and tense making way, as I struggle to do justice to the book before you. In the end I suppose, I can only say that I envy you, whether this is your first or fourth or fiftieth encounter with his work. Enjoy again and again, since surely you will find yourself returning to the text wondering what he’s meant, or what’s happened to you and your worldview, merely by dint of having read this fine work in your hands.

Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Ph.D.

Portland, Oregon

Mid-October 2020

Anno Pestilentiae I

THE ORPHAN NORTH

’Morning, One Death, they said to the manikin – Popol Vuh

After many years away from the city, I arranged to meet an old friend in the neighborhood where we grew up. The area had changed much, yet it had also remained quite the same, and as I walked the streets, I had the eerie impression that I was peering out on a distant landscape from a hole in a wall. The old dirty movie palace still stood next to the SRO, uplit in olden Weimar style and glowing Bikini beige. A time-worn rug of alphabets still hung from the dentils of fantastic emporia: Korean, Cyrillic, Urdu, Polish, Spanish, all offering mysterious import-export goods, bronze-age technologies, palmistry, adwokaat and auto repair.

A car pulled away from a hosiery and leggings front, killed its lights and crept down the alley. Playing an old childhood spy game, I followed it awhile. The alley is the sister of the open street and she is devoted to shame and sign language. Our Lady of the Gangways whose tongues rule, hanging ghouls and thugs on upturned crowns – the classics of her great stone books of battle, in semaphore and sigil. In the mean between the alley and avenue, you built your personas: the ones for other people’s eyes, the ones that hid you, the ones made for your own company, school day fever faces and the taut masks the stronger kids made. And the porcelain art of looking down through your hair, glaring through your hair – the inward stare that is shaken, fierce by the mouth.

I walked out of the alley and back to the lime-tiled façades, mock Persian friezes and colored barrels of the main drag. North from Ravenswood terminal, I passed the waning tag of Sir Bones and went down honorary New Seoul Street, under the antennas and archway grilles in thin Wednesday rain. No Loitering and Closed Big Fire, natkallim arabiyya, Mattress and Mobile Bulgaria …

Y cuando había cruzado el puente, los fantasmas llegaron a encontrarlo.

On the corner, I thought I saw someone I recognized from childhood. I was suddenly convinced that he had been there all along, standing near the same bus stop as he did after school, next to a miraculous mother still miraculously alive, himself slightly gray-haired and slightly hunched in the same ill-fitting clothes. Travel is indeed a great thing, but you can also envy the person who has never left and who passively observes a world around him so seamlessly that he is unaware of its crude changes. It was as if I were looking back at a scene from the past but from a point on some parallel track, seeing these figures from another now, but also from another then – a familiar diorama made of doubles, all of us descended from a distant original model whose actions still exert remote influence. All those other people from long ago must also still be here: the forward expansion of the city present being utterly transparent, while the landscape of the past is subject to off-season revisions. An angle has been added to memory which only comes into focus as you walk your old streets once again, when, to use the old zodiac spiel, certain stars in certain houses align.

Like the ancient sorceries, Late Capitalism has also generated odd perspectives and phantoms – paramemories wandering over the gray landscape. Las estrellas astray? Products of underground convergences analogous to the power cables crossing the sky above, dividing the air to control natural forces just as the city’s apparently sentient zones modify time and place. The shadows of loaned memories arise somewhere between clairvoyance and larceny, interest-bearing visions in bright blue lights, revenants of development in boarded-up storefronts and other scenes from the Free Market’s staged crimes. And where are the dead in this wide prospect? We know where the living are – or at least that they are not here. "We are royalty!" he said, grinning in the Adelphi dark.

Shakespeare wrote: Millions of eyes are upon you and volumes of report; run with those blind.

On the next block, an ancient photography studio keeps odd hours. In the window, arrayed on crumpled orange cloth, is a comic strip of marriages, graduations, portraits with tilted smiles and old loud clothes. Every picture is strictly organized and identically posed, which gives a crazy credence to current paranoiac visions of ‘crisis actors’ and unearthly agents. These little studios are dying away because technology favors the amateur over the specialist, home over the workshop, which ensures that everyone is both an expert and a fraud.

Why was it that dancing schools were usually located next door to the photographer’s? This is a very important question.

At the dawn of cinema, the camera only registered a blur when it tried to capture rapid movement. Better emulsions made it possible to seize action frame by frame; any single instant could now be infinitely repeated (or reversed). The shutter was able to trick the sun in motion, but the earliest experiments were able to capture only several seconds of movement. This vision of a loop of endless repetition made Eadweard Muybridge’s exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair a flop. He did indeed defy time, but only to imprison his subjects in a skipping, hellish glow which endlessly parodied life. And other powers had been unleashed, image-ideas of the terrors of repetition. The transition from a theatrical vision to the conveyor belt of memorial reproduction was perfected soon afterward by Edison, who extended motion just long enough to make it legend and give it a background. But the central curse remains: the first and last target of photography must always be the past.

Muybridge’s exhibit used a pre-cinematic projector called the Zoopraxiscope. It was a round carriage of successive stills passing before a light source, then projected outward. The subject Muybridge chose was a pair of dancers, forever revolving in one simple pass. If Muybridge had used horses – as he did in his earlier, much-vaulted efforts to perfect the device (and hence also its name) – the outcome of the presentation would have been utterly different. No matter how badly we treat them, beasts remind us of the sentimental eternity of childhood: a horse in a picture book, a pack mule on a mountain, the wonder of a world without humanity which is seen once and then departs. We are truly innocent in the end, as we prove by keeping this animal’s image alive forever, harnessed by a machine we have made which mourns the loss of a natural world. More than that: the hand and the eye return to such living subjects even when far more exotic possibilities are available (pyramids, cities, trains, even the dead moon). To commemorate this failure to provoke tears, every dance studio finds itself adjacent to a photographer’s.

Still frames imply a continual metamorphosis of the series. The mind adds time by creating other images, surrounding real pictures with inferred pictures, after the manner of dreams, depositions, and inventories. Photographic images exert so much power that any other system of recollection has become impossible. Maybe the sense of touch is the only thing free from this eternity of daily snapshots because it cannot really be reproduced; it has nothing to do with stolen light and it is a degraded sense because it fades away alone. Touch is the material quality of darkness, the hand of glory.

One last walking notion: Nothing is more common in the photographic city than the ‘missing person,’ the children of milk cartons and lamppost flyers who make a dark parody of the old studio family and class portraits. The idea of missing persons is absurd – no one can ever be missing. The word hides the fact that these images did not exist publicly until their subjects were lost, leaving nothing behind but faulty resolution. Every sacrifice demands the loss of the subject into the object and this is always a one-way street. The Missing are unreal because we assume someone is looking for them and we are also convinced that they will hopelessly fail. The hunters of the missing themselves miss, will miss – and how many live with this crumpled paper search on their minds? Is that what it means to keep on recognizing people year after year, not in the cool of shadow profiles, but in the glaring day between sharpness and blur? I thought I recognized someone who, on the contrary, has never been gone. Caution! You understand, it’s echoland.

I was hoping for a line on a job. By trade, I have done painting and construction for much of my life and I thought that an old friend might be able to recommend me as a Super, or at least for contract work at one of his properties. He also had connections to the parallel economy and I figured a good lookout might be needed for articles coming in from Mexico or South Ossetia (I’m no bad man or enforcer, but I am excellent at logistics). I wanted it known that I was available for work. Or to be honest – desperate, busted.

Which of you two is Serbian? asked the tough-guy bartender. Milan saluted and they began to talk warmly about mutual friends and relations, nightclubs and well-known night ladies, and of course, neighborhood genealogy. I mentioned I had just got back from a trip to Belgrade with some musician pals, which called for the first of many rounds of a punishing pear Slivovitz. My old friend and I began to talk about the old days in the old cant: the living and dead, the rumbles and the fates of starring bullies. Each one found some magpie detail the other had forgotten, doubling us both over with laughter. We mined preposterous legends and muddled over street names like mathematicians over sets. As real estate shifts the landmarks of the mind, remembered scenes dissolve into honorific street posts. Robbed of the vessels they once filled, streets return to the replicas of the worthies after whom they were named and who we made sure we never heard of. Never mind – bells say that Nebuchadnezzar just darkened the door with Rich the Twitch. Speedy’ll be late, says the weaving Serb. Fold.

Later that night, the abandoned reformatory came up. It was a complex of four or five great gothic structures by the Chicago River on the north branch. With its long red tattered drapes lolling out of the windows, this Calcutta manor made for countless murder ballads, thumb-prick magic and fighting elegies for us city kids in a skint midsummer. The oddest thing was that such an ominous, silly, Ushery tomb would lie surrounded by the mown grass, adjacent to the college track, even next to the edge of running water and piles of Bohemian gravestones. Trucks rolled down past it on Foster Avenue, past also the closed doors of a new austere era, under high tension wires hung with copped sneakers, a gull-mouthed girl in dirty corrugated plastic, your lessons on a cracked Chinese stair … There is a ring of plum wine, opinions on Ðilas and on Siluan’s Verses, the cockcrow for dawn and my friends at the elbow. The old haunt was called the Chicago Parental School. When we finally broke into its abandoned hulk all those years ago, we were not disappointed.

This book is the result of research conducted after a rainy night’s drinking and thirty-five years of mild possession. We leave the glare of Little Belgrade’s barroom for this old reformatory now, razed for decades, to conduct what could be called an archeology project of the unlettered. The picture? It shows a forgotten disciplinary school, another one of those Houses of Pain which Marx saw at the center of industrialization – but lying instead at its edge, in the circle of cruel laughter. Such institutional buildings were the product of strange survivals and disparate elements: utopian medico-religious theories, early psychiatry, Prussian militarism, Transcendentalist theologies of space. Victorian restraint mixed with Gold Rush fanaticism, miracle gizmos with cures for what agitated the new dark continent of Progress. Today even its foundations have been erased, yet its shadow light – a necessary contradiction of these delinquent places – exposes the outline of a ruling in stone waiting for the next final judgment. Also, something has happened to memory. Its laws of transport have changed, like the national rail changed the life of munitions after the Civil War. Like the photographs of that era, this transformation also has something to do with images, time travel and velocity.

It was not just in this lot for wayward kids, but in the great Chicago Tuberculosis Sanitarium a mile to the north, where isolated time existed within the temporal city under the hourglass of new transformations. Given over to quarantine, a ‘history’ exemplified by Indian theft and the concentration of kinds, ringing with blue-remembered infection and childhood wildness, the divisions of the tubercular were within spying distance of the truant corps and their weird houses. And three miles westerly from the old Coughing House grounds, in the heat of a cruel summer in 1985, the year we broke into the dark Parental, a broken pipe propelled a mummified body upwards in Dunning land. There, in the bulldozer tracks of a new shopping mall, the unsubtle remnant of another silent quadrant, designated clearly in City Hall records, rushed up to meet the sun again. Behind yet another ruthless Machine land-grab were 60,000 similar corpses: some tubercular, all indigent, rotten to the core, citizens of a Potter’s Field once built to accommodate an increasing margin of penniless zeros in the early years of the last indefensible century.

Perhaps here we uncover one of the laws of the American ghostly: the landscape accumulates in the present by using surplus forces from old conquests, annexing territory quite literally – mapping, city history, apartheid red-lining, and the ideology of architectural style – and performing what is an essentially military function running from the ground to the eye. Thus, wide boulevards appear to be located next to armories. The city grid form excludes spirals and turns every alleyway into a potential cul-de-sac (via a Ford Interceptor, for example). A séance-like arbitrage of space drafts the living as the