A Boolean argument was expected.

The Onion A.V. Club recently began airing a series of short films titled Pop Pilgrims. Their intro sums up the purpose of Pop Pilgrims better than I could:

“When the A.V. Club travels, we always make time to visit pop culture landmarks. If something memorable happened in the world of film, TV, books, or music, we want to go there. We’re not just tourists, we’re pop pilgrims.”

The series is a lot of fun, and very informative. Yet up to now, I hadn’t really given much thought to how they were getting their information.

Most of the shorts include interviews with local “experts,” people with firsthand (or at least close secondhand) knowledge of the sites: a pastor from the church in the final scene of The Graduate, say, or the former special counsel who helped to bring Animal House to the University of Oregon campus. That’s a great way to add to the pop lore, especially when the interviewees let us in on some lesser-known facts about the site. The short about Friday Night Lights was particularly illustrative on the ingenious use of a single physical location as many different on-screen places.

In their latest installment, the first of three in Chicago, they take on The Blues Brothers. And beyond the location interview at the Music Court bridge in Jackson Park—site of the Nazi rally in the movie—it would appear that a major portion of the three-minute short was put together by someone sitting down with some editing software, a DVD of The Blues Brothers, and a web browser displaying my site: Chicago Filming Locations of The Blues Brothers.

I say this because of the similarities in the captions that accompany several of the locations—not merely addresses, but phrasings that are somewhat distinctive due to my choice of words and their order. A standout example is their “Jackson Park between East Lagoon and 59 Street Harbor, Chicago, IL,” a near-verbatim copy of my notation, plus a typo and minus “South of Museum of Science and Industry.” (For whatever reason, both in their location shots and the caption, the A.V. Club has obfuscated the proximity of the bridge to MSI—just as the movie did.)

I’ll even go so far as to suspect that all of the on-screen captions, even the addresses, were cribbed from my site. Of course it’s impossible to say that for certain, unless the folks at the A.V. Club fess up—which is why, despite my desire for 100% perfect accuracy, I realize now in hindsight that I should have included a few “ringers.”

In the excellent book by Jeopardy über-champ Ken Jennings, Brainiac, he describes how trivia writers will often add ringers: little bits of unique, often incorrect data, used as markers to let the writers know when their work has been borrowed by others. The classic example Jennings cites is that of “Columbo’s first name: Philip,” a falsity inserted by Ken Worth into his Trivia Encyclopedia in the early 1970s—and which subsequently appeared in the first edition of the Trivial Pursuit game.

Worth’s subsequent lawsuit, and its dismissal in court, made clear that factual data, raw information, is not copyrightable. I’m not complaining about infringement or anything like that; that would be silly. I didn’t create the data—I merely compiled it from numerous sources (which I credited) and built on it with quite a bit of legwork (i.e., on-site location scouting).

An offhanded credit by the A.V. Club, for saving them from that same legwork—even just in the accompanying text, not on-screen—would have been the forthright, ingenuous thing to do. No matter, though; I remain their avid reader and fan, and I get pleasure out of knowing their little secret: that they visited my site and found it useful, regardless of how they used it.

You’re welcome, A.V. Club. Sincerely.

[Follow-up: Less than three hours after I posted this, I wound up in a friendly email exchange with A.V. Club general manager Josh Modell, who admitted that he “most definitely” used my site as a resource and offered to add a note and link to the bottom of their piece (now already in place). If you’ll pardon a cliché, I must say this: The Onion A.V. Club—too cool for school.]

Two miles south of Chicago’s Loop, just east of Chinatown, in a neighbourhood known today as the Near South Side, stand the Raymond Hilliard Homes. Built in the mid-1960s as one of the city’s last major public housing projects, the complex was designed by renowned architect Bertrand Goldberg, whose most famous Chicago work is the iconic corncob towers of Marina City. Goldberg’s intent was to create something other than the warehouses-for-the-poor that typified other public housing projects, and so he came up with a futuristic-looking quartet of high-rises that even today are striking to behold.

The Bertrand Goldberg Archive boasts that “for many years this was the only public housing complex which needed no constant police supervision.” The Archive wants to attribute this to Goldberg’s revolutionary design, and the National Register for Historic Places seems to agree: the complex was added to the Register in 1999, claiming in its nomination: “even as public housing policy turned away from high-rise developments, the Hilliard Center has seemed largely immune from the problems of other high-rise projects.” Yet even the Goldberg Archive admits, “residents were chosen from records of model citizenry in other housing projects.” This hand-picking surely contributed as much to the success of Hilliard as did Goldberg’s “neo-expressionist” stab at the new urbanism; still, by the late-1990s, the project had succumbed to the same issues that plagued most other public housing and doomed this idealistic attempt. If not for the architectural significance of the buildings, by now they might well have gone the way of most other public housing high-rises.

The Hilliard site, spanning a two-by-two-block area between Clark and State Streets, Cullerton Street and Cermak Road, utterly transformed this landscape, and its curving towers are, to my eye, a little stark, a lot retro, and reeking of a misguided optimism. Don’t take this the wrong way—I like these buildings, in all their mid-20th-Century weirdness, and while I’ll never miss the rectilinear high-rise barracks of Cabrini–Green as they’re gradually razed, I’m glad that this project has seen a major renovation and will stand for decades to come.

Yet for all the talk of architectural significance and progressive ideals, there is little mention of what this site was one hundred years ago, during what we now refer to as the Progressive Era of American history.

In fact, the site itself gives no hint that Dearborn Street and Federal Street (formerly named Armour Avenue after the famed meatpacker) once passed straight through the site, cruising uninterrupted south from 18th Street and well beyond 22nd Street, now Cermak Road. A hundred years ago, this entire area, from 18th to 22nd, Clark to Wabash, and some of the surrounding environs, was known as the South Side Levee. It was Chicago’s most notorious red light district—and its most famous.

In the Progressive Era, prostitution was seen as a necessary evil, and it was widely believed that segregation—a separate, self-contained vice district—was an adequate means of regulation. As a result, the Levee contained dozens, if not hundreds, of “disorderly houses”: saloons, brothels, opium dens, and the like. Many of these were extremely disreputable, kidnapping young women fresh off the train and forcing them into a life of harlotry, employing “enforcers” to beat the girls, often quite severely, if they got out of line or attempted to escape. Knockout drops in drinks were common, and “panel rooms”—chambers with hidden, sliding panels—were used to rob unaware clients. Corrupt police and aldermen received massive payouts for “protection” and kept the whole thriving under the blind—or complicit—watch of various Chicago mayors.

Into this morass of sin came two sisters from Omaha, Ada and Minna Everleigh. Originally from Virginia and born with the surname Simms, the pair had run a brothel in Omaha that was financed, or so they claimed, by a $35,000 inheritance. It seems likely, however, that they had made this money the old-fashioned way. The sisters, above all else, were masters of self-transformation.

At a time when it was possible for a madman to abduct and murder dozens (possibly hundreds) of people and cause them to vanish with nary a trace, when young women were leaving their homes in droves for the first time in history to travel to urban centers and seek employment, when a woman could be drugged and raped and made to believe that she was “ruined” and thus resign herself to a life of prostitution—becoming, quite literally, an “inmate” of a brothel—

—And as moralizing preachers and prosecutors used these realities to foment a widespread fear of the “traffic in white slavery” and abolish the trade entirely, creating the Mann Act and turning the FBI from a tiny arm of the Justice Department into the enforcement juggernaut it is today—

—Ada and Minna Everleigh sought to turn a profit in the world’s oldest profession in an ethical and high-toned manner. Their “butterflies,” as they called their working girls, were all volunteers, working of their own free will, and free to leave at any time. Their clientèle were judiciously selected and held to rules of proper conduct. A doctor was kept on staff to give the girls periodic check-ups, and drugs were strictly forbidden. The rougher element, pimps, and panders were never welcome; and lower-class holiday-makers were asked to find recourse elsewhere in the Levee, something they could do with ease (but rarely as safely, given those knockout drops and panel rooms and pickpockets at other resorts).

For a dozen years, the Everleigh Club was the premier resort, and Ada and Minna the de facto Queens of the Levee. Its rooms were elaborately appointed even by the over-the-top standards of their late-High-Victorian era. The club was, quite literally, world-famous: captains of industry; important authors, poets, and athletes; and even a European prince could be counted among its patrons. And then it all ended, as the moralizers and temperancers gained traction and politicians courted the law-and-order vote. The club shut its doors in 1911 and the sisters retired into obscurity. The double building at 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street that housed the club was razed a couple of decades later.

The fascinating and titillating story of the Everleigh sisters and their lavish business—but not that of the housing project that stands in its place—is told in the delightful book Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott.

I know nothing about Angelo Testa.

I am a railfan and historian, and as such I’m fascinated by the forgotten and defunct rail lines of Chicago. One of these is the Lakewood Branch, a fragment of an old line that runs north from Goose Island. At right is a shot of the Lakewood’s current terminus as it fades out into a pair of cracks in the asphalt of Diversey Parkway. Until recently, the sole remaining customer along this branch was the Peerless Confection Company, manufacturer of a wide assortment of hard candies.

Via this rail line, once or twice a week, Peerless took deliveries of sugar and corn syrup to feed its large, shiny copper kettles. Here is an excellent photo essay describing a delivery in 1999. The travail of running trains through rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods is illustrative of how far rail-supplied industry has declined in Chicago.

Chicago was once one of the nation’s biggest candymakers, but decades of ill-advised tariffs designed to protect the American sugar farmer have made it utterly untenable to be a large-scale American confectioner. Peerless was one of Chicago’s last surviving confectioners, but it finally gave up the fight earlier this year.

A few days ago I took a camera to the Peerless factory to see what was left and maybe catch a few interesting shots. I was unprepared for its sheer size. The factory is an entire city block long, running along the east side of Lakewood Avenue south of Diversey. The buildings at the south end, along Schubert Avenue, are the oldest part of the factory, a seemingly random assortment of common-brick boxes, painted white, with simple corbeling at the cornices. To the north are a pair of much newer precast-concrete behemoths, utterly nondescript and indistinguishable from each other at ground level.

The land where it stands, at the boundary between Lincoln Park and Lakeview, is prime territory for Chicago’s continuing, go-go, mindlessly unstoppable condo-building boom, so what I found that day was no surprise. The entire factory was surrounded by Jersey barriers, and the walls were spray-painted with fluorescent orange No Parking warnings. A similarly colored sticker on the main entrance showed that the city Department of Water Management stopped by on Christmas Eve to remove the building’s fire meter “before demolition,” but found no one home. Across Lakewood to the west, the site of a former baking company building was already a moonscape of brick and concrete rubble. The Peerless factory is doomed. It may already be gone.

Yet what’s this object mounted on the northwest corner of the building? A jumble of red and black square aluminum tubing, perhaps meant to symbolize the crystallization of sugar, with a name in jaunty lowercase cursive displayed below: angelotesta. Surely it’s artwork. Abstract, modern, minimalist, and totally not my style. But artwork none the less.

Who was Angelo Testa? I’d never heard of him. The web has plenty of listings of his works for sale, so I guess he was fairly prolific, but it’s kind of thin in the biographical department. According to the one decent article I found online—notably, available only via Google cache—this sculpture was Testa’s last. In response to a commission from Peerless, Testa designed five different maquettes in the late 1970s before succumbing to cancer in 1984; another artist completed this work and it was installed in 1986. One of the other maquettes, for a design that was not chosen, is up for auction and expected to garner four or five thousand dollars. This implies that, despite my ignorance of him, Angelo Testa was apparently not an unimportant artist. In addition, it seems that most of Testa’s work was in textiles—so a giant metal sculpture is fairly unique in his portfolio.

The wall on which it is mounted is going away—so what’s to happen to Angelo Testa’s final work?

[Follow-up for August 2011: Thanks to a niece of Angelo Testa, I have learned that the Elmhurst Art Museum was able to acquire the Peerless artwork. However, the work remains in storage pending an expansion of the museum which would require a substantial fund-raising effort. According to curator Aaron Ott, the museum is amenable to speaking with any “individuals or companies that may be interested in installing the work on their location.”]