Roll Call The A.V. Club goes in search of answers to questions posed by Calumet 412 photos

Calumet 412, a Tumblr devoted to vintage images of Chicago, has been around since last November, but it’s only really recently driven The A.V. Club to near insanity. It’s not because the pictures are so good—and they are—or because Calumet 412 posts so much. Rather it’s because every image and caption raises more questions for us. A picture of Wrigley Field’s construction with a note about where Cubs games were played before throws us into a deep Internet wormhole, resulting in hours spent researching the history of Chicago ballparks, mapping out where each park was, and speculating what it must have been like in each area during each era.

This project has been a pleasant and educational distraction from writing snarky comments about bands and TV shows every day, but some questions perplex us to this day. This week, finally, we at The A.V. Club picked our biggest Calumet 412 questions and tried to answer them. The results might surprise you.

Question: Why isn’t our nightlife as fantastical as it once was? On the site, there’s a picture of a 1918 restaurant with an ice skating floor show, as well as some huge, huge nightclub complexes like the Green Mill and The Coliseum.

Answer: In the case of the Green Mill, one would imagine that it has to be super expensive to own an entire block of Uptown right now, let alone to operate a massive nightclub on that spot. Add up costs for bouncers, drinks, electricity, DJs, and so on, and the result is staggering. Moreover, given the city’s semi-recent nightclub disasters, it seems fairly likely that the capacity of a place like The Coliseum would be at the extreme whims of city inspectors and fire code, and rightfully so. If other pictures on Calumet 412 are any indication, Chicagoans were once a lot more tolerable of crowded spaces than they are now.

Question: It looks like Humboldt Park was a winter playland around the turn of the last century. What happened?

Answer: Humboldt Park actually had a lot of sporting features at one time, including a Velodrome. There’s not really a definitive answer for this one, but it could probably be attributed to the number of Danish and Norwegian transplants living in Humboldt Park around that time. The lovers of cross-country skiing and speed skating dominated the neighborhood then. The Chicago History Encylopedia notes, “By 1900 the Danish community stretched along North Avenue from Damen Street west to Pulaski, in a band six to eight blocks wide. Over two dozen Norwegian churches were located in and around the Humboldt Park and Logan Square areas.” In 1901, 50,000 Scandanavian-Americans converged on the park for the unveiling of a statue of Leif Erikson. The Puerto Rican population so prevalent in the neighborhood now didn’t arrive until the 1950s.

With all of this being said, we still wouldn’t be averse to a ski jump every so often at Soldier Field.

Question: In the summer, is that hot garbage smell at Webster and Ashland because there used to be a dump there?

Answer: Well, maybe. There’s also Horween Leather down the street, and some sort of weirdly mysterious industrial facility located right there too. It’s probably fair to blame the latter, though the river probably doesn’t smell all that awesome to begin with. Waste Management’s residential rendezvous site, by the way, is over by the Whole Foods off of North Avenue.

Question: Why aren’t train cars as nice as they used to be?

Answer: For a few reasons. One is because rail travel is way down. Now that people can take a plane to New Orleans, why would they want to fork out the big bucks to sit in a plush chair on a train for two days? A Pullman Car is far nicer than anything the airlines have ever or will ever offer, but it’s still going to take about 20 hours longer to get there on a train. People now are less used to being packed in near each other as well, so they’d like to minimize that time, rather than spend it socializing with strangers. Raw costs for the car’s materials have risen, as has production. Hand-carving wood might have been cheap at the time, but to make a Pullman Car now, the cost would be astronomical and for little return. The Pioneer, a car made in 1863, cost $18,000 to make at the time. Adjusting for inflation that equates to $314,988.79 now. Workers in Pullman’s company town made $1.30 a day in 1885, which means about $31.14 now. Even at minimum wage, a worker would make at least twice that these days, and skilled laborers—like ones who could make train cars—would be far more expensive.

Question: There are pictures on Calumet 412 of thousands and thousands of people at meetings or speeches by Teddy Roosevelt. Why? How could they all hear?

Answer: On one hand, it’s possible that people were just better behaved and quieter than we are now. If that was how you absolutely had to get your information, you’d be quiet during a speech rather than assuming you could Google for a summary of it later. Microphones weren’t invented until 1877, and they probably weren’t all that great at that point. According to Henry Fowles Pringle’s Teddy Roosevelt biography, though, by 1884 microphones and searchlights were in use in convention halls. By 1917 and 1910, respectively, when the pictures mentioned above were taken, microphones were much better, though they wouldn’t really get good until the ’20s.

Question: What kind of store would let its employees play tennis on the roof?

Answer: A pretty nice one. The Boston Store once took up half a city block in the loop and was one of the biggest and best department stores around. Run by widow Mollie Netcher starting in 1904, the store was eight stories high and did, in fact, have tennis courts on its roof for employees to use on break. The company went out of business in 1946 after refusing to expand to malls and keep up with current fashions.

Question: What in the world was the Mary Crane Open-Air School?

Answer: The photo’s description says, “The open air school movement began to create optimal learning environments for students who were anemic, undernourished, etc.” The movement started in Germany in 1904 as a response to some tuberculosis outbreaks, coming to America in 1908. Other than the whole “being outside in the winter” thing, the Open Air movement sounded pretty okay, with a low teacher-to-student ratio, wholesome lunches, rest periods, and a curricula that focused on outdoor activities and proper hygiene. As more people figured out how TB is actually spread and the whole concept of antibiotics, the schools went out of favor, disappearing for the most part around WWII. 

Question: While we’re still not entirely sure what a dirty picture has to do with packaging, we recognize it was a different time. Chicago’s Near North Side was really racy pretty recently, though, with topless bars and movie theaters a-go-go. What happened to them all, other than home video?

Answer: Rush Street, as a whole, was incredibly seedy in the 1960s. It not only featured nudie bars, but also a whole lot of hard-drinking bars. It was where Chicago—and anyone visiting Chicago—went to drink. All that went away starting in the ’70s as real estate prices went up and maybe, just maybe, people living in high-value properties in the nearby Gold Coast began to put the squeeze on. Some sketchy bars remain, but not nearly as many as there once were. There are also still a few strip clubs in Chicago, though far fewer than there were in the ’60s and ’70s.

Not surprisingly, the mob had a big hand in Rush Street business at the time, as well as in the nearby gay nightclubs like the Dill Pickle Club. Also not surprisingly, Neither the Rush And Division business district nor the City Of Chicago are all that keen on highlighting the dicier portion of its history, instead choosing to focus on its current retail uptick and some of the nicer places in the neighborhood, like Gibson’s.

Question: What kind of person would let a pigeon eat from his mouth?

Answer: Presumably one with little respect for his own health and future ocular potential.