The Dil Pickle Club was beautiful. So was Urbus Orbis. And Maury’s bookstore. And Logan Beach. And Ralph Clarkson’s tenth-floor studio in the Fine Arts Building. It was like Paris in the 20s! Everywhere there were people making art. You can still get a sense of it by flipping through Ben Hecht’s memoirs, or a novel by Henry Blake Fuller, or by looking at an old photo of a group of drunk-looking adults sitting in school desks in a nightclub, or listening to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. But you’ll never get to be there.
Since history is doomed to repeat itself, it’ll happen again. It’s already happened over and over in Chicago, going back for more than 100 years, ever since the Fine Arts Building opened and created the city’s first artists’ colony.
The Little Room, 1898-early 1900s
Primary activity: Afternoon tea.
Reason for its disappearance: Lasted until 1931, when it was formally disbanded.
Jackson Park Art Colony, ca. 1908-1920
Original settler: Lorado Taft, who left his studio in the Fine Arts Building in search of cheaper rent.
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Towertown, ca. 1910-1950
Location: Division south to the river, Michigan west to LaSalle; roughly today’s River North. The name derived from the Water Tower, at the time the neighborhood’s major landmark. “It was a slum,” says historian Thomas Dyja. “A really fascinating, cool one.”
Towertown, ca. 1910-1950
(There were two major hipster waves, the first from the 1910s to the early ’30s, the second in the ’40s and ’50s, when the Bauhaus School was located in the neighborhood.)
Disparaging term for inhabitants: “Bohemians,” “art students.”
Old Town, ca. 1950-1970
Wicker Park, ca. 1985-2000
Logan Square, ca. 1995-present
Whither the hipster?
