Larry Stoler and I have been engaged in a travel adventure of sorts as part of nurturing our cross-generational friendship. It’s nothing like the Rhine River cruise type of travel that I wrote about last week. It’s more like the “I have traveled widely in Concord” kind that Thoreau wrote about. We never leave the confines of Chicago for our excursions (a word forever sullied by Trump’s use of it to describe the war he has waged against Iran). Instead, we meet up every few months to explore a coffee shop in a different part of the city.
For today we had scheduled a visit to a coffee shop in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. It’s located in a heavily Latino area which sits on land once occupied by the stockyards Chicago was famous for before the era of refrigerated rail cars and other changes that rendered the stockyards obsolete.
Unfortunately, part way to our rendezvous, I felt sick, apologized to Larry and returned home where I have just awakened from an unprecedented two-hour therapeutic nap. Larry continued on, and I am eagerly awaiting his report. Before I collapsed, he sent this note:
This is an amazing part of town. Never saw anything like this – a field of shipping containers stacked on top of each other, maybe 25 high. It looks like the Merchandise Mart of shipping containers. Is this the land where the stockyards were? You can just sense Upton Sinclair here.
To which I replied:
There’s so much to see in this city, much of it in places we wouldn’t ordinarily pass through.
That exchange captures the essential purpose of this coffee shop hopping. Chicago is an incredibly diverse city, but most of us live in self-imposed ghettos, deprived of the richness of that diversity. So, we try to choose places that have a distinct ethnic flavor and are situated in parts of the city we don’t normally encounter. Sometimes, the choices are based on recommendations others have made. Others are places I’ve researched online specifically in search of representatives of particular ethnicities. Let me give you some examples.
Today’s choice had hybrid roots. I’ve visited schools in Back of the Yards, but never really explored the neighborhood around those schools, even though I have friends who live there. My friend Greg Michie has written beautifully about teaching in the area, and when I ran my plans by him, he not only endorsed them but gave me the name of the proprietor of the coffee shop, a former student of his. I’m eager to hear other observations from Larry, but he did already comment on how quiet the area and the coffee shop itself felt. This may be because of the unpleasant, rainy morning, but I also wonder whether it’s a reflection of the hollowing out of Latino neighborhoods during the ICE raids, which caused some residents to leave and others to stick close to home out of fear of being nabbed by ICE agents.
A friend had once taken me to a coffee shop in Pilsen, another of the major Latino neighborhoods in the city, which was owned by a relative of her ex-husband. I think it was the first place I introduced Larry to because I was so impressed with the vibrancy of the place and of the surrounding neighborhood. (This was in the pre-ICE days.) That experience was rich enough for us to decide to do more of same.
Our friend Thom Hale regularly visits us at home for coffee and conversation. Thom’s wife is Brazilian and Thom himself is deeply involved in things Brazilian. He often shows up with buns from a Brazilian coffee shop he passes enroute to our place. Thom knows I’m gluten free so these cheese rolls are made of tapioca flour. So, Larry and I went to the source and visited the coffee shop ourselves to sample the rolls and other national specialties in person. The existence of a large Brazilian population in Chicago would have come as a great surprise if Rosellen and I had not attended a concert years ago by one of her favorite Brazilian singers, Gaetano Veloso. It seemed like the whole large Portuguese-speaking community turned out for the event. The existence of a Brazilian coffee shop was still a surprise for both me and Larry.
Inspired by Ukraine’s presence in so much of our political conversation, I was curious about whether there was a Ukrainian coffee shop, and indeed I found one called Shokolad. As soon as we stepped into this small storefront we knew we had chosen well. Not only were most of the diners clearly Ukrainian themselves, but the menu featured items like borshch, Ukrainian cheese pancakes and varenyky (Ukrainian pieorgies). After all, there is an entire Chicago neighborhood called Ukrainian Village, so the country is an essential component of the city’s ethnic patchwork.
Larry lives in a suburb of the city that is extraordinarily diverse but it doesn’t have the rich history of many Chicago neighborhoods, nor does it have the kind of African American neighborhoods that date back to The Great Migration, so it was essential that we include a number of Black eating establishments. This was an area for which I felt best prepared because our Hyde Park residence is surrounded by wonderful options featuring breakfast standards like grits, liver and onions and croquettes. This set of restaurants deserves an entry of its own. I’ll just offer a brief list here
We visited two Black-owned establishments, Sweet Maple and Dawn. Sweet Maple was particularly memorable because it introduced us to two elements of the surrounding community that merited visits of their own – a public library branch which sits under several stories of affordable apartments and the National Public Housing Museum, just a stone’s throw away. You can almost see the Obama Center from the windows of Dawn and is poised to become a destination for tourists eager to explore the area outside the Center’s boundaries. In fact, the next stop I have in mind for us on our Black-oriented tour is one of several Obama favorites which sits at the other end of 47th Street from Back of the Yards, across the boundary that divides Latino from Black neighborhoods.
One coffee shop on our focused travel tour doesn’t fit easily into any of the categories we’ve described. Build is the name of a coffee shop located in a building called The Experimental Station in a hidden part of Hyde Park. One of institutions housed in the building is The Invisible Institute, created by my friend Jamie Kalven. One of the missions of the Institute is to spotlight police misconduct. On the day we visited after our stop at Build for a cup of their hand poured coffee, Jamie invited me and Larry upstairs to view some amazing stop-action video of the police killing of an innocent local barber.
There are other kinds of focused travel that reach beyond the boundaries of our city. During the period when our friend Lucia was immersed in the craft of weaving, she and her husband made a trip to Ireland which concentrated on visiting weavers in different parts of the country. I remember some of the beautiful pieces they brought back, including a blanket that, in spite of encounters with the moths, still retains its intense colors and reminds me of their focused visit.
Birders who travel nationally and internationally are another example of focused travel. While seeking sightings to add to their list of conquests, birders are also experiencing new environments and cultures. The closest we’ve come to this kind of focus have been trips where we were especially interested in exploring locations which reflected on their Jewish pasts. This kind of thematic coherence adds a layer of enrichment to the already rich travel experience, so if you have special interests, consider how you might build travel plans around them, rather than the scattershot itineraries that characterize most of the travel we do.
By the way, if any of my Chicago readers have recommendations for unique coffee shop settings that would be interesting stops on our journey, please let us know.
