All Gone to Look for America (13 page)

Happily however, fate intervenes at this precise moment as my eyes light on a packet of Halls honey-menthol-eucalyptus lozenges – a familiar brand riding to the rescue like the 7th Cavalry in an ‘Injun’ ambush. Kemo Sabe, white man, I’m outta here. I head for the till, flashing him a broad smile of my typical rock garden British teeth, that I hope he might just possibly interpret as meaning my life had been enriched by our meeting. He waved back, looking genuinely as if his had. I felt like a shit, but sometimes you just can’t take too much niceness.

And in any case, today’s the day we’ve chosen to look up Chicago’s
legendary
bad boys. Oddly Chicago city tourism officials make absolutely nothing of them, and yet they form much of the backdrop of what most tourists know of their city: the crime scenes. Yes, I know twenty-first-century Chicago may have one of the world’s premier orchestras and some amazing ballerinas and operas and whatever. But if you’re a tourist the image of a man in Chicago
carrying
a violin case doesn’t suggest he’s on his way to a Vivaldi recital. At least not in that Jimmy Cagney suit. Let’s face it, the musical that’s put Chicago back on every culture vulture’s lips, isn’t about the city’s flourishing gay scene, or the annual Grant Park music festival, it’s yet another hackneyed exploitation of the phoney glamour of the gangster age which it milks for every red –
bloodsoaked
– nickel. And why the heck not?

Can it really be that the twenty-first-century city fathers are so afraid of a resurgence of their vibrant modern metropolis’s violent past that there is absolutely nothing to commemorate one of its most famous events: the St Valentine’s Day massacre? Mobster Al Capone’s 1929 ruse to lure seven men from rival ‘Bugsy’ Moran’s gang to a garage where his own hoods, dressed as police officers, tied them up and then riddled them with bullets, has not only been immortalised in the movies but become a minor part of modern
mythology
. People may try to make myths, but they make themselves, and it’s a mug’s game trying to ignore them. But that’s what Chicago does. It took us hours wandering around North Side to locate two of the sights I absolutely wasn’t going to leave Chicago without seeing. The first was – marginally – easier to locate than the second, but only with a map reference.

Between July 1933 and June 1934, John ‘Jackrabbit’ Dillinger robbed no fewer than 10 banks in Indiana and Illinois, escaped from an ‘escape-proof’ jail with a fake gun carved from soap, and earned himself a reputation – almost certainly unjustified – as a latter-day Robin Hood. On 22 July 1934, he decided to take in a gangster movie,
Manhattan Melodramas
, with his girlfriend Polly Hamilton and Anna Sage, a Romanian brothel keeper, in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago. But Sage had tipped off the FBI, an organisation whose growth was hugely abetted by the largely Chicago-based crime wave of the
Prohibition
years, and Dillinger was ambushed and shot dead outside the cinema. The Biograph, at 2433 Lincoln Avenue, with its curved light bulb-lined canopy, still exists, but having been shuttered up for years has only recently been restored, although as a theatre rather than a cinema.

At least the conservationists got there before it might have been pulled down, which was the fate of the site of another of Chicago’s most celebrated gangland incidents, the S-M-C Cartage warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where on 14 February 1929 Al Capone orchestrated the gang killing that entered history as the St Valentine’s Day massacre. Capone represented the South Side Outfit who for five years had been engaged in bloody warfare with Bugsy Moran’s North Side Mob for control of the illegal trade in alcohol.

The day before, Capone arranged for a false tip to Moran that there was to be a consignment of whisky delivered to the warehouse the next morning. Moran himself was late but seven of his men were already there when what appeared to be two police officers appeared. The mobsters thought it was a phoney bust by police on their payroll, but when the ‘police’ opened the garage doors and let in two others in plain clothes they realised differently. Especially when the two newcomers produced Thompson sub-machine guns and cut
down the seven in a hail of bullets against the warehouse wall. They then
disappeared
, leaving a local landlady to call the real police because of the noise of one of the dead men’s dog howling. The officers who eventually did arrive found a scene of carnage that left them traumatised. Moran who had stopped for a coffee and dallied when he saw the phoney police arrive, immediately put the blame on Capone but the ‘Napoleon of Crime’ had the perfect alibi: he was in Florida at the time.

The building became a place of ghoulish pilgrimage – a bit like mine – for years afterwards, even when it was turned into a furniture warehouse in 1949. But in the 1960s, that decade of ‘cultural revolution’ even in the west, it was needlessly pulled down. Today it is merely a patch of grass which belongs to the next-door nursing home. There are trees planted, allegedly for each of those killed, but not so as you would notice. There are rumours that the site is haunted and that people have heard screams and the staccato rattle of machine-gun fire. But try as hard as I can all I hear on this warm afternoon is the traffic passing by and muzak from the Chicago Pizza bar opposite.

Today North Side Chicago is quiet, leafy, residential, with three-and
four-storey
houses in brick dating back to those violent times and before. In fact it is more like a sedate inner suburb of any British city than anything else I have encountered or am to encounter in America. It is also, I am glad to say,
especially
after a wearisome few hours street-tramping in search of what turned out inevitably to be less than riveting sights, perhaps the busiest area for bars in the whole of Chicago. Without knowing it, we have wandered into the heart of Wrigleyville.

That’s the nickname for the whole heaving pub and restaurant district around North Clark Street in the immediate vicinity of Wrigley Field, the baseball park that is home to the Chicago Cubs, named in turn after William Wrigley Junior, the chewing gum magnate who owned the team in the 1920s. The baseball season, as I know, having just ended, however, everybody here is watching the football (American, that is), which is mostly college teams; the girl at the bar in the John Barleycorn explains, ‘because the play isn’t so perfect and that makes it more exciting’.

The beer is pretty perfect though, as even the wife agrees, as we tuck into a couple of frothy wheat beers and discuss when we might bump into one another again, which probably won’t be for several weeks. She has meetings to go to, and I have a continent and more to cross. The John Barleycorn is a fine pub – and I use that word in the fullest, British sense of the word – an old Victorian palace of a place with high columns and a long dark mahogany bar,
and a collection of odd artefacts brought back from around the globe by its former Dutch owner.

It was, fittingly enough, the favourite local of John Dillinger, who was famed for ‘buying the house a round’, which may well have gone some way towards building up his ‘Robin Hood’ reputation. During Prohibition or the previous decade the old saloon, like so many others, had been forced to close down. But like so many others, it only appeared to do so, becoming a Chinese laundry in appearance, while actually the basement was used to store barrels of booze which were served to customers in the apparently closed old saloon rooms upstairs. Nipping out to get the laundry done soon became a frequent habit for the people of Wrigleyville.

Even with endless college football on big screens in every direction, it’s a fine place to while away a few hours as the afternoon slips into a gentle
autumnal
dusk. An early night is on the cards.

The wife has a dawn flight. And I have a date with Hiawatha.

THE TRADITIONAL SOUTH GERMAN
dirndl
dresses worn by the waitresses would have given it away but the big sign over the door, cut into the stone in elaborate Gothic lettering that says ‘
Willkommen
’ was clear enough. As was the one over the mock half-timbered exit from the car park that said ‘
Auf Wiedersehen
’. If the majority of Milwaukee’s original inhabitants had had their way, then Wisconsin’s first city – founded two years before the state itself was incorporated into the union – would have been called something like
Mitschiganerhafen
or maybe
Neustettin
.

In fact Milwaukee was founded by a French Canadian called Solomon Juneau who set up a trading post on the edge of Lake Michigan at a place the local Indians called ‘
milioki
’ – ‘where the waters join’. By the 1830s the little settlement had become a mecca for immigrants from central and eastern Europe, fleeing the repression and unsettled aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. A substantial number came from Prussian Pomerania, today Poland’s Baltic coast, but also from the rest of the then still fragmented German-speaking princedoms of central and eastern Europe along with Polish and Ukrainian neighbours.

I had pulled into Milwaukee a few hours earlier on board the long-
distance
commuter train from Chicago romantically named The Hiawatha, after the most famous of those local ‘Indians’, the second shortest trip – after the shunt from Niagara to Buffalo – that I would undertake on my 10,000 mile rail odyssey. But then I could hardly not stop off in a city renowned as one of America’s prime brewing capitals. What made Milwaukee famous isn’t going to get by without a chance of making a boozer out of me.

The first opportunity of the day is a late lunch at Mader’s restaurant – which despite its obviously German heritage is pronounced English-style as ‘
madeerr
’ rather than ‘madder’. Mader’s sits in the middle of the schizophrenically
named 3rd Street Old World which is what Milwaukee folks call one of the few streets of pre-twentieth-century architecture they haven’t pulled down yet. Already on my walk up here from the station I’ve noticed a disturbingly Buffalo-like tendency to knock things down and not replace them. I can’t help wondering what it is you need to escape the bulldozers round here.

Whatever it takes, Mader’s obviously has it. The place is almost a historic monument, a testimony to the one-time pulling power of the local German vote, as witnessed by visits from Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Reagan. The politicians competed with the stars of stage and screen to visit Mader’s and pour a few ‘steins’ of lager down their necks to accompany a
Sauerbraten
or a
Schweineshaxe
. ‘I have never enjoyed food as much as I have yours. Thanks for the fourth pork shank,’ wrote Oliver Hardy, who had certainly dealt with a few in his time, on a menu card on display. Other memorabilia testify that Cary Grant was a fan, as was Boris Karloff.

The original bar, founded by ‘Charles’ – presumably Karl – Mader in 1902 was called, with less than a native’s feel for the cadences of the English
language,
‘The Comfort’. But the old black-and-white photographs that line the walls next to those of movie stars, show that the original was a regular
contemporary
American bar, rather than the kitsch temple to faux nostalgic
Teutonism
that Mader’s has since become. With its marquetry mosaics of Frederick the Great, a mediaeval knight and duellists lifted straight from
The Student Prince
musical, Mader’s sums up America’s 1950s need to re-sentimentalise its view of Germany.

Down the road there is a school named after one of Milwaukee’s most famous daughters: the future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, whose
Yiddish-
speaking family fled her native Kiev and the Russian Empire, for the new world and chose the Germanic community in Milwaukee as the place they would most fit in. Her father became a carpenter and her mother ran a grocery store while little Golda attended the Fourth Street School now named after her. It is a pertinent reminder of how integrated Jews were in most German communities before the rise of Hitler’s crazed anti-Semitism. There were more than a few who had traumatically mixed feelings about what happened in the years 1933 to 1945, particularly the last four when many of them were called up to fight for their new country against the old one. The stigma of the First World War had no sooner been eradicated than here was Germany, the mother country – Fatherland, if you will – once again America’s deadly enemy.

Boys named Schmidt, Gruber and Hagenbauer joined up willingly in the
US forces, even to the extent of deliberately mispronouncing their family names if they were called something like Wagner, to fight other boys with similar names, to whom they might even be distantly related. We can safely assume most of Milwaukee unquestionably wanted an American victory,
certainly
the Jewish population which lived still as integrated with the rest of the German community here as they had done before the rise of Hitler created a stigma and a segregation in the ‘old country’ that turned it into something they no longer recognised.

By the mid-1950s there was a need – obvious in the dated stereotypical decor of this place – to give Milwaukee’s Americans of German descent
something
to cling to of their recently discredited culture. There is nothing phoney about the menu, though – the beef for the
Sauerbraten
, it explains, has been marinated for 10 days, while the pork shank that Hardy so loved and I order up as much in his honour as to assuage my own hunger is indeed a perfectly done example of the classic Bavarian
Haxe
.

Even my waitress seems more in the cynical European mould than the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, tip-hungry American model, although I can’t help wondering if that’s perhaps because a middle-aged American woman doesn’t take naturally to the puffed-up bosom and constricted waist of a
dirndl
. She does, however, do the traditional American ‘server’ thing of telling me her name – Maria – and I detect a distinct if faint hint of an accent. Genuine or put on for the tourists, I wonder, and as German is a language I speak, having been a correspondent in Berlin and Munich, I enquire, as politely as possible, ‘
Ob sie deutsch sprechen?
’ Indeed she does. Almost like a native.

Almost. The odd fact is, she seems more disconcerted than delighted to be speaking her native tongue. She comes originally from Vienna, she tells me, but without the slightest trace of a sing-song Austrian drawl. It is as if her native language, which probably helped her get the job, has atrophied with lack of use. It might be a metaphor for the whole Mader’s experience: the service is excellent, the food good, the Spaten beer imported from Munich one of my favourites, and served as well here as it is there, but there is something just ever so slightly sad about the place, something lost or gone missing. Like someone who claims to be a devotee of classical music having only Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ on his hi-fi. Which just happens to be the background muzak in Maders.

The German heritage lingers here but modern America has mutated so much that today it is little more than skin deep. Sausage-skin deep. A few doors down from Mader’s, the Old German Beer House displays signs for Munich’s
famous Hofbräu lager while across the road Ursinger’s Famous Sausage
Emporium
is painted in the unmistakable white and baby-blue colours of Bavaria’s state flag. Inside, shop assistants of fairly obviously non-Germanic origins – black and Hispanic – purvey
Bratwurst
and
Knacker
from spotless marble counters above which mosaic murals proclaim worthy American hygiene mottos such as ‘
Gibt Fleisch und Wurst dem Verderben nicht Preis, Kühlt ein sie in Nordpols Berge von Eis
’
1
next to pictures of little Germanic gnomes doing just that: hauling their sausages and so on into caves of polar ice.

But the firm that sold ‘Northpole’ ice to the burghers of America’s most German city has since gone the way of most of the big brewers who built the beer industry here – Miller, Schlitz, Pabst – have, save for Miller, died away or moved elsewhere. Way down the far north end of 3rd Street, where it no longer claims to be ‘Old World’ the great nineteenth-century Gothic castle that was once Josef Schlitz’s Brewery, built in the pale yellow brick that gave Milwaukee its nickname of ‘The Cream City’, is either empty or in the process of
conversion
into loft apartments, or artisan workshops.

The departure of the big brewers ought to have left Milwaukee an empty husk of the place it used to be, as if the song were turned on its head. What made Milwaukee famous nearly made a loser out of the city when the big brewers moved away. There are parts of town where that impression is hard to avoid: great swathes of dereliction where hunks of what, had it remained, would no doubt be termed ‘historic’ downtown have been razed to the ground. Walking along Old World’s streets grim vistas suddenly open out of vast empty areas – tomorrow’s parking lots? – which would once have been vital inner city streetscape. At one point the sole structure surviving in a razed concrete expanse of maybe four acres is a four-storey building of little obvious
exceptional
architectural importance raised on jacks and then just left there, as if somebody forgot where they were meant to take it.

But things are not as bad as they might be – at least not yet. For one thing, Milwaukee has not wholly lost its heritage. Even with the decline of big brewing, beer remains an essential part of the city’s culture, thanks to a new breed of microbrewers. I’m on my way now, footsore, slogging along the
waterfront
to find one of them, a typical example of the new wave of American beer makers, reassuringly – in this city – called Jim Klisch.

Lakefront Brewery was started in 1987 in the building of a former
electric
power plant on the banks of the Milwaukee River by Jim and his brother
Russel, enthusiastic home-brewers, who had seen the microbrewing
phenomenon
take off in Oregon and Washington states on the west coast and saw no reason why they shouldn’t emulate that success to bring craft beer-brewing back to Milwaukee.

‘It’s not as if brewing wasn’t in the family,’ Jim laughs over a glass of his frothing Cattail ale after a brief tour round their premises: ‘Our grandfather used to drive a truck for Schlitz.’ Cattail is designed to echo an English summer ale, though it is a little too carbonated to be exactly right. But from early
tentative
trials in the brewer’s art, the brothers produce five regular beers plus another five seasonals, including a ‘pumpkin’ ale for Hallowe’en, which is now just going into brew: a classically American fusion of traditions, in this case from Germany and Ireland.

‘Every one of our beers is produced according to the sixteenth-century German
Reinheitsgebot
,’ he says proudly, pronouncing the “purity law”
correctly
. ‘In other words, just water, hops and barley malt,’ unlike most of the big US brewers, including those in Milwaukee, and notably their one remaining big boy – Miller – who long ago found it was cheaper to add rice.

Despite their German-sounding name the Klisch family were originally from the western Ukraine, he tells me. The authentic spelling should be Kliscze, but Milwaukee germanised it. ‘Some of the cousins still spell it “Kliscz”, with a “zee”,’ he explains. It is a reminder of just how young a country America still is, how relatively recently – in European terms – whole families reinvented
themselves
in a new world.

Disconcerted by my initial downbeat reaction to the bits of central
Milauwkee
I’ve plodded through to reach his brewery, Jim gives me a few tips on bars to try out to ‘get a feel for the real place’. Most of them are located within walking distance – though that wouldn’t have occurred to him, on the other side of the river, scattered amid a neatly kept little neighbourhood of clapboard houses painted in shades from pale grey to dark green. Wolski’s Bar on Pulaski Street, just in case I needed any reminding that there is a healthy dose of Slav in amongst Milwaukee’s racial mix. With its green-painted weatherboards and red-painted shutters, Wolski’s could be just another gingerbread house in a district full of them: this is the sort of homespun district that inspired
Disneyland’s
Main Street USA; wooden family homes along leafy avenues with telephone lines strung between them. I sink a pint of Jim’s Cream City Ale amid friendly local folk come in for a drink after work, one of whom, a large bloke called Herb, about my age, in a checked shirt and jeans supping a pint of Jim’s ale at the bar, thinks I need to know a story about arguably Milwaukee’s
most famous resident, whose name, he says with a twinkle in his eye, is Gertie, suitably delaying his punchline: ‘She’s a duck.’

Or rather was. Gertie shuffled off her mortal coil more than 60 years ago, but he’s right about me needing to know her story: it’s one of those little tales of bathos, poignancy and sentimentality that make you simultaneously feel proud – and embarrassed – for humanity. It’s what the
Daily Mail
would call – and probably did – a human interest story, which means it’s mostly about an animal. The most significant thing about Gertie’s story, however, is the date: April 1945, when the good burghers of Milwaukee were anticipating the day when they would be able to celebrate the return of their Hanses, Axels and Friedrichs from killing other Hanses, Axels and Friedrichs.

‘There was this duck, see,’ says Herb, leaning forward over his beer, ‘and it had made a nest on one of the rotting wooden pilings next to Wisconsin Avenue Bridge. Downtown. And it had laid eggs. Now some people tried to throw stones at her to get her to move on, and that got folks angry. So they set up a guard to protect her. Then just as the ducklings were hatched, the war ended, and there was a big victory parade planned down Wisconsin Avenue. But when they got to the bridge, they stopped all the bands playing and
everybody
marched as quiet as they could – on tippy-toe like – so as not to disturb those little ducks. Thing is, see, in times like that, that little mother duck
bringing
up her family in peace was like a symbol of the way people wanted the world to be again.’