In the early 1960s, the Evergreen Park Plaza at 95th Street and Western Avenue claimed the title as the first enclosed shopping center in America. So when the blizzard of 1967 clobbered the Chicago area, the Plaza stayed open as an act of pride and ferocity.
I had a part-time job as a porter at Montgomery Ward in the Plaza, when my family lived but a couple of minutes from a back entrance, if you crossed the Rockwell Avenue tracks at 96th Street. Only 16 years old, I was nervous and humbled upon receiving an early morning phone call from the manager, asking me to snowshoe in and keep things running till the plows could get through.
People do not usually cry when shopping malls close down. But I admit to having felt a lump in my throat upon reading that the Plaza is scheduled for the wrecking ball. It was a significant place in my life both personally and historically.
It’s where I met my future wife, Marianne, when I was a bag boy at the Plaza Jewel Foods, where she already worked as a cashier. And ours was one of a handful of Jewel marriages that included my brothers Charlie and Pat and their wives Monty and Patty. There were also Jim and Vicky Michau, Bill and Donna Doyle, Joe and Jean Doyle, and Emil and Jean Doyle.
Jewel was attractive to teenagers, thanks to the United Retail Workers Union and an hourly rate of pay higher than the department stores (I was up to 1.50 per hour in 1967). And it also hosted an annual union dance as well as a Christmas party, with no prohibitions against workplace romance.
On our days off, we took busman’s holidays as likely the first American youth to hang out at the mall.
We’d buy a warm chocolate doughnut at Burney Brothers Bakery, then browse books at Kroch’s and Brentano’s. We might window shop at Morrie Mages Sports and Kinney Shoes, and never failed to stop at Kresge’s dime store to try out the latest Duncan Yo-Yos, and ogle the puppies in its downstairs pet shop.
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Former St. Bernadette School classmate Jerry Kamper was a fellow mall citizen.
“I never had a car during high school, but the Plaza still gave me an opportunity to date. You could take a girl to see the latest beach blanket movie or Elvis or James Bond flick at the M&R Theaters,” he said. “That gave you time to take a trip to Wimpy’s for a razor-thin burger and fries, and a stroll to Towers Record Shop to browse the racks, or pick up a copy of the latest WLS and WCFL Silver Dollar Surveys.”
We counted ourselves lucky to be present on the day the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile rolled in, when we watched a crowd of what must have been 5,000 boomer babies fill the parking lot to score a Wiener whistle … and not so lucky when I had to report for work the night an Illinois state trooper with a rifle paced the roof of Montgomery Ward during the turmoil after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
Each year, Plaza brass scheduled events to attract more customers, like the special appearance by Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio; the giant magic show at center mall; or the six-shooter fast draw specialist in the south parking lot.
Marianne still remembers the Saturday afternoon when she was the cashier for actress Martha Raye, who purchased a gourmet canned ham. And bag boy Carl Schultz swore on a stack of Bibles that he witnessed John Lupton, from the TV western “Broken Arrow,” when he shoplifted a pack of Lucky Strikes. Both Lupton and Raye were starring at Drury Lane Theatre across 95th Street.
My own claim to celebrity fame was running into pro wrestling’s notorious Valiant brothers, Handsome Jimmy and Luscious John, in front of the Tie Rack, where I’d been buying Christmas ties for my five brothers at $1 a crack.
Sadly, Jewel closed down in 1971 since it was losing money. That particular store required more labor costs than other stores. It was not just because of having to staff the Jewel Pick UP station located in the middle of the parking lot, to which 50-pound bags of groceries traveled weekly by conveyor belt underground. It was also because someone stopping in to buy bread or milk at a mall spends way less than weekly grocery shoppers at neighborhood locations, while the store requires as many or more hours of customer service.
We grew older, and the barber shop down in the Plaza Arcade became the place to be. The barbers were friendly, and my brother James used to get his haircut from the coolest one, who resembled Jerry Lee Lewis.
But it was the Arcade’s bank of pay phones that had us hanging out there, where on some Fridays a roll of dimes was needed to set up a card game at the Doyles or a basement party at the Michaus, inviting all of our Plaza gang.
After marriage, Marianne and I bought my grandma’s house on 96th Place. This meant that my three kids could also grow up and take the shortcut across the tracks, past the bowling alley and get what they needed, though not always what they dreamed.
Upon hearing that the Plaza will be demolished and replaced by a new and modern mall, I emailed the news to my brother James. He was nostalgic, he said, and flooded with memories.
“The Plaza was like our little town,” he wrote, and he suggested I would be amazed if I sat down to make a list of all our Plaza friends.
Had we the time and skill, we could make a coming-of-age film shot entirely at the Plaza, so special we Jewel folks thought we were. But since there were 119 other stores, there were probably 119 other close-knit “work” families, each with a movie of their own.
It doesn’t always take a village to raise a child; sometimes a mall will do just as well.
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage.