The Chicago Sun-Times Photo Archives

LEE BEY

The book’ s first photograph—the opening shot—is a stunner. An evocative nighttime image of Randolph Street’ s old restaurant row. The photograph looks like a scene snatched from a long-lost Chicago film noir.

Lighted and neon signs break the downtown darkness. Toffanetti restaurant, near Dearborn Street. Famous Henrici’ s. Hoe Sae Gai, with its marquee of faux Chinese script slashing the night like scimitars. Next door: Sunny Italy, boasting “The Finest Italian Food in Town. ” And: Round the Clock, a

24-hour coffee shop at Randolph and Clark.

ST-17600001, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM

This article is a reprint of the

“Introduction ” to Chicago Exposed: Defining Moments from the Chicago Sun-Times Photo Archive, edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams. Copyright © 2021 by CityFiles Press.

To shoot the photo from atop the Greyhound Bus Terminal was a master stroke. The station was across the street from the restaurants; the sign bearing the bus company ’ s galloping mascot is in the foreground. The angle, against the darkened street, gives the image a dreamlike yet melancholy feel of an era that was about to come to an end.

In fact, that’ s exactly what happened. The photograph was taken December 26, 1961, and within eighteen months, the entire block was wrecked and hauled away to make room for what is now the Richard J. Daley Center.

But before the bulldozers rolled down Randolph, an unnamed Chicago Sun-Times photographer was there.

What could’ ve been a routine photo assignment became art— brought to Sun-Times readers for pocket change. And it happened virtually every day, with every edition, through the work of photographers who were the best in the business.

Borrie Kantor. Dave Mann. Jack Dykinga. Howard D. Simmons. Al Podgorski. Ashlee Rezin Garcia. The list goes on. These professionals captured this tough, brawling, proud and oft-troubled city, and did so with style, truth, urgency, and beauty.

And to think much of this work—including the marvelous restaurant row image—was headed to oblivion just a few years ago. Following a blunder by the newspa-

per ’ s previous owner, the photo negatives for five million images from the 1940s through the early 2000s ingloriously wound up in Dixon, Illinois.

They were rescued by the Chicago History Museum.

I’ ve been excited about this trove of photographs ever since. I’ ve spent more late nights than I dare admit looking through the thousands of the Chicago Sun-Times Collection online images.

In one dramatic photo, Bob Kotalik captures two firefighters—tension etched across their faces—urgently carrying a nun down a ladder during the fatal Our Lady of Angels School fire of 1958. It’ s a heart-stopping image. We don ’t know if she lived or was among the ninety-five students and nuns who perished.

ST-17500648, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM; Bob Kotalik, photographer

Almost thirty years after that fire, Sun-Times photographers captured the euphoria at a downtown parade honoring the freshly-crowned Super Bowl XX champs, the Chicago Bears. Revelers are frolicking on a packed LaSalle Street, which was carpeted in ankle-deep ticker tape. People climbed atop a traffic lights to get a better view. Shirtless men defied 8°F weather and a -29°F windchill.

It’ s as if parade-goers somehow knew they were attending a once-in-a-lifetime event. And the Bears have done their best to keep it that way.

Black Chicago is particularly well represented. Sun-Times photographers captured newsworthy images of the peril and pain sometimes found on the city ’ s South and West Sides. Photographs of mother Mamie Till, ripped by anguish as she viewed the tortured body of her son, Emmett—lynched by Southern racists in 1955—are as searing now as they were nearly seventy years ago.

But the Sun-Times also produced remarkable images that captured the spirit and humanity of the Black community. For instance, there is a 1974 photo essay on East Forty-Seventh Street in the predominantly Black community area of Grand Boulevard. Areas like these are easy pickings for grim, voyeuristic photography that does little but showcase tired stereotypes about poor and working class Black neighborhoods.

ST-50004224-0025, Chicago Sun-Times Collection, CHM

ST-17600006, Chicago Sun-Times Collection, CHM

Clockwise from top: ST-14003584-0059, ST-14003584-0081, ST-14003584-0006, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM

Sun-Times photographers found laughing children and an Afro ’d young mom posing with her bright-eyed toddler. There ’ s a fashionably-dressed Mack in a widebrimmed hat—even in black and white, you can still tell he ’ s colorfully attired—proudly posing next to his fabulous and tricked-out Cadillac Eldorado.

Browsing the collection, I found myself smiling at a sequence of 1967 photographs showing Muhammad Ali holding up and playing with a baby outside the old Senate Theatre on West Madison Street.

ST-50000444-0004, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM; Pete Peters, photographer

Just three months earlier, Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into the US Army. But here, on the West Side, just before attending a donation drive at the theater to help hungry Mississippi families, Ali is surrounded by admirers—not to mention that beautiful baby, who ’d be a woman in her 50s now—and greeted like the champion he is.

Much of the documentation of Chicago ’ s Black neighborhoods was done by a talented group of African American photographers who knew and respected the communities they covered.

And the respect and admiration were returned. Countless times as a young reporter in the 1990s, I’d hit the streets with photographers John H. White, Bob Black, or Brian Jackson. They were greeted like celebrities. Indeed, when I told my mother about my first day at the Sun-Times back in 1992, her first question was: “Did you meet John White yet?”

I did. And now you can, too, along with scores of other Sun-Times photographers—artists, really—through the powerful work in this book.

Lee Bey is a Sun-Times editorial writer and author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago ’ s South Side. He worked at the Sun-Times from 1992 to 2001 as a reporter and architectural critic and rejoined the paper in 2019. John H. White (left) won the “ outstanding

photography

” award at the 1985 Chicago Association of Black Journalists awards, while his Sun-Times colleague Clem Richardson (right) won for “ outstanding reporting. ” ST-10002084-0002, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM

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