TowerTown: The Bohemian Community

by Suzanne Hanney

West of Michigan Avenue, the bohemian arts and gay community known as Towertown was in full swing in 1920. The art colony began after the World’s Fair of 1893, when Judge Lambert Tree and his wife Anna built the Tree Studios at Ohio and State Streets to encourage European artists to stay. Its epicenter, however, was the area around the historic Water Tower at Chicago and Michigan Avenues, where bookstores, tearooms, coffeehouses, cheap cafeterias and lunchrooms, art suppliers and used furniture stores sprang up to serve struggling artists, writers, students and hangers-on. They were drawn to the area by cheap housing in old subdivided mansions, walkup apartment houses and former stables. Bordered by the Gold Coast on the east and Little Italy on the west, Towertown’s major streets were Wabash Avenue and Ohio, Erie, Huron, Superior, Chestnut and State Streets, but some people lived as far west as LaSalle Street, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp noted in 1988.

Its most famous coffeehouse was the Dil Pickle Club, whose entrance above 10 Tooker Place, an alley east of Dearborn Street, was marked with a “DANGER” sign that pointed to the orange main door lit by a green light. On the door was a sign: “Step High, Stoop Low and Leave Your Dignity Outside” and inside, another sign read, “Elevate Your Mind to a Lower Level of Thinking.” Drinks and sandwiches were available and attendees decorated the room themselves with art exhibitions. Sometimes they took their radical discussions on contemporary issues to public debates at nearby Washington Square Park (aka “Bughouse Square,”) where they stood on soapboxes to be seen by their neighbors – a tradition preserved by the Newberry Library each summer.

Arts and the anything-goes discussion facilitated an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness that drew unmarried heterosexuals and Chicago homosexuals of both sexes, who first found a sense of community in Towertown. There were also hangers-on and naïve voyeurs, who sometimes got themselves into trouble, Gapp noted. Perhaps the desire to shelter young single women moving to the city from small towns from such temptations inspired the myriad dormitory-style buildings for women on Dearborn Street such as the Three Arts Club (now the home of Restoration Hardware).

But Chicago’s literary renaissance was also nurtured in Towertown, with people like Harriet Monroe, who gained fame after her “Columbian Ode” dedicated the world’s fair of 1893. Monroe founded Poetry Magazine from an office located at 543 Cass Avenue (now Wabash Avenue) and is credited with discovering Carl Sandburg at about the time he was writing about the “city of the big shoulders.” She also published work by T. S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.

The neighborhood’s vitality was a uniquely urban asset that contributed to not only literature but theatre and music, Gapp said. But rising rents led to its decline by the late 1920s, even though wisps remained into the 1970s. The loss of urban bohemias like Towertown, mean that creative thinkers come not from the grassroots but from academia, he wrote, paraphrasing from Russell Jacoby’s “The Last Intellectuals.” “They talk to each other in the incomprehensible language of pedants instead of addressing large segments of the public, as they once did in the old days.”

The entrance to the Dil Pickle Club

Newberry Library