The See

2006, The building was still there.

In the late 1980s I was living in an apartment on North Halsted Street above a Chinese restaurant. I loved living there. It was a busy street and the three story wood frame building would shake every time a CTA bus would roll by. I didn't care, I was close to everything about Chicago I loved. I could walk to the lake, I could walk to gay bars, and one time I even walked all the way up to Michigan Avenue. What I didn't understand about living there was why, every few months, I would get mail from The People's Republic of China. It wasn't exactly addressed to me, but to somebody called 'The See' at my address. I would open the cheap looking brown envelope and inside would be a colorful pamphlet with glowing praises of China and Chinese Workers. It was propaganda. But why was this coming to my address? This stumped me for years until I started to think about the history of that building and the neighborhood. Now it is a gentrified city neighborhood with rents way out of my reach. But that was not always so. Just two blocks south of that building, on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was shot down by the police in an alley. I started thinking about what I knew of the place. Before I moved into the building and before it had been rehabbed by my friend Rudy, It was a rundown slum. Down on the first floor in the early 1980s was a 'juice bar' where underage gay teens and others could hang out. I know that because I was the bartender at a bar two doors down and those kids were relentless in trying to buy a drink from me. I saw more fake ID's when I worked there than Jeffrey Epstein. Before it became a juice bar it was a regular bar. Ummm... not really that regular. It was called The Snake Pit and was not for the weak of heart. I think the juice bar was also called The Snake Pit, but without a liquor license. The shit that went on in there caused them to lose that. Now we go back even further, when that stretch of Halsted had a bit of gang activity. The 1970s you knew a shooting was about to happen because the street lights would go out. Somehow the gangs could turn off the street lights so they could do their dirty work in the dark.

Anyway, I finally figured out why I was getting propaganda from The People's Republic of China. My apartment must have had some connection to the underground newspaper called The Seed. A left wing, radical newspaper established in 1968, and published until 1974. I read it often. I know their offices were just around the corner on Wrightwood Avenue, so I assume they had their mail delivered to somebody at my address just in case the mail was explosive. Or maybe they had it delivered to that address to throw off the FBI. I figured that the Chinese had mistakenly dropped the 'd' in Seed. Lost in translation. Anyway, The building is gone now. Torn down and replaced by expensive condos. I wonder, are the new tenants, Becky and Todd, still receiving those little brown envelopes from The People's Republic of China?

2628 North Halsted now.