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My sister suggested we get together at her new apartment on Sunday for brunch. I asked her where she had moved to, and she gave me an address on West Madison Street. "Ha, ha..." I laughed, "So you live on skid row now?"
I still remember my very first trip into downtown Chicago on my own. It was 1967 and I had just bought my new, used, 1962 Ford Galaxie. I now had freedom and I wanted to explore. So I got on the new interstate highway that they were building out to our town and headed into the big city. I got off at the Madison Street exit and turned left. I had no map and no idea where anything was. It turned out that I had discovered Chicago's skid row, West Madison Street. It was a collection of rundown buildings with cheap liquor stores and bars on the first floors and flop house hotels above them. The street was dirty and full of litter. At the first red light that I came to I noticed a zombie like man wandering towards my car. He was holding a large wad of newspaper in one hand and told me that he was going to clean my windshield. I rolled up my window just as he spat a giant wad of slobber onto my windshield and then started to wipe it off with the newspaper. As he smeared his saliva around I hollered at him, "No, no... NO! I'm fine, the window is fine!" He just kept wiping and wiping, smearing his spit around and around. Stuck in traffic, waiting for the light to turn green, I learned something that day. Stay out of the west side of Chicago, and don't pull right up to the car in front of you at a stoplight. Leave plenty of room to escape.
I'm sure my sister didn't think my comment about her living on skid row was funny. But she had no idea what West Madison Street was all about fifty years ago. So I showed her a photo of it from back then, and then I Googled Richard Speck and showed her that. Fifty five years ago Richard Speck raped and murdered eight nurses. He lived on West Madison Street in one of those flop houses. Right near where we had our very nice 'brunch' on a very clean and upscale West Madison Street.
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