LJ Archive - 06/05/30: Tucker City Canfield Echo

5/30/06

It's funny how things change. I'm humored every time I visit home and the "old" landmarks belie molestation in ways both strange and subtle. What blesses an area and its people with character is often just taken for granted as the fuzzy background in a photograph. Eventually, identities are lost and questions remain. A measure of humanity is the pique of curiosity; the consummation of thought whereby "if only somebody knew; surely somebody must, somewhere…"

It's this fleeting sense of identity that punctuates my fascination with the abandoned and forgotten. Nothing is born of accident, but not all is blessed with care. I seek to preserve, with photos and models, the answers to questions not yet asked. To preserve who I am, was, and wish I could be. To honor the everydays and everymen before, so those not yet here may know. Historic dates should not be the exclusive domain of anniversary and fright.

On Memorial Day I can't help but reminisce about my dearly departed grandparents. My Great-Grandma Smith once told me a story about the Ford City Shopping Mall, a monument to excess on Chicago's southwest side. The mall sits near the southern edge of the Belt Railway's sprawling Clearing Yards; between them, sandwiched like so much scorched earth in a demilitarized zone (once tucked behind the now razed Tootsie Roll factory) is an expanse of industrial fortitude rotting the days away. I seem to remember it having something to do with Clark Forklifts at one time early in my era, but the complex was and is still MASSIVE. Railroad tracks were embedded in concrete yet led to nowhere; concrete obelisks soared toward the sky like huge dominoes with no evident purpose (if you look carefully in the photo above, you can still see them). My dad used to barge our beaten Ford Granada along the crumbling road back there as a "shortcut" to the mall; when he bought a new minivan in 1990, we never went that way anymore.

Anyway, when I was about 10 or so, and Great Grandma still had a fair portion of mind not yet robbed by Alzheimer's, I asked her about the factory and the mall. Why were they so close together, and what was that factory anyway? "Oh, that whoooole place used to be a Studebaker plant! The nicest cars in the world rolled out of there, but you never see them anymore. Your Grandpa used to have a Studebaker pickup..."

Now my Grandma, she was a little crazy in that loveable octogeneric way. A Studebaker plant? Riiiight… so that's why they call it "FORD" City now? Silly grandma! But it made sense in a way; at the very least it made the old factories seem alive again. Our old Granada had actually come from a Ford dealer near there, which was long gone soon afterward.

Only trouble is, we were both wrong!

A few years later I was flipping through the week's TV Guide and saw an ad from one of those Fake Collectible Mints, you know, the Danbury-Franklin-Lincoln Crap-O'-Da-Month Licensed-Product-Payment-Plan Club. It featured a diecast model of a car called the 1948 Tucker Torpedo. Although only 51 were ever built before magnate Preston Tucker was forcibly bankrupted by a collusion of foes, the influences of that car have been manifest in every vehicle built since, even in "innovative" features making it (back) to the market over 50 years later! As a testament to its significance, 49 of the 51 cars still survive today.

The design of that car fascinated me, and I attempted more research on it in those halcyon, pre-internet days. Turned out it was built in Chicago. More importantly, it turned out to be my grandma's so-called "Studebaker", built on the site of the Ford City Mall! (And you know, my Grandma might not have been completely off her rocker: the 1951 Studebaker did in fact borrow heavily from the Tucker's design cues, and a number of those 'Studes were even used for the 1988 Tucker biopic).

A significant bellwether of American ingenuity had been born right in my backyard. It left a legacy of saved lives and changed history, yet nobody seemed to know or remember. It was a relative flash in the pan, a mere bankrupted enterprise resigned to curiosity, and 20 years later a shopping mall went up on the spot.

That Mall itself is no bellwether. I can still remember the smell of Peacock Alley, the dark underground tunnel beneath the parking lot, linking the two major structures together. It had a wicked cool arcade and a wierd hobby shop and always seemed the domain of hippie teenagers looming large when I was six. But I used to love going down there, because it invariably meant we'd surface at the other end inside Child World / Children's Palace, the faux-castellated home of Peter Panda (who kicked Geoffrey Girrafe's wimpy little ass). But on those many occasions when I'd been a snot-nosed heathen, I'd have to instead hold hope against hope for a mere Hotweels car from Venture, next door. On special days we'd go across the parking lot to John's Garage for an old-fashioned American meal, where I could play Frogger and Centipede on a coin-op and order a root beer (if I'd been snot-free).

All of those places are gone, now. The Mall is still there, but I don't shop there anymore.

Maybe in that restaurant, John's Garage, they had served Canfield's Soda. You know how Kroger or whatever usually has some store-or-local brand of cheap-ass pop in a million flavors, at 79 cents for a 3-liter? Canfield's was Chicago's very own local brew: a million chemical concoctions served up in multicolored cans. Their Swiss Creme Soda was the bomb; I used to love the stuff – a good thing if your family was smack-in-the-middle-class and wouldn't spring for that expensive name brand crap just for birthday parties and such.

Yeah, so nowadays if you have a Meijer store nearby, you can get "Down with the Clown" and buy Faygo. Michigan's cheap-ass soda nationalized by a big box; it's the same but it's not... the same. It couldn't be... but even in Chicago, Canfield's is gone.

I remember the big Canfield's billboard painted on the side of the tavern near our house though, next to the mom-n-pop video store ("Airport Video") where we stopped like, weekly to rent VHS tapes of Winnie-the-Pooh for my brother and sister. People in there knew my parents by name, probably. Before Blockbuster came along, anyway.

Nowadays, the 49 1948 Tuckers are locked away in museums, Peter Panda rests in an advertising graveyard, and my dad tells me the Canfield's billboard was painted out 14 years ago - I'm ashamed to say I don't remember that occasion. But I remember all those other things and more. I'm grateful to my Great-Grandma for encouraging me dig for the past, even if the clues don't come together for years. I don't know if anyone will ever ask me about them, but I hope I'll have the answers, or at least more clues. To those faded unknown landmarks in the background of a photograph, to the ruins of a redeveloped shopping mall someday in the future...