The Mud Hole, Aunt Enid and my dying grandmother, Harry Truman, FDR, Stevenson Playground, and the demolition of buildings for the sake of progress . . .

From my Short History of Oak Park Volume 1, compiled 2004-2005, based largely on columns I wrote for the Oak Park and River Forest Wednesday Journal.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, there was a big wading pool in Stevenson playground, under a huge willow tree east of the field house, which had WPA-era murals of Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, and others of the Treasure Island bunch.

A block away, across Austin Boulevard, was another such pool, called “mud hole” for its sandy-near-muddy bottom, on the corner of Austin & Lake Street, where now there’s a sprinkler playground.

Across Lake from the Mud Hole and down a bit to the east was a brick courtyard building with a big goldfish pond in the middle of the court. My two aunts lived in that building.

Aunt Enid watched me one day in the Mud Hole, where for some reason I stood shivering the whole time, watching other kids. About ten years later, my aunts had moved, but my grandmother lived in that building, and died in her apartment of a heart attack -- a surprise because she’d passed an EKG exam the day before.

This is how it happened then, in the late ‘40s. People died more often at home, not in a hospital after being rushed by ambulance, sirens blaring, paramedics working hurriedly to restore the beat -- which does not always go on, no matter what Peggy Lee sang.

And when the priest showed up from St. Lucy’s a few doors away, my grandmother knew the end had come and said so. He brought comfort but was also a harbinger.

In the ‘40s Stevenson’s half-block-long playing field, not yet raised a few feet, was flooded in winter for skating. You changed shoes for skates on a long bench on the Northwestern track side.

The other option for ice skating was the lagoon in Columbus Park, many blocks to the south and a few more to the east, winding in a curve away from a heated clubhouse, where you could buy chips and Coke and hot dogs. Columbus was better skating, but Stevenson was closer if you lived where I did, on Lombard a half block north of Washington Boulevard.

In summertime the livin’ was easy, but problems arose for baseballers at the west end of that big field. If a ball went into the street, fouled off to the left, the search might go long and hard until, as happened once, it turned up in the street car track declivity, flattened by a passing trolley.

I recall the day in April of ‘45 on that dusty field, we budding political thinkers stopped long enough to discuss the succession of Harry Truman to the presidency, Franklin Roosevelt having just died.

Friend Bill, a Roosevelt fan, questioned my deep concern over Truman, whom for some reason I considered even worse than the (in our house) much resented FDR. How I responded I can’t remember. I just know I felt very convinced.

The houses came, the houses went... Where Cheney Mansion stands, on the 200 North Euclid block, was once a beautiful many-porticoed house, a private residence big enough to be a sanitarium or nursing home. The owner tore it down.

Where there are houses on Ridgeland just south of North Avenue was the cutest brick farm house from the 1860s. Developers flattened it in the 1920s.

The area north of North Avenue -- hundreds of acres -- was a family farm. The owner, a man named Gale, trashed it for the sake of developing what we know as the city neighborhood, Galewood. He’s commemorated in a shingle on the Unity Temple parish house on Kenilworth across from the Oak Park post office.

Oak Parkers have not always been as respectful of history and the land as today’s [2004] anti-development people want. I’m not making it up. It’s in a 1990 Historical Society calendar with photos of long-ago houses by Philander Barclay, of Philander’s Restaurant and Poor Phil’s sports bar fame.

(As for the Oak Park & River Forest Historical Society, It’s been the source of this tale of demolition in the course of the village’s march of progress.)

Some of the landscape-changing was done by or for churches. A big “stick style” house from the early 1870s at Oak Park and Superior got out of the way in 1900, leaving room for First Methodist 25 years later.

Two years later, in 1927, First Baptist replaced another stick-style house two blocks away, at Oak Park Avenue and Ontario Street.

This was O.W. Herrick’s house, which in our time might have been preserved. Herrick had come from New York as a schoolmaster and had married the daughter of founding father Joseph Kettlestrings, whose name is on a plaque at the southwest corner of Scoville Park. Herrick was Oak Park’s first postmaster.

That’s not the half of it about the Herricks. Their son James B. Herrick was a trailblazing Rush Medical College researcher who described (discovered) sickle-cell anemia and coronary thrombosis. In his memoirs he spoke of watching the 1871 Chicago fire from his house and later greeting his father in a horse-drawn vehicle returning from the city, where he had gone with food and supplies for homeless and hungry survivors. [See: Good Medicine: The First 150 Years of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center]

To continue. In 1932 houses were torn down for a new post office at Kenilworth & Lake. Across Lake a splendid Italianate house became a tear-down, leaving room for what was to become the Grace Episcopal church yard.

Down the street Henry Austin moved his house in 1936 from Lake Street, where it was obstructing commerce, to what we call Austin Gardens. That lovely house was flattened 25 years or so later -- for noble purposes, to make room for grass, trees, and in due time outdoor performances of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, on Lake Street just short of Harlem Avenue, an Italianate cottage dating from the 1860s had fallen years earlier to the wrecking ball, crushed by the wheels of commerce.

In 1927 a late-1800s stick-style house at Maple and Washington lost out to an apartment building marvelously titled “Sulgrave Manor,” whose multipurpose architecture was intended somehow to evoke the tenth, 19th, and 20th centuries!

The apartment building -- the condo of its day -- took over space from a late-19th-century turreted Queen Anne house at 228 South Oak Park Avenue, once called home by the family of Melancthon Smith, a prominent Presbyterian and treasurer of the Oak Park Band Concert. Nothing was sacred.

And around the corner and down a few blocks, at Washington and East, a three-story, multi-chimneyed “imposing colonial revival” house with a high-roofed wrap-around front porch was replaced in 1929 by the equally imposing sandstone of Fenwick High school, home of “Friars, men of steel,” according to the school’s fight song.

That was a good move, say I. It meant I could plunge into the Fenwick pool first thing in the morning on every other school day, even on the coldest days of my freshman year in the winter of ‘45 and ‘46. Men of cold steel.

— to be continued —