Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

and Division Street. It is an intersection of the new and the old, of the rich and the poor, of the lively and the lifeless, of the artists and the artful. The park is a refuge for drifters and day laborers, the very slice of the city Algren wrote about, and, indeed, engraved at the foot of the fountain is a quote from
City on the Make
: “For the masses who do the city’s labor also keep the city’s heart.” But the neighborhood is changing, and in the mornings young men in gray suits and young women in white blouses and somber skirts merge here to catch the bus or the El downtown. The Busy Bee, once the anchor here, is gone, replaced by restaurants that require reservations and bars so well lit you could read a newspaper in them. Families have razed old homes and built anew. After all, neighborhoods in Chicago change direction regularly; in another part of town, for instance, you have Mexican-Americans occupying Pilsen, which was originally a community of Czechs and was named after Plzen, the second largest city in Czechoslovakia. But in Wicker Park it’s unclear who the insiders are and who the outsiders are, and so you have Spring, one of the city’s posher, trendier restaurants, at one corner of the neighborhood, and Polska Restauracja Podhalanka, which has been around for twenty years, at another. It’s as if the neighborhood is simultaneously moving both backward and forward in time.
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    Robert Guinan is an artist whose inspiration, like Algren’s, comes from the street, from the people who are seen but not heard, and for that reason I had wanted to meet him. He suggested that we rendezvous just a block west of Triangle Park at Rite Liquors on Division Street, the bar where he had spent many years drinking and sketching. This is Algren’s old turf. I waited beneath the tavern’s tired-looking green awning, watching its collection of neon signs— BUDWEISER, GO BEARS , a green shamrock, DRINK STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE —toss flickers of light on the cracked sidewalk. A thick-legged elderly woman entered Rite Liquors, and I could hear a voice from inside announce good-naturedly, “Here comes that dancing gigolo.” “What?” the woman growled. “What y’a say?” The man and his friend chuckled. Then a man who was missing a good number of teeth and wearing a T-shirt that read LICK IT SLAM IT SUCK IT came up and offered to sell me a sledgehammer. It was wrapped in electrical tape and looked as worn as he did. When I declined, he flung the mallet over his shoulder and tried the other customers in the bar, who turned down his offer as well.
    Rite Liquors is like a spinster among the young and the beautiful. Directly across the street are two new stores: Smack, a clothing boutique, and Bamboo Nail Spa. There’s a Starbucks on the corner, and down the street a sushi bar and the Smoke Daddy, a rib joint (which despite the fact that it is relatively trendy has some of the best ribs in the city, along with live blues bands). But Rite Liquors refuses to give ground. Patrons, mostly men, still beat the bar’s owner to work, waiting under the awning at seven a.m. for the doors to open and for the beer and whiskey to flow.
    â€œIt’s still here.” The voice has a warbly quality to it. Guinan, who at sixty-nine is slightly built and light-footed, has sneaked up behind me. His face, which looks alternately dour, amused, and baffled, is almost cartoonish-looking in its pliability; Guinan has the expressiveness of a mime. Guinan was once a regular at Rite Liquors, where he would come to sketch two patrons in particular. One was a young blonde bartender, Dorota, who had come from Poland just a few years earlier, and who complained to Guinan that his sketches made her appear unhappy. (The bartenders at Rite Liquors still tend to be recently arrived young Polish women.) The other was Loretta, an African-American woman who had worked in a