5/26/21
Yours truly has to admit that one of my guilty pleasures
is the 1971 Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah ditty “Lake Shore Drive.” The song never fails to bring a tear to my
eye, probably because so much of my youth was spent driving up and down Lake Shore
Drive long past the hour at which, as my cop friend like to say, nothing good
happens. Most of those stories best
remain unwritten, though they may surface in the book on which I am working.
Here, however, is an innocuous story involving that tune:
Shortly after we moved to Naperville, now some 27 years ago, the marquee of a
bar I would drive past on Ogden Avenue on my way to the train declared “Friday
night, one night only, Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah.” Hmm.
Since “Lake Shore Drive” turned out to be a medley of that trio’s hit, I
wonder what they did for their, I presume, at least hour long gig. Did they get up and play “Lake Shore Drive,”
wait for the crowd to yell “Play LSD again, you mothers!,” or something like that,
and play it again…about twenty times? By
that time having been long past the age at which I frequented establishments
that served strong drink and mediocre rock’n’roll, I never satisfied that
curiosity.
But I digress.
It looks like the Chicago City Council is going to
re-name outer Lake Shore Drive “DuSable Drive” in order to honor Jean Baptiste
Point DuSable, the first non-native to set up shop, almost literally, in
Chicago. Like many of my fellow
Chicagoans, I am not for the name change.
Lake Shore Drive, besides being the world’s most beautiful stretch of urban
road, would be Chicago’s most iconic street were it not for Western Avenue,
once, and maybe still, the longest urban street in the world, running from Howard
Street on the northern border of Chicago to 119th Street on the southern
border of Chicago. And that is only the
Chicago portion of Western; it runs well into Harvey, home of the Dells (which,
by the way, were never known as “The Mighty Dells” back when they were in the
business of producing doo-wop and R&B hits with near boring regularity; the
adjective “Mighty” in connection with the Dells only accrued to that pre-eminent
vocal group when they became an object of fascination with the public TV crowd
about fifteen years ago, but there I go again.), on the south and probably into
several north shore communities in the north, but I wouldn’t be the go-to guy
on streets north of town. That I grew
up about a block and a half from 119th and Western might have
something to do with my judgment on the relative iconography of Western Avenue
and Lake Shore Drive, but, again, and for the last time in this post, I digress.
Besides changing the name of Chicago’s, and the world’s,
most scenic street, the effort to change outer Lake Shore Drive would be to
cave into the whims of a, to put it nicely, fickle crowd. One can foresee all kinds of future problems
by catering to this group of history class also-rans. So I sent the following letter to the Chicago
Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune; the Sun-Times ran it on May 3;
the Tribune did not run it:
4/29/21
Suppose that the city does decide to rename the Outer
Drive for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable.
How long do you suppose it will take the self-appointed guardians of all
that is woke and virtuous to decide that Mr. DuSable, as the first permanent,
non-indigenous settler in our area, was an exploiter of native peoples and consequently
demand that DuSable Drive be renamed?
Mark M. Quinn
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