Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

It still feels funny to drive down east 63rd Street between Stony Island and Cottage Grove in the Woodlawn neighborhood and see virutally nothing. Coming up in the 1970s, I remember when that stretch of 63rd was a dense near-mile of shops, a theater, bank buildings, offices, a grocery store, and restaurants topped by a roaring elevated train. In the 1970s, my oldest sister, Claudette, worked at the two Vito's Grocery stores on 63rd. My father bought his steel-toed Hi-Test workboots from a shoe store there.

Much of the street and the EL was demolished about 15 years now. Since then, east 63rd has been an urban prairie largely, with new middle-class housing coming in and inching its way westward.

But I don't want to be too nostalgic about this thing. The once-mighty 63rd Street was one of the saddest commercial strips in Chicago by the time it was demolished. It was disappearing via neglect. Stores were vacant and prone to fires. I once saw a half-block burn in 1989 one night when I was a City News Bureau reporter. So help me, the other half burned a week later.

But all of that is but pretext. Today I present scenes of a film from my youth, The Monkey Hustle--a title that would not pass muster today--from 1976. The plot is immaterial: a light, post-Uptown Saturday Night comedy with African American characters running rinky-dink hustles and street scams on each other. The inaugural scam involves the swiping of a carton of Wanser's milk. Truffaut, this ain't. There is a subplot involving the Crosstown Expressway, so give the filmmakers some credit. And I'm not saying this movie is a bomb, but I think the ATF found a spool of wire and two copies of The Monkey Hustle underneath the floorboards in Lefty Rosenthal's car in Vegas back in 1983...

Where was I? Oh yes...The Monkey Hustle was filmed in Woodlawn and watching it now is like opening a time capsule of the neighborhood. A lot of the action takes place on old 63rd Street. In the scene above, a neighborhood activists office looks out on the South East Bank building at 63rd and Drexel, if memory serves. You can catch a bit of the Jackson Park el in the background.

In this scene below, The Woodlawn Organization's (T.W.O) old HQ is clearly visible. The latticework of the now-departed Jackson Park el runs overhead.

Below: A Queen Anne styled station on the old Jackson Park line. (The line was built for the Columbian Exposition), a pretty mean pair of Afros and a glimpse of Harold's Chicken Shack #7. None of this exists today. I bet the red Ford Granada was the first to go, though.

Below: Another view of 63rd, looking southwest, if I recall. Look at  the big shop windows on the York Clothes Store. And to the right is Kham & Nate's Shoes an African American-owned business, now defunct, to the right. They used to have a location at 87th and Cottage Grove, but that's another story.

Below: Outside of Woodlawn, the movie shows us the old LaSalle Street Metra Station, which was demolished in the 1980s. The scene on the right shows the base of the Tribune Tower and the grid-faced Equitable Building as Yaphet Kotto and Kirk Calloway (who was quite good in Cinderella Liberty) join forces to chase down the people who convinced them to appear in this movie.