Reading the Stones

Again and again on my walks in Chicago I stumble across little cues that awaken memories of my childhood. They’re not usually of a specific moment or event; they’re more like a long-forgotten scent or taste. And their triggers are hardly ever prominent fixtures on the streetscape. Often, they’re little architectural features: corbels or mouldings resembling ones that my eye must have lingered on long ago. Features like this keystone on a prewar apartment building I passed while walking down Marquette Road in West Englewood, on the South Side:

I stared at this weird little botanical motif for some time, trying to remember why the hell I remembered it, and pondering its reasons for being there. I concluded eventually that those ears of corn emerging from their husks were probably some local stonemason’s tribute to the crop that has fueled prosperity for so long in the Midwest, or maybe they were a symbol of rural bounty or good fortune. There was something innocent and hopeful about them, something pleasantly incongruous with the burned-out storefronts lining the nearby blocks. Whatever their purpose, after that encounter, I began noticing corn-themed ornamentation on buildings all over the city.

Some of the memory land mines strewn about the city are more eye-catching than others—like the neon and day-glo vintage signage that once beckoned customers to mom-and-pop business along all of the city’s thoroughfares. I’ve come across audacious signs like this one, in Chicago Lawn:

And back-to-the-future signs like this one, for a dry cleaner on West 79th Street in Chatham:

Such sights bring back the days when I was a kid, when small-time streetfront shopping seemed to be the only kind there was.

More often, though, I connect with less obvious elements. I’ve always had an affection for the faux-rustic stone inlays that adorn the facades of many ’50s- and ’60s-era low-rise apartment buildings all over Chicago. Curious decorative additions like this one, on a building on West 63rd Street:

Or this one, set into the wall of an apartment complex perched on the embankment of the Metra tracks in Blue Island, just south of the city limits:

Whence these architectural afterthoughts? With no obvious symbolic or utilitarian value—aside from maybe evoking some distant villa or hunting lodge—these stone inlays, though hardly unique to this city, have always struck me as peculiarly Chicagoan. Once you take note of them, they turn up everywhere you look. My great-grandmother lived in such a building, and after gazing for a few seconds at those chunks of flagstone or river rock, out of nowhere I’m remembering the Brach’s candies served in a molded glass dish in the shape of a Irish setter on my great-grandmother’s coffee table; the scent of her perfume mingling with that of naphthalene; the jangling of her charm bracelet, each heart-shaped silver trinket inscribed with the name of a child, a grandchild, a great-grandchild. Such memories seem at once to close and to widen the gulf of time. And they come only when I’m not looking for them, when I’m walking down the street with no particular destination.