The unique Castle Car Wash building on Ogden Avenue, aka Route 66, in the Chicago suburb of North Lawndale has recently become the target of preservationists.
Now, according to the Chicago Tribune, other parts of Lawndale are being considered as important historic sites, and the car-wash building is now considered a catalyst in the effort:
Amid the century-old greystones and scores of Jewish synagogue buildings still standing, a young Benny Goodman launched his career with rooftop garden gigs at the Jewish People’s Institute, now the Lawndale Community Academy on Douglas Boulevard.
Later, Golda Meir lived in the neighborhood, attending Zionist meetings that led to her role as prime minister of Israel.
And (Martin Luther) King lived on Hamlin Avenue in the mid-1960s, overseeing a new urban civil rights movement in Chicago. Near where his run-down apartment once stood, clubs wailed with a tinny new “West Side sound” of blues generated by the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy. […]
For instance, a few Ogden Avenue clinics pay homage to Belle Whaley, known as “the first lady of Lawndale” for the decades she spent feeding the neighborhood’s poor and elderly before she died in 1990.
Dawkins lives a few blocks away. He’s happy to share stories about such characters as Big Bill Hill or Left-Hand Frank who helped make Lawndale a blues mecca.
“That’s all gone now,” he said recently, staring out a McDonald’s window at subsidized apartments that stand where a 12th Street blues hall once packed in large crowds.
By the way, Chicago roadie David Clark is quoted in the article.
The Castle Car Wash building is representative of an earlier, happier era in the town. I’m just glad that the movement to buy the deteriorating building and convert it into a tourism center seems to be gaining momentum.
More about North Lawndale can be read here.
(Photo courtesy of David G. Clark.)