Ask Rick: Your questions take us back in time
As you put away your golf clubs, take your winter coats out of storage and worry about the state of the Bears and of our nation, welcome to the sixth installment of “Ask Rick,” that experiment intended as a way for Chicago Tribune readers to ask me questions they might have about the place we all call home. The summer months and a few fall weeks have brought in more questions, comments, criticisms and bits of praise and, as always, some craziness to www.chicagotribune.com/askrick.
I responded to most, even, “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
My answer was, “That all depends.” What is on my mind now is a bygone restaurant named Riccardo’s, because through “Ask Rick” I received this question/comment from Michael Thompson: “Riccardo’s Restaurant had a painting by Ivan Albright on the wall, an Aaron Bohrod, plus three others, as I recall. Do you know what happened to them? That was a special restaurant.”
It was special, this legendary spot that was the creation of an exuberant creature named Ric Riccardo.
Born Richard Novaretti in Italy, he was a painter, dancer and musician who, after some interesting adventures elsewhere, came to Chicago and opened, in a sliver of a space in 1934 at Rush and Hubbard Streets, a place he formally called Riccardo Restaurant and Gallery. He allowed artist friends to hang and sell their work there, and he painted three large female nudes and mounted two of them on the ceiling. Riccardo’s, as everyone called it, was where my parents first set eyes on one another in 1948. They named me in honor their good friend Ric, my mother adding a “k” to my first name for, she said, “a little more substance.” It is where I had an incalculable number of meals and drinks and conversations and debates and arguments over the decades.
The paintings that Mr. Thompson mentions were known as “The Seven Lively Arts” and they had been commissioned after World War II by Ric, who mounted them on the wall behind and above the restaurant’s bar, which was built in the shape of an artist’s palette.
One of the paintings was his own (representing dance) and the others were by Rudolph Weisenborn (literature), William Schwartz (music), Vincent D’Agostino (painting), Ivan Albright (drama) and his brother Malvin Albright (sculpture), and Aaron Bohrod (architecture).
After Ric’s death in 1954, his son sold off two of the most valuable of the paintings (the Ivan Albright and the Bohrod). He also sold the restaurant before he died in 1977.
Nick and Bill Angelos did a fine job running the place but finally had to close Riccardo’s in 1995; I wrote the eulogy. For many good years after, it was Phil Stefani’s 437 Rush and a great spot until it closed a couple of years ago. It is now empty.
But back to the paintings. Early in this century the charming real estate mogul, art collector, philanthropist and preservationist Seymour Persky bought five of the paintings from the Angelos family and diligently tracked down the missing two, bought those, had them restored and put them on exhibition in 2002 at the Union League Club of Chicago, where he was the chairman of the art committee.
Persky died in 2015 at the age of 92, and the seven magnificent paintings have long resided in a place not open to the public but not out of memory.
Interestingly, another “Ask Rick” question, from Cal Skinner, had a Riccardo’s connection: “What happened to the Chicago Journalism Review. Mimeographed. I think back in the 1970s.”
The Chicago Journalism Review was the first independent journal of media criticism owned and operated by reporters in the nation. It was founded in the late 1960s, in part as a reaction to what many reporters, writers and photographers felt was lousy and slanted media coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and what others felt was a too-cozy relationship between the mainstream media and the city’s politicians and businessmen.
So there was a gathering upstairs at Riccardo’s. Among the people there were journalists Ron Dorfman and Hank De Zutter. They started a monthly publication — printed, not mimeographed — that was a critique of the city’s press. As I once wrote, “It was wonderful, wild, sometimes wacky and usually wise. It allowed space for staffers on the city papers — there were four major daily newspapers in those days — a place, other than the nearest saloon, in which to voice their gripes and exchange ideas.”
At its height, CJR circulation hit 9,000, but by 1975 (the same year I wrote a story for it about the life and death of a magazine called the Chicagoan, where I had worked) that number was down to 2,500 and that was that, with one of its editors attributing the publication’s death to “apathy” among working journalists.
A more pleasant memory was sparked by this, from Vicki Kirk: “Was there a Holiday Inn in downtown Chicago, with a revolving restaurant at the top. This would have been in the early ’70s.”
Well, yes, there was. Atop what is now the W Chicago Lakeshore hotel at 644 N. Lake Shore Drive there was once a revolving restaurant named The Pinnacle. The hotel was the Lake Shore Holiday Inn then and the restaurant, which opened along with the hotel in 1965, was the only circular revolving restaurant in Chicago and the only such spinning spot in the chain’s 600 motels. It turned at the rate of one revolution an hour on the 33rd floor into the early 1970s.
The room occasionally featured entertainment — anyone remember the Rich Christoff Trio? — along with photos of old street scenes and notable historical citizens, dishes such as Frog Legs Sandburg ($8.75) and the Lincoln Park salad ($2.50) and, needless to say, great views.
And, finally, this from Mike Pritchett: “How about some history, the journey, the update on WLS AM 890 from the mid ’70s to today? I loved my fantastic plastic card and animal stories with Uncle Lar!”
WLS has a storied and lengthy history, much too long for this space but available at wlshistory.com/WLS60, with a link to a book by Scott Childers. The station, its call letters standing for World’s Largest Store (i.e., Sears, which owned it for a time), started broadcasting in the 1920s and would eventually become a ratings powerhouse. The “Uncle Lar” mentioned, and who thousands of you surely remember, was Larry Lujack, a distinctive talent who was on top of the ratings for two decades, starting in 1967. I was in the studio for his final broadcast, which took place on Aug. 28, 1987. One of his last on-air comments was this: “Saying goodbye is kind of silly.”
He was 47 at the time and died in 2013 at 73, in case you were curious.