Discover the city’s mysteries in ‘Secret Chicago’

We live in a world, a city, where secrets are increasingly hard to come by and almost impossible to keep. Thanks a lot, Google.

And so when, after it had been sitting on my desk for many months, I casually picked up a book titled “Secret Chicago: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and the Obscure” (Reedy Press), by Jessica Mlinaric, I did not expect to find anything or any place I did now already know.

Indeed, there were many wellknown spots of the 90 covered in the book’s 200-some pages, places such as the Green Mill, Busy Beaver Button Company, International Museum of Surgical Science, First United Methodist Church of Chicago, and a number of cemeteries such as Oak Woods, Graceland and Woodlawn.

That list is long and in some cases quite personal, such as details of the rocks embedded in the Tribune Tower, this newspaper’s former home. There is also the Couch Mausoleum, located in Lincoln Park near the Chicago History Museum and the final resting place of a businessman named Ira Couch, who lived from 1806-1857. It is the tomb that some pint-sized pals and I tried to break into with some regularity but to no avail in the 1960s, using hammers and screwdrivers and whatever else we could find.

Still I was surprised and delighted to find in the book a few things that were new to me, and likely will be to many of you.

Kim’s Corner Food, a convenience store owned by Thomas Kong at 1371 W. Estes Ave. in Rogers Park, which Mlinaric calls “a “dizzying delight [where] Kong’s minimal collages cover the walls, shelves, coolers, even the merchandise.”

The grave of Andreas von Zirngibl, a Chicago settler who died the year after coming here in 1854 with a wife and five children and who remains buried on property he once owned on what is now an industrial site at 9331 S. Ewing Ave. As Mlinaric writes, “Today, concrete blocks mark the grave where a wooden cross once did. At about one hundred square feet, it may be the city’s smallest cemetery, but its caretaker over the years have honored Von Zirngibl’s last wish.”

Mlinaric came here from Cleveland a decade ago and enthusiastically began to explore like to think so: Hull House, the Tiffany Dome in the Cultural Center, the Hideout, Glessner House. But there are many pleasant surprises. Do you know about Robinson Woods? Chicago Honey Co-op? Optimo Hats?”

Mlinaric is enjoying the sometimes exhausting chore of promoting her book and will do so again from 6-8 p.m. on Feb. 7 at FieldHouse Jones, an interesting new hotel/event space at 312 W. Chestnut St. She’s hosting a trivia contest based on her book. Admission is free.

If you pick up the book, you will see a quotation from me, something I wrote long ago but still believe to be true: “There is not a day that passes that I do not find my head filled with images from Chicago’s history.”

Another other quote in the book is from Sun Ra, the late avant garde jazz musician/composer: “And then I went to Chicago, that’s where I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets.”

I have no idea what he is talking about but I can tell you that I first met Mlinaric in the summer of 2017. I had just finished my chores as host of the Newberry Library’s Bughouse Square Debates, that annual July gathering of soapbox orators held in conjunction with the Newberry’s book sale. It was for many years hosted by the late Studs Terkel and, as I ever do when concluding my hosting remarks, mentioned that Terkel and his wife were buried in Bughouse Square, formally known and Washington Square Park (the oldest park in the city). It was an important place for Studs, who spent some formative time there. As he wrote in his book “Touch and Go”: “I doubt whether I learned very much (at the park). One thing I know: I delighted in it. Perhaps none of it made any sense, save one kind: sense of life.”

So, I said to the crowd, “I’ll happily show you where he is buried.”

In 2017, Mlinaric was the only person to come up to me and ask, “OK, where?”

And so I walked her across the park and showed her the tree that marks the final resting place of the ashes of Studs and his wife Ida. I told her that it was too bad there is no plaque offering what Terkel before his death said could serve as his epitaph: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”

She snapped a photo but she does not in this book give away the precise location. She is keeping that a secret, and you’ve got to admire her for that.