Harry and Fidel

I went downtown earlier this week for business, and fortunately had a little time to walk around streets I used to see every day but now only visit every few months. As usual, I noticed that certain shops were gone, others had opened, even that a building or two had vanished, or progress had been made on construction of something new. The Chicago condo boom has just about run out of steam, for now, but the lead time on such a building is so long that construction usually carries on into a slump, a little like the Empire State Building, planned in the late ’20s but not built until the country was actually sliding into the Depression.

Sorry to say that the Harold’s Chicken Shack on Franklin has closed. (Amazingly, there’s a Wikipedia article about the Herold’s chain.) It opened at that location three or four years ago, an easy trip on foot from my office at the time. The chicken was good, but I also went for Harold’s fried chicken livers. One heapin’ box was enough to make two lunches, if you like liver.

I also took a bus to a North Side destination, and shared part of the ride with a bus-riding loony. Been a while since I’d done that, too. Public-transit loonies can be unpleasant for everyone else, but usually not. Though not dressed for the part, the fellow was a dead ringer for the latter-day Fidel Castro: bushy grey beard and eyebrows, but also in the shape of his face.

He pointed out the window and muttered in Spanish, except when we drove by Harry Caray’s restaurant, which has a large banner outside that says Holy Cow!, which was Harry’s signature phrase back when he was among living sportscasters. “Holy Cow, Holy Cow!” Castro said, looking around at everyone else in the bus, maybe to see if the phrase was as important to us as it was to him. It wasn’t.