For many, the thing to grill is ribs, but most anything will do.

I am not a cook or a grill guy but consider myself something of a rib expert, having eaten plenty (those at Twin Anchors are on top of my current list) and for a few 1980s years served as a judge for the Mike Royko Ribfest, generally acknowledged, by no less an authority than “The Chicago Food Encyclopedia” (University of Illinois Press), to have been “one of the nation’s first large barbeque competitions.” I remember those days fondly, as I wrote a while ago, “the unity, the harmony and the togetherness of them all. There were, side by side, groups from Glencoe and West Pullman, Rosemont and Roseland, Austin and Streeterville — white, Black and brown. There was no anger or violence, no arrests or trouble. If there were arguments, they were about cooking methods or sauces ‘sweet or tangy.’ These were harmonious and hopeful gatherings.”

So, I was talking about grilling with Joe Carlucci, a man I have often consulted in matters of food and drink. His name may be familiar to you because he has had an acclaimed and influential presence on the local scene. He said to me, “You can’t cook, you know?

Carlucci was born and raised in New York. After graduating with a degree in psychology from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, he worked in the music business for a few years, saying, “My first day on the job I had to pick up Bette Midler at the airport.”

He came to Chicago in the early ‘80s, began operating eponymous restaurants in the city and suburbs and worked with a couple of Mike Ditka’s joints. He still operates a few places and consults with others, including recently with some of the most popular grill guys in the world. They are the BBQ Pit Boys and this is how he found them about four years ago: “I was watching TV one Saturday morning and on came this guy with a beard being interviewed about grilling,” Carlucci says. “With my background in music I think I have a good ability to judge star quality and the guy I was watching had it.”

He tracked down the man, whose “grill name” is “Bobby Fame” but his real name is actually Bob Ahlgren, the creator of the culinary phenomenon known as BBQ Pit Boys. They talked. They liked one another. They became partners and Carlucci helped facilitate the recent publication of “BBQ Pit Boys Book of Real Guuud Barbecue” (Firefly Books). It is a handsome 256-page, colorful, lively and entertaining book. It is packed with recipes and tips for grilling and smoking a variety of meats, as well as sides and desserts. All the usual suspects are here, such as pulled pork, ribs and chicken wings. There are also recipes for alligator, lamb and venison. There’s fish, soups and sides. There’s a lot.

It also gives you the BBQ Pit Boys origin story, which Ahlgren told me over the phone a few days ago. “Well, I ran a small publishing company and was a serious antique dealer,” he says. “When YouTube first started around 2007, I thought it might be a good thing to spread the word about my business. Then a friend of mine from California wanted to get a recipe for something I grilled for him when he was visiting. I thought it would be fun to do that as a video and I posted it for him on YouTube.”

YouTube called him, asked him to become a partner and shipped him thousands of dollars worth of cameras and other equipment. They also sent him a check for $32.

That was long ago and the checks have gotten larger. The BBQ Pit Boys is now an international fraternal order, with some 18,000 international chapters and 230,000 pitmasters, according to the book. Episodes are posted every week and they have been viewed more than 94 million times.

The nature of the show hasn’t really changed. It’s still a group of guys around a grill, drinking and making food. Ahlgren is the host, affable and amiable and, as he says, “making sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

The enterprise is based not in Tennessee or Arkansas, as the boys’ outfits might suggest, but rather in Connecticut. In addition to YouTube, the Pit Boys are now spread across the other prominent social media platforms such as Facebook, X and Instgram. They have 2.2 million YouTube subscribers, are in the top 5% of all YouTube channels and are number one when it comes to BBQ.

Not surprisingly, Ahlgren has been approached “more than ten times by network producers about doing shows for them,” he says. “But I have rejected them all. They talk about how they can make me famous but I am already famous and I don’t want to be part of fake TV, become part of the reality show world.  And I never want to lose control of the content and the way we deliver it.”

This was never intended to be a star-making vehicle. The focus is on the food and that’s one reason why Ahlgren and his pals wear sunglasses and cowboy hats that cover most of their faces. That aversion to the seductions of the mainstream entertainment business appeals to Carlucci, and to another food person who is also a partner with the Pit Boys. Ed Rensi is a former president and CEO of McDonald’s and he and Carlucci are intent on exploring all manner of opportunities.

“Bob and his pit boys have such a broad platform and the ability to reach so many people,” says Carlucci. “But we are going to be true to the spirit of the show and of the people. They never had a business plan. This is just a great fun idea that has blossomed into a wonderful enterprise.”

He tells me that a Pit Boys line of sauces and rubs is currently available in 3,000 stores across Canada, and a Pit Boys beer can be had in Texas. The website offers all manner of official merchandise.

Then he asked me which of the book’s recipes I was thinking of tackling.

“You can’t cook, you know?” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “That’s why I’m going to try the Cigar Ash BBQ Sauce (page 233) or Bacon Oreo BBQ Cookies (page 255).”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

Located at 3724 N. Clark St., in what for a couple of decades had been the Full Shilling Public House, the new Goat joins the increasingly frenetic playground and booze-fueled area that surrounds Wrigley Field.

Earlier in this century there had been a Goat a few blocks south but that closed after two years. “But it is nice to be back,” says Bill Sianis, whose family has long owned the Billy Goats. “It was always in our plans to return to the neighborhood. Maybe we are meant to be together.”

Others agree. The Lakeview East Chamber of Commerce issued a statement about its excitement for “the potential for this legendary establishment to weave itself into the fabric of our neighborhood. The arrival of the Billy Goat Tavern in Wrigleyville signifies more than just the expansion of a beloved Chicago eatery; it marks the coming together of two iconic Chicago institutions — Wrigley Field and the Billy Goat Tavern.”

It’s possible — isn’t it? — that some people might never have heard of the curse? The tavern’s north room will inform them. The story is on the walls, traveling back to Oct. 6, 1945, and William Sianis, owner of a tavern known as the Billy Goat Inn on Madison Street across from what was then the Chicago Stadium.

On that day he brought his pet goat named Murphy to see the Cubs play the Detroit Tigers in the fourth game of the World Series. Murphy was wearing a blanket with a sign pinned to it that read, “We Got Detroit’s Goat.”

In short, the pair were not allowed to take their seats and they returned to the tavern. After the Cubs lost the series, Sianis sent a telegram to team owner Phil Wrigley, asking, “Who stinks now?” And so was the curse born, fueled by a combination of the Cubs’ ineptitude and the inventiveness of newspaper writers. It finally ended when the Cubs won game seven against the Cleveland Indians in the 2016 World Series.

The southern room of the new tavern is devoted to the other source of BG fame: its many famous visitors, from presidents to movie stars, and some of the journalists who wrote of the BG, none more enthusiastically or artfully than columnist Mike Royko. Its walls also tell of the 1978 “Saturday Night Live” skit inspired by the “cheezborger, cheezborger” mantra at the BG and starring John Belushi, Bill Murray and Robert Klein. This room also contains the kitchen.

At an informal family-and-friends opening a couple of weeks ago, the crowd was peppered with a few celebrities, a couple of politicians, some loyal customers of the other Goats and a few curious neighbors.

Sam Sianis, the patriarch of the family that owns and operates the taverns, was there. Sitting and smiling, he might have been recalling how he came here from his native Greece in 1955 to work for his uncle Billy, helped open in 1964 what is now the oldest BG, that subterranean tavern on Hubbard Street.

He was with his wife Irene and she was smiling too as they watched some of their six grown children — in addition to Bill, sons Tom, Paul and Ted, and twin daughters Patty and Jennifer — and 11 grandkids examine the handsome new place.

Bill Sianis had a goat on a leash and they wandered around, stopping here and there for people who wanted to touch the animal. Bill said he and the family had purchased the entire two-story building where the tavern sits, with apartments upstairs. “We are here for keeps and maybe the chance for another World Series,” he said.

Earlier this week he was back, with his wife, Boriana Tchernookova, a visiting clinical assistant professor in the biology department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Sitting with them was their son, the youngest of the pack of Sianis grandchildren, nearly 4-year-old Ephraim.

“And he is already saying, ‘cheezborger, cheezborger,” Tchernookova said. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

Ana Luna was working nearby. She has worked for the Sianis family for 15 years, at the other Billy Goat locations and most recently in the Lake Street outpost that recently closed. She is excited and not only because this spot is closer to her home.

“Yes, I can walk to work and I am still getting used to it, but I know it’s going to be good here,” she said. “Of course we expect it to be crowded when the Cubs are playing and there are a lot of other events at the park during the year. But we can’t wait to start serving breakfast and meet all our new neighbors.”

One of those neighbors is Joe Shanahan, the owner of the Metro/Smart Bar/Gman Tavern complex to the north. He has been in the neighborhood for more than 40 years. He was at the opening party and told me, “We welcome the Billy Goat to the block and wish them only the best success. The Sianis family has made a great impression on me and all the people I work with. It is not everyday you meet an icon like Sam Sianis on his ‘opening day’ and get to meet a goat too.”

“Paul Robeson is an under-appreciated giant of the 20th century,” says Lasana Kazembe, assistant professor of education at Indiana University in Indianapolis, a performer, poet, and the co-creator of the new “Paul Robeson: Man of the People,” a new jazz poetry opera. “There is a learning gap concerning Mr. Robeson. There is a lot of work I, we, have to do to bring his story to a new generation and to remind older generations about this man.”

This show premieres here on Friday but was seeded long before, when Kazembe was growing up in the Englewood neighborhood and attending Paul Robeson High School. “So, yes, I knew the name but it was not until I began college that I started to dig deeply into the life of this remarkable man,” he says.

As he traveled the academic road to a doctorate, he would learn plenty.

Born April 9, 1898, Robeson was the son of a runaway slave who had become a minister. He became an All-America football player at Rutgers University, where he won a dozen varsity letters and was the school’s valedictorian; he played professional football in what would become the NFL; was a lawyer after attending Columbia Law School; spoke and sang in 20 languages; and became, thanks to innate acting ability and his rich bass-baritone voice, a world-renowned singer and actor, most famous for his Harlem Renaissance roles in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” and in the stage and screen version of “Showboat,” in which he unforgettably, definitively sang “Ol’ Man River”; he recorded 300-some songs, and on and on.

The lofty term “Renaissance man” seems wildly insufficient. Robeson was a towering figure and was also “brave enough to speak out, becoming a pioneering voice in the struggle against racism and social injustice,” says Kazembe.

But Robeson’s international activism made him a target. He raised money for Welsh miners, lobbied the federal government to integrate major league baseball and pass antilynching legislation. He supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War and voiced support for the Stalinist Soviet Union.

The FBI began to dog him and in time he was branded as a public enemy, a Soviet apologist. He would be blacklisted, his reputation eroded. As a stark monetary example, in 1947, he made $100,000 as a performer. Five years later that income was diminished to $6,000. From 1950 to 1958, his passport was revoked and work was limited. He had previously performed in large venues — at Comiskey Park and in Orchestra Hall — but was, in time, relegated to small churches, factories and ballrooms, many on our South Side.

Still he never stopped speaking out but even during the height of the civil rights movement his perceived “anti-American” sentiments made him persona non grata, as organizations such as the NAACP never embraced him. His health and spirit would eventually break and he would die in 1976, with Harry Belafonte among his 12 pallbearers.

There are a number of fine books that chronicle Robeson’s life. I am partial to Martin Duberman’s biography. Kazembe has read that and many others — and knows why educator and civil rights leader  Mary McLeod Bethune famously referred to Robeson as “the tallest tree in our forest.”

“I have written about iconic figures before,” Kazambe says. “But this was likely the most gifted man of his time.”

The show had its world premiere with a performance Friday at The Cabaret in Indianapolis, where Kazembe recently finished a two-year stay as its artist-in-residence. Though there had been talks about perhaps having a performance at the Apollo Theater in New York City, schedules never meshed but Kazembe is excited to bring it to his hometown.

Kazembe spent more than three years crafting the six movements of the production. “It has 44 musical concepts,” he says. “Eight new poems and five new songs.”

Last year he sent his libretto to Ernest Dawkins, the esteemed Chicago saxophonist/composer and founder/director of the Englewood Jazz Festival (now in its 25th year), which he sees as “a training ground for young musicians. … That’s one of our missions: Mentor young musicians into professional musician status.”

Dawkins was impressed with Kazembe’s work and said, playfully, “Just leave the music to me.”

And so, what is expected to be a two-hour long (“no intermission,” says Kazembe) multimedia show will take place at Hamilton Park District. Kazembe and Dawkins will perform, as will vocalist Goldie Ingram and a 10 piece orchestra, embellished by hundreds of projected images, silent video of Robeson and other creative elements.

Admission is free, with no reservations or tickets required.

And if you are curious, Hamilton Park is named for Alexander Hamilton, a wildly talented human whose life and times blasted into the country’s consciousness with the immensely popular musical “Hamilton.” There is also a Hamilton elementary school on the North Side.

Paul Robeson High School, by the way, closed and was demolished in 2018.

“Paul Robeson: Man of the People” is 6 p.m. June 7 in the Fieldhouse at Hamilton Park District, 513 W. 72nd St.; free, www.choosechicago.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Koloc came here by train from her native Iowa in 1968 and quickly became, at the Quiet Knight and Earl of Old Town, one of our most beloved singers. She has long lived back in Iowa with her husband of decades, the writer/teacher/publisher Robert Wolf, and does not get to Chicago often enough to suit her fans.

But Osgood estimates that he has taken “thousands of photos of her, maybe tens of thousands” and you will be able to see some of them, never before seen by the public by the way, in a slideshow when Koloc takes to the stage at the Hideout on the afternoon of June 8, her first time at this enterprising and cozy club.

One of the club’s owners, public school teacher Tim Tuten, is wildly excited and proud to have her. “I was too young to have gotten in the clubs to see her, to see her and Steve Goodman and John Prine,” he says. “But I celebrate them. They are like this power trio, and she is the living embodiment of that, making it a living, breathing thing.”

Koloc will share the stage with Mark Guarino, the author of “Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival” (University of Chicago Press). He tells me, “This was a long time coming. A few months ago I went to Decorah, Iowa, and interviewed her in front of locals and she played a few songs at an indie bookstore. I loved Decorah and had a great time with Bonnie and Bob over two nights. So we are going to try to recreate it at the Hideout.”

The pair will dip into the memories, recall Koloc’s many recordings and concerts, her ups and downs. It has been quite a career. A few months after arriving here she shared gossip column space with Jimmy Durante, then appearing at the Empire Room, and that same year a newspaper critic wrote, “Bonnie Koloc doesn’t know where she’s going but the audience definitely knows where she’s at.” By 1971 she was headlining at Mister Kelly’s, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the audience.

There are some who will tell you that Koloc should have become a major star. But having watched and listened to her over the decades I take her at her word, especially in what she said to me a few years ago, “I have a great life. I find myself so much happier in my older years. Singing is my greatest joy. It has saved me.”

At the Hideout, Koloc will sing, accompanied by guitarist/singer/songwriter Steve Dawson, who not only has a new record about to be released but teaches Koloc’s songs in his songwriting classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

“There is something so youthful about Bonnie,” Guarino says. “She is full of spirit, ideas and is hilarious.”

The night before her Hideout appearance, Koloc will be at the Dime Gallery (1513 N. Western Ave.) for the opening of an exhibition of her artwork. “The first time I heard her sing ‘Jazzman’ I was a kid,” says artist/gallery owner Tony Fitzpatrick. “But she had a perfect upper register voice that could be mournful, lovely and transcendent. And her ‘I Can’t Sleep,’ a tribute to Steve Goodman, is a lovely lament that feels like a gospel song. I’ve not seen her in a long time, but many times years ago. Her art is just like her, elegant, coherent and poetic. … I adore her.”

Koloc has been a visual artist since childhood. In 1987, she returned to college to finish a bachelor’s degree in Art Education from the University of Northern Iowa. Since then she has been an active printmaker, painter and ceramist. She has had more than a few one-woman shows nationally and was part of 1999’s National Exhibition of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society.

She’s illustrated over a dozen books for Free River Press, her husband’s company. He and it are admirable, publishing collections of stories documenting life across America by people without literary ambition. She created the striking cover art and linocut decorations for Wolf’s “Heartland Portrait: Stories From the Rural Midwest” and for his two books with Oxford University Press: “An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk” and “Jump Start: How to Write From Everyday Life.”

The Dime exhibition will continue for weeks and now the plan is for Koloc to be there on weekends. You might have the chance to meet her husband Wolf at the gallery. The ghosts of Steve Goodman and John Prine too. So many of those who once populated her world are gone. But many remain. Tuten and Tony Fitzpatrick will be hanging around and some new fans too. And if she happens to break out in song, she will do so because, as she says, “Everybody has hard times in life, and I feel that my music can be healing. It has been for me and I want people listening to me sing to feel that no matter how hard things are, there will always be a better day. It is my mission, of sorts, to transmit my own joy to people listening to me.”

And, yes, as ever, Osgood will be around, a camera in his hands.

“An Afternoon of Conversation and Music with Bonnie Koloc” will be 4 p.m. June 8 at The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave.; tickets $20 (ages 21+) at hideoutchicago.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

That is how Conti recalls her first encounter with Gacy. It was October 1993 and he was locked on death row in the Menard Correctional Center in downstate Chester, Illinois. Conti, along with her partner in law and life, Greg Adamski, had been contacted to possibly represent him in some civil matters, one of which was fighting the prison’s attempt to stop him from profiting from sales of paintings he had created while in jail.

Over the next months she, as the only woman on his legal team, and Adamski would come to know Gacy in close fashion. They met with him often, shared meals, phone calls to their home, banter and personal stories. They would eventually represent Gacy in his last set of death row appeals.

Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. Adamski and Conti would carry on, cohosting a radio show and otherwise fashioning high-profile legal careers. He died in 2011 and Conti continues as a weekly WGN-AM720 radio host, TV commentator, practicing attorney and professor.

Happily remarried, she was compelled during the quiet of the pandemic to revisit her time with Gacy and now that, and much more, is packed onto the 250-some pages between the covers of her surprisingly compelling book, “Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row.”

I say surprising because, frankly, I have had more than my fill of the killer and never expected to revisit his life or crimes or death again. He and his evil have shadowed me ever since the snowy/icy December day in 1978 when, as a young reporter, I watched as some of the dead bodies of young men and boys were removed from the crawl space of Gacy’s ranch house near Norridge, in an unincorporated village in Norwood Park Township.

I stood in a crowd of stunned and curious neighbors, cops, a couple other reporters, medical technicians and others, many of them crying and all, it goes without saying, trying to grasp this particular manifestation of evil.

Eventually 33 bodies were discovered, 29 in the house and four others nearby. Gacy went on trial, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death. Even before that came, the foundation of his “immortality” had begun to form.

As the TV critic for this paper in May 1992, I wrote about his five-part gabfest with WBBM-Ch. 2’s Walter Jacobson: “(despite) typically hyperbolic promotional messages (‘The most notorious mass murderer in history talks’), the series of interviews was sedate … in fact so dull as to beg the question, ‘Why did you bother to air this?’” Also WGN-TV and its Steve Sanders at the same time offered a three-part “The Gacy File: Unanswered Questions” during its nightly newscast.

In that same story, I reviewed Brian Dennehy as Gacy in “To Catch a Killer.” I wrote that it was a “fine, tense and surprisingly reserved film … not the sordid, blood-stained romp that many might have expected.” Of Dennehy I wrote, “(he is) riveting. More physically imposing than the real killer, he has menace written across his crooked smile.”

Most recently, in 2021, I wrote about what I called a “a brilliant and provocative” six-part, six-hour documentary, “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise” on Peacock, “handsomely made, judicious in its uses of archival footage.”

Evil fascinates and this particular evil has also generated a shelf full of books.

Even though I know Conti, I would not have been drawn to open her book had it not been for Scott Turow, the best selling author and a lawyer who handled big cases as a U.S. attorney, including serving as lead counsel in the Operation Greylord trial and later, in private practice, helping free an innocent man from death row. He has called this book “addictively readable…[and it] answers some of the law’s most fascinating questions” and there are few lawyers or writers I respect more than Turow. His is just one voice in a chorus of praise the book has received, such as “unique and engaging” and “powerful.”

Those opinions are correct. This book also serves as a memoir and you get to know Conti’s background, the reasons why she has been a lifelong opponent of the death penalty and why she was able to grasp the humanity (if that’s the right word) inside Gacy. He calls her “Dollface” and she listens as he tells her, only hours before his execution, “You’re gonna be glad you represented me. Your career’s gonna skyrocket. … You’re gonna be forever connected with me … I love ya.”

It is difficult to determine how her encounters with John Wayne Gacy might have forever altered Karen Conti. She writes that she has been asked to “participate in a John Gacy seance, to be the judge in a Halloween horror costume competition, and to host a serial killer jeopardy game for charity. Handling this case has made me a legal novelty whether I like it or not.”

But it has also, in palpable ways, made her a talented writer, provocative storyteller and decent human being.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

We never found that bike but over the next decades, often early in the mornings in the hope that a Polish sausage would help cure a hangover, we found all sorts of diversions, wonders, music and bargains. Maxwell Street — we never called it the Maxwell Street Market, as it would come to be known by more formal folks in recent years — was a wild carnival of a place, a stretch that resembled, in its colorful chaos and hint of danger, that playground called Riverview, which vanished from the North Side in 1967.

Recent news sparked all sorts of memories of those of a certain age. Perhaps you heard about it, and learned that some variation of the Maxwell Street Market is returning to its original home this summer.

It will do so Sunday, settling in on Maxwell Street between Halsted Street and Union Avenue, as well as on Union from Rochford Street to Liberty Street. It’s been gone for a long time, moving first in 1994 to a portion of Canal Street and in 2008 to the 800 block of S. Desplaines Street.

This new move will offer a marketplace on the last Sundays of every month from this Sunday into October (the August market will take place on Sept. 1). It will be open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Entertainment and food are promised.

The reason for this move is that the Desplaines site is the city’s landing zone for migrants arriving here by bus and many more buses are expected. There is some irony in that, since the area that once spread out from the corner of Maxwell and Halsted Streets, was once and for more than a century a “landing zone” for immigrants.

From the 1880s into the 1990s it was a human quilt of various immigrant groups, mostly Jewish, then Black, then Latin in substantial waves. It was where people lived and worked, many of them at the marketplace that dominated the area, south along Halsted Street from Roosevelt Road to 16th Street. It attracted others from across the city, to buy and sell things. People played and listened to the blues. They ate food and in other ways tasted new cultures. Vibrant and wild, it was an essential piece of the city. It was, for so many, where their American dreams took root.

But as the University of Illinois-Chicago began to expand in the early 1990s, the market eventually vanished, despite the energetic efforts of the members of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition and others. In short, “urban renewal” order, the market was obliterated and the area rebuilt, transformed into what was called University Village.

The great photographer Charles Osgood and I were there then. It was like visiting an old friend who was dying. As I wrote, “the curbs were broken, the sidewalks too, smashed and thrown askew as if by a small earthquake. It’s a shattered and tattered place, a messy stretch of iron grates, plywood and broken glass windows.”

There was an empty lot on the north side of the street, covered with wood chips, and next to it a makeshift shrine. A sculpture spelled M-A-X in 10-foot-tall letters made of railroad ties, and near it is the “Maxwell Street Wall of Fame,” a mural filled with names of former area residents such as bluesman Bo Diddley, jazzman Benny Goodman, boxer Barney Ross, author Willard Motley and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.

There were new plaques placed on the street, offering bits of history. But there are other ways to explore and learn. Ira Berkow, a native Chicagoan and former New York Times sportswriter, provided it in his wonderful history titled “Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.” Years later, when the shadow of doom was obvious, he called Maxwell Street “the Ellis Island of the Midwest” and passionately pleaded against its “annihilation.”

You can get some deep thoughts from “Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place,” as author Tim Cresswell tells us that “If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘Cities give us collision,’ then Maxwell Street was the epitome of what it is to be a city.” His book contains a lot of fine writing, such as this section focused on Simone de Beauvoir, the French writer and feminist who was the gal-pal for a time of novelist Nelson Algren. He took her to see Maxwell Street and she found it, as Cresswell notes, “an extraordinary mix of all civilizations and races that have existed through time and space… Yet under the blue sky, the grayness of Chicago persists. At the end of the avenue that crosses the glowing bazaar, the pavement and light are the color of water and dust.”

There is also the 2006 documentary film “Cheat You Fair: The Story of Maxwell Street,” by filmmaker Phil Ranstrom and narrated by Joe Mantegna. I once wrote that “This is one of the most remarkable pieces of work I’ve ever seen. Anyone with any affection for Chicago or the blues must see it.”

You can’t, however, recapture the past. The city changes. We move on. One newspaper, the Sun-Times, earlier this week cheered the relocation, writing, “The city deserves a pat on the back — and maybe a complimentary pork chop sandwich — for its decision to bring street vendors back.”

There’s nothing wrong with such boosterism. The city’s having a tough time.

In his book, Creswell captures the essence of change, writing with hope, “The people who live in University Village live lives as authentic as anyone else’s — going to work, raising families, or not. Places change, and this place too will one day be a place of the past that some will look back on with longing and nostalgia.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

I knew Studs pretty well and so I can confidently tell you that he would be both intrigued and charmed by a woman I recently met, and not only because she is a wildly creative person but one who thinks of Terkel as a “kindred spirit.”

He would be intrigued by her name, Hana Bleue Chaussette, which is not her real name but the one she has attached to her many professional projects. He would be fascinated by her background, which has taken her from upstate New York to many places across the planet.

She has been here for two decades and her stay has reached a significant milepost with a public art exhibition called “Unsung Heroes of Uptown: Art of People ON the Streets IN the Streets.”

More than two years in the making but decades in the percolating, it consists of acrylic-on-paper portraits of five people that were installed on 30 city bus shelters on May 6 and are set to continue through wind, rain and heat, for at least three months, and then will remain online for keeps. Most are in Uptown, but they are also on bus shelters across downtown.

Born in upstate New York, Chaussette attended Duke University, graduating with a degree in political science. She headed to Washington, D.C., and then on to New York City where she was attempting to break into the theater world when she got a call from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. “I had been making art my whole life and I had applied to the Art Institute and based on my portfolio I was offered a substantial scholarship,” she says. “It was a tremendous experience.”

She loved the school and she loved the city and she fell in love with Studs. “While I was here I just happened to read, not as an assignment or anything, his book ‘Working’ and was so inspired by the way he was able to explore people’s lives that this powerfully permeated the rest of my life.”

After getting a degree from the SAIC, she boldly moved to Japan where, speaking not a word of the language at first, she served as an unofficial liaison for the SAIC. She lived with the family of a doll maker and taught English for various Japanese companies.

In the late 1980s, she was standing in line at the Chinese Embassy in Osaka when she met a scientist named Rao Pingfan. They married in 1990 and moved in with his elderly parents in Fuzhou, a booming city in southeastern China.

There she worked in radio, co-hosting a popular call-in program called “English Teahouse,” though most of the conversations were in Chinese. She also worked in TV, on a film about women in China, aimed to help foreigners understand the country better and to show, “that life in China is not so different from life in the West.” It would take her seven years to finish “Apple Pie and Chopsticks,” a 90-minute-long documentary that was screened internationally to great acclaim.

In 2000, the couple and their son, Joel, came back to Chicago, where his ability to enroll in a public school program for gifted kids compelled them to stay.

With her husband already an esteemed university professor, she tried to get back into TV and radio, doing all she could to get to Oprah Winfrey. Frustrated in that quest, she began taking acting and playwriting classes with Chicago Dramatists and at Lillstreet Art Center, exchanging her volunteer services to attend classes.

When the pandemic came, she created the “Unsung Heroes.”

She found it surprisingly easy to get through to executives at the JCDecaux Group, the France-based multinational corporation best known here for its bus shelters and the largest outdoor advertising corporation in the world.

It was a bit more difficult to traverse city government but she eventually got to the folks at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. One enthusiastic backer was 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman.

So, we now have Studs and we have Jackie Taylor, the CEO and founder of the Black Ensemble Theater; Yman Huang Vien, co-founder with her late father of the Chinese Mutual Aid Association; Terry Abrahamson, who wrote a Grammy Award-winning song, “Bus Driver” with Muddy Waters, and is a writer, playwright and expert on Chicago blues; and K., a library clerk who preferred to remain anonymous, and who lost her 18-year-old son to gang violence but, Chaussette says, “remains one of the brightest lights for anyone.”

Her work is stunning, colorful, and each portrait is embellished with snippets from her interviews with the subjects and links by which you can find more information, text and video.

Of course, Studs Terkel died in 2008, on Halloween. Chaussette did meet him once, by chance, she shared an elevator ride with him. But his shadow remains. “I feel that Studs would have approved of this series he inspired,” says Chaussette. “Especially the idea of bringing art out of galleries and to people on the streets.”

Though this project is marvelously original, “Unsung Heroes” will remind some people of the Tribute Markers of Distinction program. This involved placing 7-foot-tall enamel markers around the city with photos and biographical information about notable Chicagoans. It began in 1997.

“Unsung Heroes” might also bring to mind the Women’s L Project, an idea of a woman named Janet Volk to rename every one of the 141 stops spread along the city’s “L” train lines in honor of notable local women.

Chaussette has been actively traveling to observe her work and will often talk to the people standing or sitting in the shelters that bear her paintings. She loves to talk and to listen, and offers people the chance to be interviewed by her in one of the “Studs shelters.” Some of those interviews she wants to post on the website. She says “I hope to reintroduce Studs’ amazing work to a new generation.” (Which is what author Mark Larson is doing too with his recently published book, “Working in the 21st Century: An Oral History of American Work in a Time of Social and Economic Transformation”).

Another aspect of Chaussette’s mission, she says, is “to encourage Chicagoans to feel more connected to each other and to their community, despite the onslaught of the Digital Age. We could all use more Studs in our lives, especially in such politically divisive times.”

She and her husband live, not surprisingly, in Uptown. He travels a lot, as an international lecturer and one of the world’s leading food scientists. Their 27-year-old son lives nearby. He is a filmmaker.

“Instead of advertising a product, these shelters advertise an idea,” she says. “The idea that we should get to know one another better, celebrate the human spirit.”

You will notice, when you visit Chaussette’s heroes, that the one of Studs does not feature his distinctive face. “I know, I know,” she says. “And that’s kind of controversial but people are more to me than faces and when I think of Studs I think of his red-checked shirt and the tape recorder. I think of his voice, of his ability to celebrate people, to celebrate life.”

More information about “Unsung Heroes of Uptown: Art of People ON the Streets IN the Streets” at www.hanableuechaussette.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Rosenberg died on May 7 at his home in Skokie, from a heart attack after some years of fighting various serious ailments. He had lived 68 full years but the relatively premature nature of his death was shocking to many.

Naturally, social media messages reflected that, but also were rich with pleasant memories and praise such as, “Your extraordinary talent brought pleasure to so many people in so many different ways.”

OK then, where to start?

Though he never attained the bright name recognition of some of his contemporaries — Howard Levy, Corky Seigel, Megon McDonough — he rivaled any in esteem and affection.

He was a master of many instruments (violin, mandolin and more), with an insatiable curiosity that led him happily into all manner of musical genres (Irish, bluegrass, klezmer, jazz and folk among the many). He was an accomplished engineer and producer, working in his Long Dog Studios for a number of recording artists. He was an educator, teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He was a radio host of such memorable NPR offerings as “Earth Club” and “Radio Gumbo.” He was a writer and an astute cultural critic, most of that work appearing in Chicago magazine. He was …

John Soss was a friend of Rosenberg’s and is a fixture on the music scene as an executive with Jam Productions, the concert and events producer. He told me: “Stuart’s tireless curiosity about music, art and literature — and his uncanny ability to absorb all of those influences — made him into a truly unique and well-rounded practitioner of the arts. What made him stand out, though, was the manner in which he could capably shape those things into sustainable ventures. He was equal parts musician, promoter, businessman, producer, bandleader, organizer, hustler and cheerleader, and in a career that spanned five decades, he also proved to be resilient enough to overcome the ups and downs that anyone would experience in the music business.”

Rosenberg was a local and though he performed music across the globe— Finland, Mexico and many other places — he remained tied to this area. Though his parents might have envisioned for him a career as a doctor, he became beguiled by the violin lessons he took in his youth. When he was 16, he won a scholarship to attend school in Haifa, Israel, and there he was exposed to a wider variety of music and musicians.

He would fashion a keenly collaborative career. He simply and energetically loved to play and would do so with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of musicians and in such groups as Rogues, the Laketown Buskers and The Otters.

“My whole musical life I have had this ongoing, living, growing relationship with audiences,” he once told me.

He was among the mainstays of First Night Evanston, the annual New Year’s Eve community celebration, going from performer to organizer and producer. In the 1980s, he formed the Society of the Preservation of Arts and Culture in Evanston as a storefront music venue which, with partner Craig Golden, would eventually become SPACE, one of the most admired performance venues in the Midwest.

Singer Jamie O’Reilly has often performed there. She was also a member of the Rogues and tells me, “When I started hanging out with Stuart 40 years ago, my world went from black and white to Technicolor. Everything from his sandalwood and jasmine-scented apartment, to the hot, spicy andouille sausage in his gumbo, to the mind boggling palette of his musical tastes fascinated me.

“I learned so much from him. He was such a loyal friend and we were never afraid to plumb the depths of life’s toughest challenges in our talks, of which there were many, seeking meaning and somehow come out on the other side with similar objectives: practice goodness, listen, and love.  The love and wisdom shared at his powerful funeral relieved me of the fear he might be forgotten.”

His jam-packed funeral Friday in Skokie featured wonderful memories and observations from his friend and “musical colleague” Cantor Randy Herman, and eulogies from the two children he shared with his wife Rachel, of more than three decades, Theo and Allegra.

Of course there was music, with Allegra offering the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” while O’Reilly and some Rogues performed “Will Ye Go Lassie Go” a Scottish folk song (aka “Wild Mountain Thyme”).

Watching this moving hour, I recalled many things, among them the afternoon some years ago when Rosenberg and I shared a radio studio and he said, “I love everything, all music, and that’s why I do what I do. My great passion has always been to share the things I love.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

There are a lot of fictional spies but none of them can prepare you for Dave Rupert, the compelling real-life centerpiece of a 12-part podcast series called “Underbelly: The Rebel Kind,” currently unfolding on various platforms.

New episodes come every Wednesday, each roughly an hour in length. I certainly don’t want to spoil any of the edge-of-your-chair excitement of this tale, and though I was not an enthusiastic podcast fan until this show, I will do my best to get you to plug into this audio marvel without giving away many of the details that will keep you hooked.

In addition to having no experience with espionage and without political or religious affiliation, Rupert was not exactly the blend-into-the-wallpaper type. He was a giant, standing 6 feet, 7 inches tall and weighing 350 pounds, give or take.

Still, he would become one of the most successful spies in FBI history. It was he who in the late 1990s was responsible for infiltrating and taking down the Real Irish Republican Army, a particularly violent faction of the IRA, and its most notorious terrorist, Michael “Mickey” McKevitt, convicted of directing terrorism in a 2003 trial and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

You will learn of Rupert’s childhood in upstate New York; his checkered career; legal and financial troubles and about the night he walked into an Irish bar in Florida. There he met a woman who would take him on trips to Ireland, which he loved and where he met all manner of companionable people, many of whom were in the dangerous business of creating trouble and terror.

At one point he was here, running a trucking company in South Holland, when in walked an FBI agent and, based solely on a photo he had of Rupert with an IRA operative in an Irish pub, recruited him to become a spy.

No training, no “spy skills” but with a certain adventurous streak, Rupert accepted and for the next seven or so years climbed deeper into the IRA and, with the FBI buying him a pub in Ireland, began providing information not only to the FBI but MI5, the British intelligence service.

When his work was done and never one to pass up an opportunity, Rupert thought there might be a book in his “adventures.” He contacted then-Tribune reporter Flynn McRoberts who, with Abdon Pallasch of the Chicago Sun-Times, began to interview and research Rupert. McRoberts had to pull out of the project due to other professional commitments and an eventual job with Bloomberg News. Pallasch then teamed with colleague and friend Bob Herguth.

They turned on a tape recorder for hours and hours. But for reasons you will learn when you listen to the podcast, the book deal never came to fruition. They were sued to give up the tapes of their Rupert interviews and soon enough Pallasch and Herguth went back to separate careers.

Herguth, a long-time investigative reporter with the Sun-Times, focuses on many subjects, including police corruption, organized crime and government accountability, as well as religion. Pallasch was a reporter for the Sun-Times, where he covered a young Barack Obama and co-wrote (with Jim DeRogatis) the stories that paved R. Kelly’s road to prison. He left the newspaper business to work in government, where he is now communications director for the Illinois Office of Comptroller Susana Mendoza.

Rupert faded into a colorful memory until about three years ago when Herguth was contacted by a producer with an outfit called Entropy Media. They discussed various ideas. The producer was sparked by Rupert and the seeds of this podcast were planted.

Entropy is the creation of a former Chicagoan, Anjay Nagpal, who attended Fenwick High School before going off to become a Hollywood movie producer. With Entropy he began to make podcasts. The first was “Underbelly: “Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles” based on wild tales from the 1980s Chicago trading floors and an FBI undercover sting operation against alleged broker fraud.

Pallasch and Herguth began working on this project more than two years ago. “It took us to Ireland and elsewhere,” says Herguth. “We were knocking on doors, doing some original reporting.”

This is a podcast of the most compelling kind, produced by Dalton Main. What makes it valuable beyond its edge-of-the-seat, thriller-like qualities is its substance and breadth. It’s a layered story, employing the voices of scholars and other enlightening folks. There is music, the history of Ireland, the Troubles and Chicago’s deep and often dark connections to Ireland. Some thoughtful portions deal with the complex political and emotional issues at play, the personal costs of conflict and betrayal. It’s an exciting story but a human one too. Pallasch and Herguth, from a script written in collaboration with others, sound polished, professional.

“They made us sound better than we actually sound,” said Pallasch.

He and Herguth are pleased.

“I really think this podcast is better than any book might have been,” says Pallasch. “There are so many layers to get, making for a powerful narrative.”

Rupert isn’t saying a word. His work earned him the FBI’s Lou Peters Award in 2013 and millions of dollars too and he now lives someplace in the United States. One hopes he has a quiet life, out of harm’s reach.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Update: This story has been changed to correct details about Rupert’s past and the British intelligence service he aided.

“Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of Our Architectural Treasures” is the latest visually striking, marvelously written offering from Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, who have been at this for more than 20 years with their CityFiles Press.

Cahan, a former photo editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and Williams, a writer and designer, claim to have never had any arguments in that time, “except on the basketball court.” Operating in the increasingly chaotic book publishing realm, they have been craftsmen of the highest order and have produced a steady stream of books.

Many of their initial offerings had a strong Chicago focus but that has expanded. “Our first books are firmly Chicago books and some of our great photographers like Vivian Maier,” Cahan told me. “But in time we began to explore issues that we felt were important to America, such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, slavery and the civil rights movement.”

“Lost in America” is 208 remarkable and handsomely packaged pages, beginning with a short foreword by Catherine Lavoie, who writes, “Buildings mark who we are as a society. Buildings have the ability to inspire change, facilitate social reform, fuel cultural movements, or simply help us envision better ways of living.”

She is the chief of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service, a government group that for 90 years has used a small team of freelance photographers to, as she puts it, make “one of the world’s most substantial archives of the built environment.” Indeed, the HABS program now has more than 200,000 photos taken at 34,000 sites.

One of the photographers in the book is Richard Nickel, the Chicagoan who died tragically in the wreckage of Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange building in 1972 and is the subject of a previous CityFiles book, 2015’s “Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years: What He Saw and What He Wrote.”

Nickel’s photographs share this book’s pages with other HABS photographers, such as Stephen D. Schafer, who says, “If the buildings documented by HABS were people, you’d take them straight to a hospital. Instead, we push them straight into the grave.”

All photos have been taken in the same fashion, without artistic pizzazz. Rather than being visually redundant, this black-and-white parade gives the book a compelling dramatic punch.

The book is national in scope, with photos from around the country. And so, we have some relatively prosaic three-story homes near Cincinnati’s City Hall and then the glories of Pennsylvania Station in New York City, both erased from the face of the planet, in the 1980s and 1963 respectively. As for the other buildings in the book, some died with a whimper, while a few were attended by the rage of preservationists, historians, architects and other concerned citizens.

“These are not all landmarks,” Cahan tells me. “But they are important buildings in American history and communities. They may not be the greatest architecture, but they each tell the story… of plantations and slave quarters, ballparks, music halls, steel mills.” And more.

Naturally, Chicago is featured and among our ghosts are the Republic Building, Garrick Theater, Stock Exchange Building, Granada Theater, Dearborn Station Trainshed and First Regiment Armory.

The Granada “was one of the largest and most ornate movie palaces ever built,” Cahan and Williams write. “After years of abandonment, the end came swiftly. At the last minute, developers offered to keep the theater’s facade pasted on the exterior of their new apartment building but preservationists rejected the proposal. They wanted the entire building.”

Gone, gone, gone, so many buildings. (Also see 1975’s “Lost Chicago” by David Garrard Lowe). But not likely to be forgotten since Cahan and Williams provide sparkling and informative text to accompany all the photos, sort of like mini-biographies or, if you will, ghost stories.

And do not bypass the book’s final page, for it details how Cahan and Williams explain “the great American road trip-pandemic style” that allowed them to research and build this book

As Cahn told me, “We visited all of these sites via Google Street View. We traveled the country many times (via computer) to figure out if these buildings still stood. The HABS website shows what was photographed, but we didn’t know which ones still stood.”

Not enough, in part because, as they write on that final page, “We believe buildings reflect our culture and mark our spot in the universe.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com