Location: Feed
Show: Outdoor Crayfish Boil with Al Schorch IV and many others
Drinks: FREE Smirnoff, Jim Beam, ice, lemonade, and iced tea, to mix at your convenience
Things I missed to be there: Outdanced at Funky Buddha; $6 dollar Tuesdays at Kerasotes AMC
Reason for going: FREEE FOOOOD
It's hard to imagine Humboldt Park turning into the next Wicker Park. If you go down the main financial strip of Division, past the 50-foot Puerto Rican flags, the votive stores, the sad and hopeful murals tipping their hats toward Catholicism, revolution, and community, it looks as though nothing short of an astronomical event, a comet hitting the Earth, a second great Chicago fire, could change it's face. If you look to the secondary financial district, the (White) financial district down on California, you can see why real estate devils are calling Humboldt's border "East Wicker Park" the way they used to call Wicker Park's border "South Bucktown" when they wanted to sell the neighborhood to young families in the 90s. There are lounge bars, vegan diners and cafes, and at least one concert venue. Because of the condition of the neighborhood they moved into, they aren't replacing the bodegas and storefront churches, but they are taking up all the spaces around them, and soon property taxes will do the rest.
That isn't to fault these establishments, as they really are of the community. The California Clipper is full of bilingual poetry groups, house bands, and bingo games; The Flying Saucer really wants to save the world; and when the noise cabaret gets to be too much, you can often find the Reversible Eye's neighbors grilling out back.
Then there is The Continental. Pass by the Continental afterhours and you can see what Milwaukee and Damen looked like before it looked like Division and Rush. Hip motherfuckers, yuppies, and drunken jerks making their last stand against going home or, worse yet, going home alone. I try not to fault things for being something I don't like. If the city was willing to hand out more 4AM permits, the 4AM bars wouldn't have such a high concentration of dickheads, but because they are, the city won't grant more, and because the city is so unwilling to grant late night licenses, these bars will stay in business forever, assholes or not. I can't fault The Continental for its patrons as I scan the line around the corner, and I can't fault The Continental for replacing the Hiawatha Lounge, which was a wonderful bar with a wonderful bartender and Bakelite 78 as its awesome house band, I can fault The Continental for it's musical selection and philosophy. A couple friends were spinning one night when they were warned not to play any "Black music". A while later, they succumbed to the urge to grant a request for what was inarguably the song of last summer, Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty". They were immediately shut down and banned immediately from spinning there again. Fuck The Continental for that.
I have much warmer feeling for The Continental's next-door neighbor Feed, a dim-lit country kitchen that specializes in kitchen. Feed may be the first family restaurant in Humboldt Park that specializes in American food (I can only describe the Flying Saucer's mostly-vegetarian fair as an alternative family restaurant; of course there are many great family restaurants in the neighborhood that specialize in Puerto Rican cuisine, which is of course American food, but, well, you know, different). I have a friend who left her barista duties downtown to work at Feed, and apparently they treat her better than anyone else she's ever worked for. On Monday, when the restaurant was closed, the staff was taken to Six Flags.
Today, Feed opens their outdoor patio with ribs and crayfish. Not the best crawdads I've ever eaten, but the only time I've ever gotten to eat them here in Chicago that wasn't at my house. To make it a real celebration, they got a bunch of acoustic bands to play in the back, mostly duos, mostly folk and country, with a little bit of old-timey rock'n'roll. Sweat streams down Al Schorch's beet-red face as he strums away at his banjo. The speed, with which he is playing could be described as furious but there is nothing furious about the way he plays the silly songs he likes to sing when he picks up his banjo. His suspenders droop half off over him. The sun begins to set, and he is more of the place than anything I've seen before it that day, as if it couldn't be a crayfish boil at a country kitchen that sits one block away from yuppieville, one block away from heavy gang territory, and one block away from the diminishing industrial district down Grand.
The restaurant's owners have brought in a number of thirty-something lesbians, families and professional artistic types (-slash artistic professional types). The staff has brought out the new school of the neighborhood. Al has brought out his friends in the Rat Patrol, costumed in various shades of crust, steampunk, and glamarchist. Every racial hue is represented in the twenty- or thirty- square foot yard behind Feed, but it's overwhelmingly White. This is Humgboldt as Humboldt is going to be, for a while at least, a genuine, well-meaning, form of gentrification.
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