A pale gray curl of snow spun in the air where the statue once stood. It had been a modest memorial, occupying a narrow median of grass, between the rusting padlocked ruins of a Chicago gas station and the corner of 69th Street and Wolcott Avenue. It wasn’t much, just an unremarkable concrete bust of Abraham Lincoln, maybe 4 feet tall, a head and shoulders that looked out across a stretch of the West Englewood neighborhood, its brick bungalows, long-derelict businesses, snowdrifts that avalanched through broken windows. The bust too had seen better days — a glance would remind you those days were decades ago.
The statue had watched this corner for 91 years. In that time it was chipped, covered in trash, tagged with graffiti, used as a launching pad for fireworks, painted black, then painted white, painted red, given a green mohawk, painted white again, painted black again. It was also washed and cleaned by its neighbors, used for Boy and Girl Scout ceremonies, and during wars, it’s where West Englewood mourned its fallen soldiers.
“Everything that neighborhood has seen in the past century is reflected off that bust,” said Camilo Vergara, a New York-based photographer and MacArthur genius known for shooting the same neighborhoods over many decades. He’s been photographing the Lincoln statue annually since 1997, “because it brings together so many issues that you just don’t consider standing in front of other Chicago Lincolns. It was white, then black, cared for, then marked by gangs — it was never going into a museum, and who cares?”
It was loved.
Never mind that no one is entirely certain who made it, or where exactly it came from.
Never mind that its nose has been missing for so long that some people in the neighborhood didn’t recognize the statue’s deformed face as Honest Abe. It was community wallpaper, the kind of local landmark you see so often you stop seeing. Jerome Wallace, a customer at the Transcending Kutz barbershop a block away, said: “I’m 43, and I’ve known that statue since I was born. Everyone here knows that statue. When I was a kid, when the school bus passed the Lincoln, I knew I was almost home.”
“It was like West Englewood’s Egyptian statue,” said barber Will Cook. “No nose!”
And then last summer, just before Labor Day, it vanished.
“We have no idea where it went,” Wallace said, “and it was the only statue we had.”
Outside the barbershop last week, a woman walked fast down 69th Street to a waiting bus. She nodded at the spot where the statue stood and called over her shoulder: “No idea what happened, who took it, when it’s coming back, if it’s ever coming back. This is Englewood — don’t hold your breath.” When Vergara arrived last summer to shoot it, he found only a flattened patch of dirt. He sent the image to Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s official cultural historian. Samuelson has done more than anyone to trace the statue’s history.
Samuelson knew what had happened. A lot of people knew what had happened — the news of the statue’s removal briefly became a cause celeb within political left and right media.
Here’s what happened: The bust of Lincoln was removed last August by the Chicago Department of Transportation, at the request of Ald. Ray Lopez of the 15th Ward. Though the statue is located in the 17th Ward, Lopez said he stepped in “only after it became obvious that nobody but myself was concerned about the health of this statue.” (The 17th Ward alderman, David Moore, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Lopez contacted the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, which contacted CDOT for removal. He said he became concerned after the statue was vandalized twice last August: A resident called to say the statue was painted black; soon after, it was set on fire. (Lopez said the vandals used tar and roofing paper.) “It was around the time of the Charlottesville (Va. white nationalist) marches. A lot of hate-filled things were said, and I’ll be the first to admit this statue had seen a lot of wear and tear — of youthful indiscretions — but two acts to happen about that same time? It just felt like something else happening.”
He offered no evidence of who might have vandalized the statue, and though no one has since been arrested for the vandalism, or claimed responsibility, Lopez noted that nearby Marquette Park had been a stronghold for Illinois Nazis. He wasn’t comfortable leaving the statue on 69th, vulnerable to more attacks. He told the Chicago Sun-Times in August that President Donald Trump’s (widely condemned) response to the violence in Charlottesville had emboldened white supremacists; Lopez sent a letter to Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Mark Kelly, concerned that, as left-leaning groups called for the removal of Confederate statues, right-leaning groups could seek revenge on monuments to the Great Emancipator. Soon after, the bust at the corner of 69th and Wolcott was removed, without ceremony or a timeline for when or if it might be returned.
“It’s frustrating,” said Samuelson, the historian with the cultural affairs department, “because the department I work for handles public art in Chicago, so every once in a while they get calls from Englewood residents complaining about the statue: ‘How could the city of Chicago allow that statue to sit all busted up like that?’ The truth is, it’s not ours — the statue was placed there privately, and became a meaningful thing. When I saw Camilo’s picture of 69th Street without its Lincoln, just a patch of dirt, it was startling — it looked like a fresh grave.”
Of course, the United States doesn’t lack memorials to its 16th president. There are highways and cities and schools and tunnels and cars companies named after Lincoln. Samuel Wheeler, Illinois’ state historian, said: “Lincoln is the quintessential American — born in a log cabin with a dirt floor, and despite only one formal year of education he dies one of the most powerful men in the world. It’s such a familiar name we tend to forget that a life inspired those memorials, across the globe.” Indeed, “Lincoln is one of the few figures in Western Civilization, other than Jesus Christ, whose entire life story can be found in our statues and monuments,” said Dave Wiegers, an amateur photographer from Gurnee whose “near obsession” is documenting Lincoln statues.
Ask him to tell you about Lincoln statues in Illinois and be prepared to listen: There’s the very formal Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue in Lincoln Park; the hunkier 9-foot-tall young Abe in Senn Park; Abe with an axe in Garfield Park; and Abe with kids and a dog in Berwyn; the Abe just erected inside the courtyard of the Palmer House; the seven Abes marking the locations of the Lincoln-Douglas debates …
“But that (West Englewood) statue,” he said, “that’s one I get asked about the most.”
Unlike most statues to U.S. presidents, generals, activists, favorite sons, favorite daughters, it was not erected by a municipality, or a formal organization. It was placed there by a Swedish immigrant, and through endurance and default, became folk art.
A small hand-stamped brass plate at its base tells us it found a home on Aug. 31, 1926, and the man who placed it was a 39-year old mechanic named Philip Bloomquist.
Actually, his full name was Philip Gustaf Bloomquist, according to Cheryl Koranda, his granddaughter and last known relative, a middle-school art teacher in Urbana. He was born in 1887 and moved here from Sweden when he was about 13; he came with only his mother and sister, settling first in Indiana then in Chicago. “He came here without much money and lived a middle-class life,” Koranda said. He bought a bungalow in West Englewood in 1915, at a time when the neighborhood was predominantly European, full of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, many of whom worked in factories. The neighborhood’s busy train depot had been a first stop for newcomers.
Koranda said that her grandfather was tall and handsome, and lived on the 6600 block of South Hermitage Avenue for many years with his wife, Blanche, and two daughters, Edna and Ruth (Koranda’s mother). He was a devoted White Sox fan and worked many jobs around the South Side to eke out a living. For a short time, he operated the Lincoln Gas Station at 69th and Wolcott, “though the story in our family was that he was screwed out of his money.”
It was named the Lincoln Gas Station because, until 1939, Wolcott was Lincoln Avenue.
Before the station could change hands, Bloomquist placed a bust of Lincoln out front. “Like a lot of immigrants, he wanted to be American,” his granddaughter said. “He refused to honor old Swedish customs. He liked his herring — but he also liked Lincoln.”
The statue classed up the corner.
Though likely it was placed there partly to advertise the gas station, Samuelson said. He added the bust is probably an inexpensive adaptation of the Saint-Gaudens in Lincoln Park, a stock sculpture purchased at one of the several statuary businesses in Chicago then. That said, Samuelson is also not entirely certain of the statue’s origins.
“Came from a scrap yard!” said John McGrath, an 84-year-old retired AT&T salesman in Oak Lawn, who grew up at 70th and Wolcott. He said his own father, a railroad foreman, “was a handy guy who visited salvage yards all the time, and the story in my family is that my father and another guy — don’t know who — found that sculpture in a dump, and what I think happened was they somehow got it to the station and built a base for it.”
He said the statue was salvaged from a junkyard of scrap parts of the White City. That said, he himself is not sure if the story referred to the White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition or the long-gone White City Amusement Park at 63rd Street. Indeed, Samuelson said the nearby park suffered a major fire in 1925 — the year before the statue was erected — and its design had suggested the “classical majesty” of the 1893 Exposition in amusement park form, with much cheaper materials. So it’s very possible the Lincoln bust was a decorative element of a decaying amusement park. “Or the junkyard story is a bit of innocent family folklore that came to be regarded as fact.”
The truth is distant now.
McGrath said that, without a doubt, “the neighborhood had so many functions there when I was a kid.” After a brother was killed in World War II, the family held a ceremony at the statue. Bloomquist had long left the gas station, but his statue remained, literally a community pillar. Koranda and her mother and father lived with Bloomquist until she was 13. “At which point, in the late 1960s, during the riots, that time of white flight, my parents were very scared of living in the city, so we moved to Homewood. But my grandfather refused to leave the neighborhood. He really loved it, and my mother was heartbroken.”
Bloomquist died at 83 in 1970, of heart failure.
West Englewood is 77 percent black now, and is a frequently cited example of what seemingly intractable urban neglect and racism can do to a once a vibrant, middle-class community. More than 40 percent of its children alone live in poverty. And there’s nothing at the corner of 69th and Wolcott now. Just some old garages in a bleak abandoned lot. “The truth is, when I heard about the vandalism to the statue last summer, I wondered if someone, symbolically, took Lincoln out of his misery,” Vergara said. “I wondered if someone looked around at how badly an American neighborhood full of black people can be treated, and they decided to destroy Lincoln to save him.”
So, where is the statue now?
There were theories and rumors on 69th Street.
Not long after the bust was removed, notices were pasted to telephone poles about the commercial rezoning of the street — some in the neighborhood say removing their weird, battered Lincoln was a first small step to gentrification. Others said the statue was destroyed: Antonio De Luna, who owns the muffler shop across the street with his brother Pablo, said they watched a crane lift the brittle bust “then (accidentally) break — like, into two pieces.” The stories didn’t stop at 69th Street: After Lopez posted on Facebook about the statue being vandalized, the Lincoln bust briefly became a political football, with even right-wing Breitbart News Network claiming “The destruction of the 90-year-old statue lends credence to President Donald Trump’s contention that left-wing activists will never be happy with merely destroying Confederate statues.”
A week before Lincoln’s Birthday, the Tribune asked Ald. Lopez about the state of the Lincoln. He said he hadn’t witnessed it being removed but believed it was in the possession of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. A department spokesperson said the department had not seen the bust. Ald. Lopez then asked commissioners for the department, the Department of Transportation and the Chicago Public Library about the status of the statue. He received an email from cultural affairs Commissioner Kelly: The bust was in storage, it had not received “additional damage,” and despite “a backlog of conservation projects,” this aesthetically prosaic, crumbling statue would go at the top of the department’s conservation list.
Soon after, we were led to the bust itself.
We found it in a muddy CDOT maintenance yard, in South Lawndale. It sat just inside a metal shed, surrounded by stacks of rock salt and metal fencing. When it was removed from West Englewood, the pedestal snapped away from the bust, so Lincoln sat on the floor, across from the thick, blocky base. And CDOT masons had stripped 90 years of paint. It’s the drab tan-brown of concrete now, with only a hint of char around the eyes.
The statue will never return to 69th and Wolcott.
Its eventual home is the West Englewood Library.
Should you care to remember Philip Bloomquist’s legacy the way it was, before its eyes were blackened and body scarred, visit 69th and Wolcott on Google Maps. An old street-view image is still there, the bust cracked and ghostly. “This doesn’t need to be a loss,” said Vergara. “Maybe what comes out of everything is a new memorial. Let the neighborhood replace its Lincoln, with something that lends an identity, and gives that corner a new meaning. Then the story continues, and Lincoln was never lost at all.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
