Newcomers, black and white, were not “feted in any way.” Instead, the neighborhood, a short distance from Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, attracted the professional and private.
Tribal as it sounds, “South Shore wasn’t, and isn’t, tight-knit,” writes journalist Carlo Rotella, a South Shore native whose history of the neighborhood, “The World is Always Coming to an End,” is due this spring. The condo that Isaiah Muse bought in South Shore was directly across the street. And until its dissolution in 1973, the South Shore Country Club, hugging 70 acres of green along Lake Michigan and serving as a kind of touchstone in the neighborhood (later becoming South Shore Cultural Center), refused to admit blacks or Jews.
Lucas as a child, he remembers not being able to ride his bike south out of Jackson Park and across 68th Street whenever he did white children would pummel him with rocks. “Money went around and around inside Bronzeville back then,” said Harold Lucas, a Bronzeville community organizer and historian, “and the people who made it, a lot figured out they had the equity built up to get a home in South Shore.”Īnd so, like many upwardly mobile African-Americans in Bronzeville, Muse left for the cool lake breezes and charming brick bungalows of the South Shore neighborhood, which stretches roughly from 67th Street and Jackson Park to 79th Street at the south. He left in the 1950s and ran cafes in Bronzeville hotels, met famous entertainers, saved a little and dreamed of opening his own restaurant. However, their father was cruel and beat them, said Robert Muse, Isaiah’s youngest brother, 89 now, so bit by bit, eight of the children left home early, including Isaiah, who moved to Oklahoma City at 16 and didn’t return again to the homestead until several years later.Īfter serving in the Army during World War II, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a waiter for the Pullman railcar company. The Muse family owned a farm that harvested cotton and corn they had nine boys and girls. Its decline - tied to the Great Depression and the bankruptcy of the Oklahoma-Arkansas railroad - began a decade later, and coincided with Muse reaching his teens. He grew up in Boley, Okla., which was founded in 1903, and for a time the richest predominantly black town in the country, a model of ambition, business savvy and class mobility. Isaiah Muse was born in 1919 he would have turned 100 last month. He didn’t leave much behind.īut what’s left, what’s known, is a micro-sketch of South Shore. It’s hard finding anyone who remembers anything about him or even his name - like most of us eventually. But Isaiah Muse himself? Never heard of the guy. They recall Michelle Obama, and Kanye West, and David Mamet, all of whom lived blocks away from Muse’s home. But all of it prompts a question: How did the living room of a Chicago waffle house owner wind up in the Smithsonian?Īsk around South Shore today for who knew Isaiah Muse and the silence is as loud as the silence that settled long ago over the neighborhood’s commercial strips. Some of it is in the museum, some of it went into storage. Owner Isaiah Muse is second from the left. South Side politicians were rumored to stop by occasionally. Muse's, seen here in the 1970s, congregate around the bar. The facade of the bar is a puffy, pleated red vinyl, and the crowning touch, stitched across its face, in giant letters: It was built in 1971 and sat for ages in the apartment of Isaiah Muse, the owner of a waffle house on South Vincennes. 2011.101.9 is a home bar, the sort that people once installed in basements, for entertaining visitors. The official Smithsonian description classifies the item as a “bar counter.” Which, like any dispassionate cataloging of history, somewhat understates history and meaning. You can find it at the top of Concourse 1, kitty-corner from Oprah’s couch, occupying its very own dramatically lit glass enclosure. 2011.101.9, however, arrived at the Smithsonian via a small condominium on South Shore Drive. Others came from everyday people Pretzer recalls an Indiana woman who found Ku Klux Klan robes in her late grandfather’s home and asked if the museum wanted them. Many of the museum’s objects were acquired through auctions and antique dealers.
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