January 2011

Torrio turned over his holdings to his right-hand man. Capone had been born in Brooklyn in 1899. Standing five foot ten and weighing well in excess of two hundred pounds, Al started life as a bartender. One observer reported that he “emanated menace while saying please.” He received his famous scars not in the world war, as he often claimed, but by insulting the sister of a Brooklyn thug.

Capone shared with many of the era’s gang leaders an incendiary temper and a willingness to take a man’s life. But he was always more than the “millionaire gorilla” that he complained people viewed him as. “I have always been opposed to violence,” he said. “I want peace, and I will live and let live.” He meant it.

More and more these days, Americans are choosing vacation destinations on the basis of the history they can find there; and to think about traveling with a sense of history inevitably leads to thinking about historic preservation. In fact, everything we explore in this, our annual travel issue, pivots on preservation.

On the morning of November 10, 1924, three men walked into a flower shop at 738 North State Street, in the bohemian neighborhood of the near North Side. The announced their intention to pick up a wreath they had ordered for the funeral of Mike Merlo, president of the Unione Siciliana and a prominent leader of the city’s Italian community. One of them shook hands with the florist. The other two reached into their pockets. Four years had led up to the moment that followed.

With the advent of Prohibition, bootlegging became the chief gangster priority. Jostling for territory began as soon as the Volstead Act took effect at midnight on January 17, 1920. Hijackings and low-level gang skirmishes dominated the beginning of the decade. This turmoil continued a tradition of turf battles among the youth gangs and ragtag criminal bands that had long been a fixture of urban America. In the Chicago of the early twenties the alignment of gangs was a Balkan complexity, further complicated by constantly shifting alliances.

Big Jim Colosimo (the epithet “Big” was applied liberally in the city of broad shoulders) set the pattern for a generation of Chicago gangsters. Flashing diamonds and thousand-dollar bills, Colosimo reigned as lord of the city’s vice and gambling for the first twenty years of the century. He struck bargains with politicians. His patrons at City Hall, the aldermen Michael (“Hinky Dink”) Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, were paragons of improbity in a venal city.

The prostitution and gambling from which Colosimo derived his living flourished in the Levee district, from Twenty-second to Eighteenth streets, between Clark and Wabash. There he operated Colosimo’s Café, a pleasure palace opened in 1910 at 2126 South Wabash. Chicago’s high society flocked down from Lake Shore Drive to enjoy the club’s baroque extravagance and to hear Sophie Tucker sing “Angle Worm Wriggle,” a song so suggestive it once got her arrested.

The attraction stands at 605 North Clark Street, within easy machine-gun range of the ubiquitous Hard Rock Café. Its main feature is a twenty-five-minute multimedia presentation of gangster history in which events are brought to life by complex automatons. We see a jaunty Al Capone seated beside the actual fireplace that decorated his office in the Lexington Hotel. We are entertained by a ranting Carry Nation, a coy flapper, and a lifelike Louis Armstrong. Murals on the outside of the building re-create famous crime sites. It’s interesting that in staging even this sanitized version of events, Graham met opposition from city fathers squeamish about Chicago’s image.

Big Tim was small potatoes. Convicted as a mail robber, he was one of the earliest gangsters to move on into union racketeering. On the evening of June 26, 1928, he was listening on the radio as the Democratic convention moved toward nominating Al Smith to run for President. Someone knocked on his door. He opened it, saw no one, stepped outside.

He stood where we are standing now. The car rolled down this quiet street. Tim saw it too late. But he knew. He must have felt that he was in a dream himself as he turned and began to run toward his front door. He couldn’t run fast enough. Half a dozen of his gangland enemies fired thirty shots from the car.

Here, on the front of the house, are the holes that tell the story. Of all the shots fired during the 1920s, these are the clearest documented traces remaining. Two of the slugs hit Tim’s body, one shattered his forearm, another tore through his heart.

In the twilight we lift the veil for a second and glimpse the reality. Not the meaning of it, or the moral, but a flash of the notion that this was no game, that the bullets were real.

A .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol fires a half-ounce lead cylinder at a speed of 579 miles per hour. If the bullet strikes a brick, it leaves a distinctive mark, a gouge surrounded by radiating cracks.

It’s almost evening. accompanied by Mark Levell, a Prohibition-era historian who has compiled files on more than two hundred crime sites in Chicago, I’ve trav eled to the city’s far North Side. The leafy streets and brick houses are serene. We park, discreetly, a few doors away from our destination, 2525 West Morse Avenue. We’ve come to see where Big Tim Murphy got it.

I had been driving across Pennsylvania’s hills and valleys for five hours when suddenly my destination for the evening appeared ahead. On a high, level clearing in the state’s mountainous southwest quarter, just beyond the immaculate little town of Bedford, stood the Lincoln Motor Court, a roadside lodging almost exactly the way it looked when travelers passed by in Hudson Hornets and Studebaker Land Cruisers.

The gravel driveway made low, crunching sounds as my car pulled into the court—a U-shaped cluster of thirteen clean little cabins, each of them surfaced in gray Permastone, with white shutters adorning the windows and old-fashioned metal lawn chairs waiting by the front doors. Hip-roofed cabin No. 6 was all mine for twenty dollars a night. What more could an explorer of historic highways ask? I had set out to travel the nation’s first transcontinental motor route, and here I was experiencing the famous Lincoln Highway in all its obsolescent charm.

The heavy cannonading in the east told the American POWs in Kommando 64/VI that the war was almost over. We had survived the brutally cold Baltic winter in this satellite labor camp of a German stalag and were now enjoying the first tenuous rays of the spring sun. Meanwhile, the Russians were drawing up their forces along the Oder River, just 50 miles away, for their final drive into the heartland of Germany. Prison life would soon be over, at least for the Americans.

As prisoners, we had tried to look like lousy soldiers. Early every morning, before we were taken out to labor, we were lined up to be counted. Appell, the Germans called it. On returning at night, we were lined up for another Appell. The second count made certain that the same number that had gone out in the morning had come back at night.