Six Loyola University students have captured the magic of Bughouse Square, the city’s oldest park
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The author, radio host and life force who was Studs Terkel spent many youthful years listening to a variety of voices in the park that is the three-acre front yard of the Newberry Library at 60 W. Walton St. on the Near North Side. Its formal name is Washington Square Park but it is also known as Bughouse Square.
“I doubt whether I learned very much (at the park),” Terkel once said. “One thing I know: I delighted in it. Perhaps none of it made any sense, save one kind: sense of life.”
Terkel has been dead since Halloween in 2008, and he and his wife Ida, who died on Christmas Eve in 1999, have been buried in this park since 2009. Their ashes were tucked in the ground in a very informal service, since the city does not allow such ceremonies to take place in public spaces, a rule to which Terkel had said before his death, “I know it’s against the law. Let ‘em sue us.”
One night earlier this week, six young people gathered in the park. They knew that story. They know almost all there is to know about Bughouse Square since for the last eight months they have been working to create a documentary about the history of this place and the importance of it all.
They are graduate students — three of them graduating soon — in Loyola University’s Digital Media and Storytelling program: Marina Donahue (production coordinator and editor), Taylor Evans Ghosal (production coordinator and script supervisor), Lexie Garrett (editor and script supervisor), Duncan Hoag (director of photography), Christina Hoffmann (lead researcher) and Keagan Hynes (art director).
Collectively, they are a lively bunch, their enthusiasm palpable. They make a smart and passionate team and from their documentary, “No Permit Necessary: An Oral History of Bughouse Square,” has sprouted a new business, a video-making operation called “House of Bug Productions.”
It all began after Garrett attended an event last summer at the Newberry. “It was there that I first learned about this park,” she says. “I brought up the idea to the others and we all decided to work together to dig into the rich history.”
There was plenty to dig into.
“We just didn’t know the scale, the many sides of the story,” says Hoag.
The park is the oldest in the city, deeded in 1842 by developers eager to boost land values in the area. It was at first surrounded by the large homes of the well-to-do, even after the 1871 fire leveled most of the nearby buildings.
Eventually, after the wealthy had moved to the north and east, it became a gathering place for those who lived in nearby rooming houses, hotels and small apartments. And many of those people liked to get on soapboxes and speak their minds. Some famous folks were attracted to this free speech oasis, such people as Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman and Eugene V. Debs. Others were anonymous anarchists, dreamers, poets, preachers and lunatics.
In “The Gold Coast and the Slum,” the 1929 landmark sociological study of the Near North Side, author Harvey Warren Zorbaugh wrote of these orators, “All their arguments come down to one or the other of two propositions: the economic system is all wrong, or there is no God.”
The park is firmly the main character of the documentary and though the film is only 15 minutes long, it does a remarkably fine job of capturing the various “lives” of the park, as it reflected its surrounding neighborhood, which has gone from ritzy to seedy and notorious and back to ritzy now.
Using wonderful historical illustrations and photos, and contemporary video and drone shots, the park is vividly captured. I cannot imagine one watching this film not being drawn to the park for a walk.
There is a welcome minimum of talking heads. I have a few things to say in the film, having written about the park since before these filmmakers were born. Mostly I ramble on about Terkel, who followed social historian and author Arthur Weinberg as emcee of the Bughouse Square Debates when they were resurrected in the 1980s, a chore that I have insufficiently handled since his death.
Gary Chichester, an activist and former president of the Chicago Gay Alliance, is particularly moving, talking about the early days of the park as a meeting place for gay men and the beginnings of the pride movement. What would become the annual Gay Pride Parade began in Bughouse Square in June 1970, as a march of about 20 people.
“If we lose our history,” Chichester says, “we lose ourselves.”
Mary Lou Sydel, Barbara Clark and Kit Barbaro of the Washington Square Park Advisory Council offer their thoughts about the now stunning park and the many, many dogs that visit and romp daily.
Providing a strong narrative thread to the film is historian Paul Durica, who used to work for the Newberry before recently becoming the director of exhibitions at the Chicago History Museum. Knowledgeable and compellingly articulate, he is lively and informative, filled with such sublime observations as what was on the entrance sign to the once nearby Dill Pickle Club: “Step High, Stoop Low and Leave Your Dignity Outside.”
The film has been publicly screened twice, at Mullady Theatre on the Loyola campus and at the Newberry, there for a crowd of people from the advisory council. “It was a large crowd and so enthusiastic,” said Garrett.
It is important to note that this gang did not make this movie for class credit. “We had to fit it into our lives between class work, jobs and, well, our lives,” says Donahue.
“This was not a school project,” says Hoffman. “But I got to really devote myself to interviewing and editing, which I love.”
They did not make the movie for money. It was a passion project but so satisfying as the six students took what they learned in classrooms and employed those skills in real life.
“This enabled me to sharpen my skills,” says Hynes. “The park used to be a place where I went when skipping class. Now it is so much more.”
“The joy has been in working with this team but also making connections with so many other people,” says Ghosal. “All these connections to my new hometown.”
None of the filmmakers are Chicago-born but all are determined to stay here, as they start to look for film festivals they might enter, look for jobs and search for a new project. They tell me there are some ideas on the table. They now know where Studs and Ida Terkel are buried. I hope they know that with “No Permit Necessary,” they have done them, and the millions of other ghosts that call Bughouse home, proud.
