On March 2nd, 1908, a nineteen-year-old East-European-Jewish immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, was shot to death while visiting the home of police chief, George Shippy. The maid turned him away with a terse command to “come back later.” He went back later and was shot seven times, and it was claimed—later—that he had anarchist connections. Chicago is historically afraid of three things: honesty, anarchists, and fire. The Lazarus Averbuch story is one of those pieces of background radiation, constantly surging through Chicago; it flares up on occasion, whispering rumors of Anarchy. It occasionally sparks an interest in the case and then fades…again. Chicago’s history is violent and more than a little lurid; Chicago history is also somewhat stinky, in a slaughterhouse kind of way. Ah, but Chicago was the slaughterhouse of the nation, for a time. Before it took a bath and joined The Outfit, and got in on a really big piece of the action. For a while, Chicago was the action, but that was later, and the subject of another post. Before the famous Chicago Mob scene, there was the not-so-famous turn-of-the-20th -Century-off-the-rails-psychotic scene. Lazarus Averbuch was just one of many overtly-murdered people piled up in Chicago’s history. Murder victims and crime victims are the mortar holding Chicago history together; murderers, psychotic industrialists, mobsters, psychotic businessmen, assorted femme fatales, shady characters, and unrepentant miscreants are the bricks. Everyone else is the paint job. Chicago history is dark. Chicago history, when you dig deep enough, is astonishingly scary. And it’s peppered with truly strange people and events. Lazarus Averbuch doesn’t figure as one of the strange people; that honor is reserved for the cryptic, cross-dressing/drag-fabulous, though scruffy Julius Duc. He was arrested in a dress. He wore that dress for unknown reasons and was arrested for wearing that rather fetching, though uncomfortable dress, that wig, that tastefully-stuffed bosom in public; two or three pictures of him survive in the Chicago Historical Society (in the negatives collection) and those photos have made their way onto the internet. (The only photos of Lazarus Averbuch are rather troubling post-mortem, “posed” images.) The image in this post is a response to Chicago’s history: not necessarily to Averbuch and Duc, or the corpses mortaring the city together, but to the other Chicago. For all of its darkness, all of its bad mojo of biblical proportions, it was an interesting and photographically-appealing city. It was vibrant. It was sublime. For all for all of the darkness, there was Humanity. In short, it was like any other big city. It was at war with itself. It still is. Oh, but it looked seriously good!. It was grungy. It was dirty, ramshackle and improvised, but good for photographers. The textures had textures. You could see the scents. I wanted to capture something of that: the mood of it, the fuzz, the blur, the world-as-it-will-never-exist-again sort of vibe. This is one of the pieces I came up with. It isn’t old. Not yet. You can’t see any of the scents, but it’s a Chicago photo that almost captures something of that old city. Almost. Nearly. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week/end.