South Loop eatery shows what city could be
My in-laws are wise and sensible people. They only enjoy ice that comes in a glass. So, naturally, they will soon be headed back to Florida for the winter.
But before they leave, we will have our regular Sunday morning breakfast together at Blackie's, the place that to me most makes the South Loop where I live feel like a real neighborhood.
For 70 years, the DeMilio-Thomas family has owned and operated Blackie's restaurant and bar at the corner of Clark and Polk. I love the apple sauce pancakes, but it's the diverse and longtime staff, which includes African Americans, Latinos and Italian Americans, that keeps me coming back.
It is a snapshot of what the rest of the city should be like.
Ora Caston, originally from Jackson, Miss., has worked at Blackie's, first as a cook and now as manager, for 28 years. Linda Gaimari has waited tables there for a quarter of a century. Carmen Capron-Villanueva has been there for 24 years. She met her husband, Paul, at Blackie's. He's a newcomer. He has worked there only 16 years.
One of Ora's sons also worked there at one time.
Talk about a family restaurant.
Jeffrey Thomas and his mother, Doreen DeMilio Thomas, own the business, which started out in 1878 as a bar owned by a former Confederate officer.
Jeffrey's grandfather, Alex DeMilio, bought the property from the officer's daughter in 1939. But in those days in Chicago, according to Jeff, who is also vice chairman of the Near South Planning Board, there was an unwritten covenant in the largely Irish neighborhood against selling businesses to Italians.
So, DeMilio quietly got a German-Irish buddy to buy the bar for him, and Blackie's was born. But DeMilio was not Blackie. That was the nickname of the black-eyed restaurateur who helped run the day-to-day operations.
Blackie's is across the street from the old Dearborn train station. During the 1940s and 1950s, there was no telling who you might run into having a beer at Blackie's. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., the Harlem Globetrotters, Rocky Marciano, Sam Cooke and Lena Horne were just a few of the celebrities who ate and drank there on their way in or out of town on the Santa Fe Super Chief.
The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers also spent time in Blackie's. One night, the Stooges and the Marx boys got into a food fight when one side criticized the other's comedic skills.
"It was right over there near the window,'' Jeffrey says, pointing behind. "I can't remember who my grandfather said started it.''
Jeffrey grew up on the West Side. When he was a kid, coming downtown to his grandfather's restaurant and hanging out in the surrounding neighborhood was "like going to Disneyland.''
"It was a vibrant neighborhood,'' he says. "It was wild.''
The neighborhood was the hub of the city's printing industry, where thousands of people worked. Then airplanes crippled train travel. Technology and other changes sent much of the printing industry packing. By 1977, when Jeffrey was fresh out of Northwestern University, Blackie's, he says, "had been reduced to a shot and beer joint.''
His grandfather refused to surrender. That's when Jeffrey decided to join the family business on a part-time basis.
"I had a zillion childhood memories,'' he says. "I wanted to keep it alive.''
He worked for an oil company and then as a trader on the Chicago Board of Trade, helping out at Blackie's as much as he could.
It was rough going. Then the neighborhood began to make a comeback. High-rise condos, town houses and college dorms are its new neighbors.
In 1985, Jeffrey left trading to run Blackie's full time, working alongside his mother and Ora Caston, who had been hired a few years before.
"Doreen put me to work the same day I applied,'' Ora says. "She waited tables and I cooked. I fell in love with the place.''