Birth of west Evanston's arts district: From bricks and pipes to easels and prints

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There’s a curious concentration of artists and art businesses in an otherwise unremarkable section of west Evanston, roughly bounded by Dempster Street, Dodge Avenue, Main Street and Asbury Avenue.

The mostly modest one- and two-family houses, small apartment buildings and occasional old commercial buildings in the area date from the days before cars were ubiquitous – when folks always shopped “in the neighborhood.”

I moved into the area in the late 1980s and I’ve loved learning about the history of the area and becoming a part of its growing art scene.

This area was once a haven for Eastern European immigrants, mainly Polish, who had been settling there since the early 1900s. Many worked either in the brickyards, where the Robert Crown Community Center is today, or at the Clayton Mark factory, which has been replaced by the Evanston Plaza shopping center at Dempster and Dodge.

Clayton Mark, which made wrought steel pipe and water well supplies sold all over the world, was once the largest single employer in the city.

A Chicago & Northwestern Railway rail spur, which today is the Mayfair “cutoff” behind the west side of Evanston Plaza, carried heavy freight and brought materials and equipment to the Clayton Mark factory and other industrial sites. The spur ran diagonally southwest from the tracks at Green Bay Road, through Evanston, to Montrose Avenue in Chicago.

(What’s left of the Mayfair viaduct became canvases for the Foster Street mural You are Brilliant and two Church Street murals, Trust Your Heart and Live Your Dream. Remains of the railway’s dirt embankment are still seen east of Dodge and the ETHS east parking lot.)

Small neighborhood stores in the West Village – only recently named an official city business district – consisted back then of at least two grocery stores, some beauty parlors, a candy store, a popular bakery, a hardware store, a Polish meat market and probably other businesses. Everyone attended the local Catholic church, Ascension of Our Lord, at Ashland Avenue and Wilder Street, and neighborhood children went to the elementary school there run by the Felician Sisters.

Matts’ Bargain Room (dry goods, work clothes, shoes and toys), on the second floor of 1121 Florence, struggled until it was turned into a private “key club” by the Poleski family, who owned the eight-unit building housing it. (Really, two four-unit buildings that were joined.) It became a lively Polish social center on weekends, with dances and parties.

After World War II, as the children of the immigrants moved out of the area to further suburbs, many artists and creatives moved into the empty commercial buildings.

Creative types are always looking for bargains, and they are particularly good at “fixing things up,” adapting odd spaces to unique uses, like art studios. (I note here, for the uninitiated, that a studio is a place where art is made; a gallery is a place where art is only shown.)

In 1984, artist couple Cynthia Archer and Will Peterson purchased a former hardware store, with a house attached, at the southwest corner of Florence and Greenleaf Street.

There they lived, made their art and operated Plucked Chicken Press, nationally known for its publications and lithography. A prop rubber chicken hanging over the gallery’s corner doorway was the only sign for their business, which ceased operations after Peterson’s death in 1994. Archer is still an Evanston resident.

Michael Phillips owned and operated Special Things gallery at 1405-7 Greenleaf St. where he showed only the work of Black artists, and handled custom framing as well. He lived there “above the store” until his death in 2006.

Evanston artist Fran Joy worked for Phillips as an artist/curator. Joy told me it was the beginning of her representation of other artists, especially artists of color. There, she said, she “began to learn the value and significance of collecting African art.”

When the popular Purwin’s Cake Box bakery at 1124 Florence closed in 1980, the space was rented briefly to an electrical contractor and then was purchased in 1984 by Ellen Rockwell Galland and Vic Freise, who used it to house Galland’s architectural business and Freise’s construction company. Freise and his company were responsible for joyful block parties on Florence in the summer.

An immigrant Yugoslavian artist-architect named Budimir Tosic bought the eight-unit building at 1121-29 Florence and 1532 Crain St. when the Poleski family sold it in the early 1970s. Tosic rented the empty first-floor shops to artists, who not only used the spaces as their studios but actually lived in them, cooking on hot plates and bathing in hastily installed showers.

A second-generation Evanston artist couple, Kathy and Tim Ade, rented the top floor at 1121, the former key cub, and remodeled it at their expense to make it liveable – adding a kitchen and a shower. They retained the shuffleboard court in the flooring, Kathy told me recently, adding, “The whole, huge ceiling was black. Our baby slept in a tent we made there.”

Tim was an art professor at NU and Loyola, and Kathy became the first graphics person at the RoundTable.

When the Ades left in 1974, the space became Tosic’s own home and studio. There, he held regular figure drawing sessions for neighborhood and Chicago artist friends.

Tosic owned a human skeleton that he brought out as an anatomy resource. Along with some of his paintings, the skeleton was (literally) found in a closet after Tosic died. It was quite a surprise for the new owner – me – in 1986!

Editor’s note: This column has updated to correct the spelling of Vic Freise’s name. Part two of Gay Riseborough’s look at west Evanston’s arts district is posted here.

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Gay Riseborough is an artist, has served the City of Evanston for 11 years on arts committees, and is now an arts writer at the Evanston RoundTable. More by Gay Riseborough