WBEZ | Evergreen Park

Lost landmark of Evergreen Golf Club

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

April is here. The golf clubs come out of the basement and into my car’s trunk. And yet the time is bittersweet. I’m starting the third season without my favorite course—Evergreen Golf Club.

Evergreen was located at Western and 91^st, in Evergreen Park. It wasn’t fancy and it wasn’t a great course. Yet in its own funky way, it was historic.

The site had originally been part of the Ahern farm. In 1924 the family opened an 18-hole daily fee course. Also on the property was a road house called the Beverly Gardens. At a time when most golf was played at private clubs, there weren’t many courses open to the public.

All sorts of people played Evergreen in those days. The most notorious regular was Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Al Capone’s chief trigger-man. McGurn was a scratch player who once competed in the Western Open. Big Al came out to the course a few times, too.

John Dillinger also visited Evergreen, but not to play golf. On New Year’s Eve 1933, Dillinger and six pals stuck up the road house, shot it out with the local cops, and got away with $500.

I grew up on the Northwest Side, and never got around to playing Evergreen until the 1990s. Then I fell in love with the place. The Beverly Gardens had long since burned down, and the clubhouse was a little frame building with asbestos siding that looked like a renovated tool shed. But the green fees were cheap and it was seldom crowded.

The course was split in half by a live freight track, which you crossed four times during your 18 holes. Many of the holes were wide open and easy. A few were tricky, with narrow, tree-lined fairways and blind shots to elevated greens. Some were just weird—on the thirteenth, you teed off at roof-level of the houses behind you on 93^rd Place.

One thing I appreciated was that the course was never littered with goose droppings. The greens crew simply let their dogs run free, and that kept the geese away.

By now the course was owned by Anna May “Babe” Ahern. She’d been born on the property in 1907 and was listed as the club pro. All the years I played at Evergreen, there’s was talk that the course was going to be sold to a developer, or Wal-Mart, or the Village of Evergreen Park. But like Babe Ahern, Evergreen went on.

On October 14, 2010, I holed-out a full 5-iron shot on Evergreen’s seventeenth. In nearly fifty years of golf, it was only my second eagle. Not wanting to spoil my mood, I skipped the last hole and walked off the course.

That was the last shot I ever hit at Evergreen. The next month Babe Ahern finally found a buyer who would pay her price, and the month after that she herself died, at 103.

I’ve driven past Evergreen’s site a few times in the last few years, and seen the development taking place. I realize that change is inevitable. But sometimes it comes too damn quickly.

Teachers go on strike in Evergreen Park

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 09:55:00 -0500

Teachers in the south Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park are on the picket line.

The teachers in Evergreen Park District 124 walked off the job after contract talks broke down late Monday. Representatives from the district and the teachers' union had been meeting for more than five hours but were unable to reach a deal.

The negotiators differed on issues including salary and efforts to tie teacher pay to student performance.

The strike is the first for the Evergreen Park district. It leaves nearly 2,000 students in five schools out of class Tuesday.

Neighborhood banks used to be so money--architecturally speaking

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:49:00 -0500

A national bank is building a new branch on a commercial intersection not far from where I live. A few lengths of structural steel went up, and the rest seems to be plywood and brick veneer.

That's why this bank building pictured above caught my attention while I was driving past 100th and Kedzie in Evergreen Park a few days ago. Built 50 years ago as Evergreen Savings & Loan, this Harris Bank branch is a well-preserved example of what neighborhood banks used to be, architecturally. It's substantial, sober, efficient and modern. You know you'd get a desk-set, a calendar, a bronze paperweight--something--for opening an account there, back when. The architecture tells you.

I like the Mondrianesque curtain wall facing Kedzie:

That bank branch that's under construction? It's not finished, but already you can tell the completed building won't stand out. It won't register visually. And it's not supposed to. The building is only built for speed: just enough architecture to collect the money--collect the fees--lock up for the night and repeat the next day. The architecture is telling us something there as well.