Local ragtime

Artwork courtesy of Quigley Publishing Company, a division of QP Media, Inc

In the “writing/editing” section of Craigslist, it’s a familiar call. Once a year or so, some ambitious soul posts an ad looking for writers, proclaiming he or she will launch a Midwest version of The New Yorker. It turns out that yearning has been around for nigh on a century. A year after The New Yorker’s debut in 1925, Marie Armstrong Hecht—wife of famed Chicago journalist Ben Hecht—gathered together a group of critics and journalists to create The Chicagoan, a wantonly imitative gazette that even featured a “Talk of the Town” section.

Seemingly long-forgotten, the magazines have been attracting new interest ever since they were discovered and dusted off by Neil Harris—history and art-history professor emeritus at the University of Chicago—in the university’s archives. Packaged together in a beautiful new book, with Harris serving as a tour guide of the mag’s history, The Chicagoan (University of Chicago Press, $65) makes us wish it could have hung on (it gasped its last in 1935). As it stands, it’s a testament to the provincial pride of the Second City. Harris notes that The New Yorker never acknowledged its Midwest rival, but The Chicagoan took its shots, most notably in a 1929 J.C. Davis cartoon titled “The New Yorker’s Map of the United States,” which labels everything outside of New York and Atlantic City “Dubuque.” And we can’t get enough of some of the time-capsule moments, as in the June 14, 1926, “Talk of the Town,” which complains, “The pyramids were built by hand and it took thousands of hands to build them. The second installment of the Tribune Building is being built by machinery, but it takes some hundreds of pedestrians daily to stop and watch it go up. Where is the gain?”

Reading the dusty old mag in this beautiful new book made us nostalgic for an urban culture that we never got to experience. The Chicagoan was civically engaged in a way publications nowadays rarely are. No compunction exists about taking shots at politicians, making hay about the naming of the Art Institute lions, or moaning about the difficulty of hailing a cab on Michigan Avenue. Though we hardly knew ye, Chicagoan, you’re suddenly sorely missed.

Neil Harris discusses The Chicagoan on Tuesday 2.