Places of the Heart: Requiem for a Greasy Spoon
by Kevin Nance
MARCH 11, 2010 TAGS:
They shut down Standee’s the other day. Standee’s Snack ’n’ Dine, open around the clock for 60 years, a few doors down from the Granville El station, three blocks from my apartment in Chicago. It was a dump. None too clean, a film of bacon grease over the walls and ceiling. The seats in the booths were ripped in places and patched with duct tape. You could get a decent breakfast — eggs over easy and buttered toast, hash browns, a nice link of sausage — for under $5, but otherwise the food was never more than calories. The best you could say about the coffee was that it was all right.
Still.
Lost its lease, Standee’s. You could see it coming. The long-depressed three-block stretch it’s on, from Broadway east to Lake Michigan, is busy fixing itself up. A fancy coffee place, the kind where they roast the coffee beans on site and make pictures of trees in the foam of your latte, is full day and night with writer/musician/artist types eyeing each other’s laptops. There used to be a wino problem on one corner, but the neighborhood voted to ban alcohol sales there, and the winos moved on. On another corner, a new café is doing brisk business — not because its food is especially good, but because it features an abundance of yuppie catnip, otherwise known as stainless steel appliances and granite table tops. Across the street, a big new condo building opened last year. Property values are edging up.
In this setting, Standee’s had become an embarrassment, a relic of the bad old days before people had iPhones and ate arugula. It still paid its rent, sure, but the landlord wanted the proprietor to spruce up the place, attract a higher class of customer. The Standee’s guy said no thanks. Who stays where he’s not welcome? Now the hanging neon Standee’s sign is gone, the windows covered up with black garbage bags. Someone’s tagged the locked door with Rest in Peace! The landlord’s looking for a new tenant. Maybe we’ll get a Quizno’s.
I know that the passing of Standee’s is the way of things, and that there’s no going back. But I also know that it’s about more than one tattered old café giving up the ghost. If Standee’s wasn’t special in itself, it stood for something valuable, even quintessential in American life: the institution of the mom-and-pop diner, where you sat and ate without judging or being judged, and where you could be comfortably languid and lonely in the presence of others. That state of mind, immortalized (and somewhat idealized) in Edward Hopper’s great painting “Nighthawks,” is part of the national psyche. Like the Irish and the French, but in our own very different way, we like to drift and brood and laze about in public. Misery loves company. So does hope.
And Standee’s didn’t lack for clientele. The place wasn’t always packed, but it enjoyed a steady business. Blue-collar workers heading to and from their shifts on the Red Line. Homeless people who’d panhandled enough change, often just outside the door, for a bowl of split-pea soup. The occasional upwardly mobile type, slumming or just too hungry to care. Retired or unemployed people from the neighborhood with nothing to do and nowhere to go, nursing a mug of joe for hours at a time, often late at night.
Officially, Standee’s discouraged loitering. Unofficially, it didn’t give a damn, as long as you ordered something, kept reasonably quiet and didn’t smell. Standee’s was that increasingly rare thing in a world of security cameras, gated communities and libraries and churches that lock their doors at sundown: a place to just be.
I don’t want to romanticize it. As I said, Standee’s was a dump. But it was a homey dump, a dump with soul. It wasn’t full of signs for different menu items in flashy fonts and bright colors, like the Subway chain store a couple of doors down. If there were signs at Standee’s, they were hand-written. And if the waitresses, generally middle-aged motherly types with big hair and wide hips, didn’t know you when you walked in, they pretended to. If you looked remotely approachable, they called you “hon” and chatted amiably when they took your order — just a way to pass the time, plump up their tips and, in their dealings with certain customers, be kind.
One of these waitresses — I’ll call her Dot — did that for my brother, Ted. Dot didn’t need me to tell her that Ted was beat up and broken down — a bad knee and a bad ticker, lonely and scared, a small-town Southerner in big noisy Chicago. He liked Standee’s, one of the few places in the Windy City where you could find a decent bowl of grits. And he liked Dot, who made sure his bacon was grilled exactly as he ordered it, medium with a little chew. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she’d chirp. For my brother — bloated, balding and prematurely gray — this was the best part of the meal. “Back atcha,” he’d say, turning pink.
It was at Standee’s, it turned out, where I ate my last meal with Ted.
And for a month after I found his body — he died in his sleep, of heart disease, at 42 — I avoided the place. I’d pass by on the way to the El, think for a second about stopping in, realize I didn’t want to, and walk on. One morning, finally, I went in for breakfast. Coming over to take my order, Dot spoke her first words gingerly, as if she suspected the answer. Where was my brother?
“He died,” I said.
She took a moment with that. Her lip trembled a little. “He told me he was sick.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry, hon.”
“Yes.”
There was nothing else to say. Dot and I got through the meal. I paid the bill as soon as I could and left. I knew I’d never go back to Standee’s. I never did, and I never would have, even if it had stayed open for the rest of my life.
Still.
I’m grateful to Standee’s, now, for being what it was, for me and especially for my brother. It welcomed us when we needed it, and made us feel, if not at home, something very like home, where no one looked at you crosswise when you put your elbows on the table. After all, they had theirs on the table, too.
Thanks, Standee’s.
Rest in peace.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based writer, editor and critic.
Do you have a lost place of the heart, a closed diner, a record store long gone... Leave a comment, tell us your story.
Still.Lost its lease, Standee’s. You could see it coming. The long-depressed three-block stretch it’s on, from Broadway east to Lake Michigan, is busy fixing itself up. A fancy coffee place, the kind where they roast the coffee beans on site and make pictures of trees in the foam of your latte, is full day and night with writer/musician/artist types eyeing each other’s laptops. There used to be a wino problem on one corner, but the neighborhood voted to ban alcohol sales there, and the winos moved on. On another corner, a new café is doing brisk business — not because its food is especially good, but because it features an abundance of yuppie catnip, otherwise known as stainless steel appliances and granite table tops. Across the street, a big new condo building opened last year. Property values are edging up.
In this setting, Standee’s had become an embarrassment, a relic of the bad old days before people had iPhones and ate arugula. It still paid its rent, sure, but the landlord wanted the proprietor to spruce up the place, attract a higher class of customer. The Standee’s guy said no thanks. Who stays where he’s not welcome? Now the hanging neon Standee’s sign is gone, the windows covered up with black garbage bags. Someone’s tagged the locked door with Rest in Peace! The landlord’s looking for a new tenant. Maybe we’ll get a Quizno’s.
I know that the passing of Standee’s is the way of things, and that there’s no going back. But I also know that it’s about more than one tattered old café giving up the ghost. If Standee’s wasn’t special in itself, it stood for something valuable, even quintessential in American life: the institution of the mom-and-pop diner, where you sat and ate without judging or being judged, and where you could be comfortably languid and lonely in the presence of others. That state of mind, immortalized (and somewhat idealized) in Edward Hopper’s great painting “Nighthawks,” is part of the national psyche. Like the Irish and the French, but in our own very different way, we like to drift and brood and laze about in public. Misery loves company. So does hope.
And Standee’s didn’t lack for clientele. The place wasn’t always packed, but it enjoyed a steady business. Blue-collar workers heading to and from their shifts on the Red Line. Homeless people who’d panhandled enough change, often just outside the door, for a bowl of split-pea soup. The occasional upwardly mobile type, slumming or just too hungry to care. Retired or unemployed people from the neighborhood with nothing to do and nowhere to go, nursing a mug of joe for hours at a time, often late at night.
Officially, Standee’s discouraged loitering. Unofficially, it didn’t give a damn, as long as you ordered something, kept reasonably quiet and didn’t smell. Standee’s was that increasingly rare thing in a world of security cameras, gated communities and libraries and churches that lock their doors at sundown: a place to just be.
I don’t want to romanticize it. As I said, Standee’s was a dump. But it was a homey dump, a dump with soul. It wasn’t full of signs for different menu items in flashy fonts and bright colors, like the Subway chain store a couple of doors down. If there were signs at Standee’s, they were hand-written. And if the waitresses, generally middle-aged motherly types with big hair and wide hips, didn’t know you when you walked in, they pretended to. If you looked remotely approachable, they called you “hon” and chatted amiably when they took your order — just a way to pass the time, plump up their tips and, in their dealings with certain customers, be kind.One of these waitresses — I’ll call her Dot — did that for my brother, Ted. Dot didn’t need me to tell her that Ted was beat up and broken down — a bad knee and a bad ticker, lonely and scared, a small-town Southerner in big noisy Chicago. He liked Standee’s, one of the few places in the Windy City where you could find a decent bowl of grits. And he liked Dot, who made sure his bacon was grilled exactly as he ordered it, medium with a little chew. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she’d chirp. For my brother — bloated, balding and prematurely gray — this was the best part of the meal. “Back atcha,” he’d say, turning pink.
It was at Standee’s, it turned out, where I ate my last meal with Ted.
And for a month after I found his body — he died in his sleep, of heart disease, at 42 — I avoided the place. I’d pass by on the way to the El, think for a second about stopping in, realize I didn’t want to, and walk on. One morning, finally, I went in for breakfast. Coming over to take my order, Dot spoke her first words gingerly, as if she suspected the answer. Where was my brother?
“He died,” I said.
She took a moment with that. Her lip trembled a little. “He told me he was sick.”
“Yes,” I said.“I’m sorry, hon.”
“Yes.”
There was nothing else to say. Dot and I got through the meal. I paid the bill as soon as I could and left. I knew I’d never go back to Standee’s. I never did, and I never would have, even if it had stayed open for the rest of my life.
Still.
I’m grateful to Standee’s, now, for being what it was, for me and especially for my brother. It welcomed us when we needed it, and made us feel, if not at home, something very like home, where no one looked at you crosswise when you put your elbows on the table. After all, they had theirs on the table, too.
Thanks, Standee’s.
Rest in peace.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based writer, editor and critic.
Do you have a lost place of the heart, a closed diner, a record store long gone... Leave a comment, tell us your story.
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krishna andavolu wrote on March 11, 2010 6:21am
Aldo's on S.4th and Havemeyer in Brooklyn. An Argentinian diner with sublime huevos rancheros. They called it a "Mexican Breakfast." It closed late last year, and the sign still hangs over the shuttered storefront. Don't know why it's gone, but for years it was my spot to avoid brooklyn's brunch lines or have a quiet weekday lunch out of the office. Sandwiches were big, soups were grayer than i thought possible, but the care put into making a salad was extraordinary. Also they made their own hot sauce. Yum. I will miss that place a lot. [Report Comment]
