Valentine's Day let down

You’d think there’d be at least something marking the spot were seven men were brutally gunned down in cold blood, but as my roommate and I strolled past the lot that used to be 2122 N. Clark St., there was nothing but a fence, row of trees and patches of grass.

On Valentine’s Day in 1929 a handful of Al Capone’s boys walked into the building that once stood there dressed as cops to bust up a rival gang members whiskey deal, asked them to line up against the wall innocently then proceeded to Tommy Gun them all to pieces. One of the most brutal gangland shootings of its time and even to date, it was dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Seventy-six years later, on a mild, blustery pre-Halloween Fall, the type of night where I feel compelled to seek out something macabre, the roomie and I stewed around the apartment restlessly trying to think of something cheap and mildly entertaining to take up the next couple of hours. I suggested we stop by the site where the murders took place not knowing anything about what stands there today but mildly curious about it.

We walked the 1.5-mile trek down Fullerton, to Clark, then south past Webster and passed a newly-built (i.e., after 1930 — this is a really old part of Chicago) retirement home. There’s a series of mid-rise apartments across the street and I’m imagining to myself what it is the people who lived there in the winter of 1929 thought when they heard a 30-second long machine gun from across the street that morning.

“Hmmm, just another day in a really fucked-up, corrupt, violent city,” they probably thought to themselves briefly and went back to their radio shows.

I’m utterly fascinated by history and wish to re-live it every day. Time travel, for me, would be the ultimate.

Well, on the even side of the street, like I said, there’s a old folks home and as we walk along notice that the first vintage building on the block is 2120 (it’s a non-descript 9-5 business), which meant that the empty lot just to the north must’ve been where the shit went down. So we stop and look at it expecting to gain some sort of interesting perspective (at least I was) but we don’t really. There’s no memorial denoting what took place there over 75 years ago. The lot is fenced off completely so there’s not getting access to it unless you’re a member or employee of the home.

We just stood there, leaning up against the fence.

My roommate says something along the lines of “hmmm, quite a few dudes died tragically ten feet in front of us.”

“Yeah they did. Pretty crazy.”

“Well, you ready to go,” he asked after about a minute.

I stood there for another moment as he headed down the street holding out hope that I’d hear the yelping of a dog or the faint rattle of gunfire (stuff some people have said they’ve experienced while passing the site.) None of this happens, of course. Shit like that never happens to me. The only time something completely inexplicable has ever happened to me was one time a block of cheese slid off the counter of a girl I was dating in Omaha at the time and flew halfway across her kitchen floor. Not quite as cool as walking past the site of one of the bloodiest gang murders in history and hearing the ghostly bark of the poor dog that was trapped in the building after the killings, but I’ll take what I can get.

A couple approached me from the north as I was leaning into the fence gazing at the empty lot, and assuming they knew the story behind the location I figured they probably thought I was some lame tourist or a paranormal freak. So I backed away and headed south past Clark Bar nonchalantly.