Tags
Archer Avenue, Chicago, flarf, folklore, ghost, Mozart Ave., poetry, prose poem, Resurrection Mary, Southwest Side, vanishing hitchhiker
A well-known vanishing hitchhiker- my favorite evening at The Oh Henry Ballroom. A young man meets a girl, most beloved, who supposedly wanders the streets down Archer Avenue late at night, dating back 100 years, playing at Jeannie’s Bottle on the 12th. If you are there after 8:30 p.m, many men have had heart stopping encounters with the gorgeous legend, dancing at the corner of 47th St. and Mozart Ave. They don’t like to talk about this blonde-hair, blue-eyed Mary Bregovy, just a bunch of hooey seen on numerous occasions after a fight with her boyfriend at the Oh Henry Ballroom. Young Mary stormed out into the cold, where a moonlit encounter with an urban legend makes a compelling case for resurrection. She still manages to find men who long to dance.
Radical Totality 
Just a quick flarf visit with an old friend. A buddy of mine and I used to go wandering out there looking for Mary when we were still dumb kids. Never saw her though. He’s been buried at Resurrection Cemetery for years now, so I like to think they go dance at the Willowbrook every night.
I grew up at 87th and Mozart (we uneducated South Siders pronounced it Mo-ZZZZZart), and as a teenager used to work at 47th and Lawndale, which is very close to where the ballroom was at 47th and Mozart.
I spent some quality time on the South Side, though I wasn’t a native, so didn’t know about Mozzzart Street, let alone its proper pronunciation. Seems to me whatever the residents call it is what’s right. After all, New Yorkers call Houston Street Howston Street and laugh if you get it “wrong.” Come to think about it, as a Midwesterner, I got laughed at for saying “pop,” instead of “soda,” too.
Were you there long enough to hear the legend of Resurrection Mary?
I have no idea what prompted me to write this. It’s not great flarf, but it is a brief visit home with an old pal, I guess. I have spent all day fighting a battle against a water heater- and losing.
I don;t even remember now whether we called it “soda” or “pop.” I’ve been in the South for 15 years.
Two old pals, I guess- Mary and my buddy who now dances with her.
I didn’t know the legend–or very much else. Just a wide-eyed kid from the suburbs getting her chance to be in the big city for college, with classmates who were denizens of the South Side.
It’s old vanishing hitchhiker bit of old-country folklore brought in by a wave of Polish immigrants in the 1920’s. As the story goes, a beautiful young girl who loves to dance had a fight with her boyfriend dancing at the Oh Henry Ballroom (now called the Willowbrook). She leaves to go walk home on her own and was struck and killed by a car. Since the 1930’s men have reported meeting a beautiful young girl who dances with them at clubs, etc (particularly the Willowbrook), then disappears without a trace as he drives her home past Resurrection Cemetery (a huge very old cemetery in the Southwest suburbs with a large Polish Catholic population buried there). She spends eternity dancing, as she loved to do in life.
It’s corny, but it is very old folklore- and she belongs to us South Siders.