Medium blog & a side of fries.

Since the demise a few years ago of the original Gold Coast Dogs at the corner of State and Hubbard — victim, I believe, of a foolish landlord who decided to price an excellent tenant out of its location — my favorite hot dog stand in Chicago has been Fast Track. It’s just south of the El line that runs between downtown and west suburban Oak Park, at the corner of Des Plaines and Lake. It sits in a near West Side location that’s still largely populated by smallish Class C office buildings and surface parking.

It isn’t a stand, in the sense of a guy with a pushcart and a beach umbrella, just a small restaurant that serves hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries and so on. I would call it a greasy spoon, but it isn’t a diner, and most of the food isn’t what you would eat with a spoon. Fast Track has a railroading theme, complete with a three-car Illinois Central model train running along an 0-shaped track suspended from the ceiling. Other decorations include an old-time railroad lantern, a handful of train photos, and, incongruously, a full-sized traffic light, always on red.

The proprietor, or at least the boss behind the counter, is a man in his 50s, a fellow with a touch of gray on the chest hair visible at his shirt front. He has a pronounced Greek? — Albanian? — some kind of Eastern accent, each word enunciated like a hammer swatting a nail, in a way that comes off as brusk. But he never fails to end each transaction — he rings them all up — with “Thank you, my friend.”

But that’s all detail. The smell brings the place alive. Meat hissing on the grill, fries bubbling in the oil, these smells rising from behind the counter to fill the little room. The food lives up to the promise of the smell, too. I like the hamburgers: warm meat working in combination with ketchup, onions, relish and other flavors, held in place by a soft bun. The fries are fresh-cut. The lemonade isn’t the best, but passable. I pay less than $5.

I go there once every month or two, especially when it’s warm. Today it was warm. I walked from my office to the Haymarket Station Post Office first, to mail our tax returns, and then to Fast Track. Its large glass sliding door was all the way open today, so that eating inside is almost al fresco. Fast Track does have an outdoor eating area, marked off by an old rail mounted on posts, and some train-car wheels, but I couldn’t get a seat there, so I ate inside.

The area may be undistinguished now, but there’s some history to it, as I discovered one day after eating at Fast Track. If you walk south about half a block on Des Plaines from the restaurant, and are paying attention, you’ll see a dinged-up plaque embedded in the sidewalk at the mouth of an alley that parallels the nearest east-west street to the south, Randolph. It is the City of Chicago’s afterthought-ish way of commemorating the Haymarket Riot, which occurred here on May 4, 1886. At the top of the plaque, it says “Site of the Haymarket Tragedy,” and then there’s a paragraph of canned history about the event:

“A decade of strife between labor and industry culminated here in a confrontation that resulted in the tragic death of both workers and policemen. On May 4, 1886, spectators at a labor rally had gathered around the mouth of Crane's Alley. A contingent of police approaching on Des Plaines Street were met by a bomb thrown from just south of the alley. The resultant trial of eight activists gained worldwide attention for the labor movement, and initiated the tradition of "May Day" labor rallies in many cities.

“Designated on March 25, 1992, Richard M. Daley, Mayor”

I suppose any more detail is too much to ask of a plaque like this, but a few other things are worth noting. Police action on May 3 had resulted in protestors being shot elsewhere in Chicago, and so another rally was called for the next day. A mass of protests had gotten under way on May 1, when strikers — and estimated 300,000 nationwide and 40,000 in Chicago — had taken to the streets across the country to demand an eight-hour work day.

Afterward, four of the “eight activists” were hanged, one died in prison, and three were pardoned by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld in 1893, which was political suicide for the governor. At this distance, it’s fairly clear that the men taken to the dock for the bomb-throwing were railroaded, and that Gov. Altgeld did the right thing. It would have made a good Jimmy Stewart movie, with him as the pardoning governor, going at it against all odds. As far as I know, the real Altgelt’s only monument is his headstone at Graceland Cemetery on the North Side, and a minor street named Altgeld, also on the North Side.