The part of my old SPLOTCHY DOT COM site I put the most work into was probably the Hooker Motels section.
Back in Chicago in the late 90s, old, beaten-up motels dotted the lovely diagonal street North Lincoln Avenue, all the way from Foster to Devon. I already loved Lincoln Avenue, because, HELLO! DIAGONAL STREET ON A GRID-LIKE CITY LAYOUT! Okay, I don’t know why a diagonal street held such appeal for me. I will say that I love Elston Avenue, and Milwaukee Avenue, even Clark Street, which is only occasionally diagonal. I like diagonal streets. Let’s leave it that.
The motels all had a dilapidated, low-rent Vegas charm to me. What is a dilapidated, low-rent Vegas charm, you ask? Well, lots of neon signage, for one. Also, overly ambitious motel names. The Stars. The Apache. The Acres. And yes, sometimes, the mischievous motel name. The O-Mi!
So, I went about cataloguing the motels. There were a lot! Over 10! That’s actually a lot. Trust me. I took pictures in the daytime. I took pictures at night.
At the time, I was visiting the Lincoln Square record store Laurie’s Planet Of Sound a lot. I got to know the owner, John. He was a nice guy. I mentioned I was devoting part of my website to the motels on Lincoln Avenue, and he thought it was a cool idea. He offered to call all the motels and get rates. He even asked me if I wanted him to inquire about hourly rates, too. Hell yes I did!
I pulled out all the stops for the website. I created an animated “Hooker Motels” GIF for the page heading. I created pseudo-neon links that lit up when you hovered your mouse over them. It was the bleeding edge of the Internet, baby!
During the time I was documenting the motels, a few got knocked down. The Acres. The Spa. NO!!! THE SPA!!!!!! Oh, that was the crown jewel of the Hooker Motels. I was lucky to talk to the daughter of the owner of The Spa after it was closed but before it was torn down. She sold me a light fixture, and told me stories about rock bands that used to stay there.
Not long after The Spa was knocked down, I stopped maintaining my site. SPLOTCHY DOT COM just sat there, all dead and static and unloved.
But, people still visited the motel pages. It’s not like I did anything special or wonderful, but I probably had the largest collection of pictures of the motels on the web at the time. I will admit that Google was certainly a conduit for people to find my site via slightly-unseemly searches like “HOOKER + CHICAGO”.
Occasionally, people would contact me about the motels. A grad student emailed me and asked if she could use some of my pictures in a thesis she was doing on the motels of Lincoln Avenue. I happily let her use whatever pictures she wanted. A man who bought The Stars was going to knock it down and replace it with condos. He contacted me to see if I wanted to buy the motel’s sign for US $500. If I had a place for it, I definitely would have. Instead, I asked to take pictures of the motel before he knocked it down. On a rainy day, I went there with my friend Tim and took pictures.
In some ways, it’s weird having a static webpage documenting some part of the world. It’s not a blog page. It’s not something that will be up at the top of your site for a couple days, and then vanish into the obscurity of your archives. It’s always present. I think there might be an expectation from this, that your site is some sort of dependable, up-to-date resource. But my old Hooker Motels page isn’t. I didn’t want that responsibility.
Hey, maybe if I still lived on the north side of Chicago, and saw those motels every day, I would be the recordkeeper of these places. I do miss them. And I know that at least some of them are still standing, but I couldn’t tell you which ones.
Disclaimer: This post was composed while listening to the John Fahey album “America”. You should check it out. It’s really nice.
