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Jean's Place, 1929-1999The Unknown read at Jean's Place about five months before it was closed after seventy years of servicing the local community. Jean's was a place where you could get a stein of Old Style for $1.50. People from all walks of life: filmmakers, struggling writers, plumbers, tuckpointers, mailmen, carpenters, printers, painters, costume designers, photographers, electricians, insurance salesman and the unemployed drank at Jeans. Class differences didn't matter. Most of its customers were from the neighborhood and lived within three or four blocks. I met most of my neighbors there. The neighborhood tavern is a dying breed of public space, one that I'll miss. I'm glad the Unknown had a chance to read there before it was reduced to rubble to make the way for cookie-cutter condominiums.
The audio from our Jean's reading is of very low quality, except for Paul Kotheimer's songs. Several drunks in the front row were having a domestic dispute throughout, and the audio-man (Eric Rasmussen) spent most of the reading at the other end of the bar. But here's to the memories. . .
When Jean's closed, it was, in a way, the end of a community. The last night of November, 1999, was the last time I felt such a sense of kinship with a physical space and its inhabitants. My friends would thereafter scatter to different parts of the city, as gentrification took its final hold on the neighborhood and drove rents too high for us to stay. A few days before Jean's closed, my car had been torched by a gang member. The fact that my car had been destroyed in an aimless and misdirected act of class warfare bothered me less than the fact that Jean's was shutting down. My car was just a car. Jean's was part of a collective soul. When they tore that place down, they ripped open a hole in that neighborhood that will never heal.
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