More from the Johannsen family -- another death trip.

Above: brother-sister indie-pop duo and globetrotting vigilantes Willy & Safire.

Boy, I'll tell you, a tragedy is a tragedy, but I don't know it is about the Johannsen family that breaks this neighborhood out into a total case of the loonies. Marla Manda dies last year, and all of a sudden it's a great idea to build a giant statue of a handgun in the middle of Armitage Square. Then her fool son goes and dies and suddenly every Republican in the 3rd Ward is threatening to prosecute me and Sherman Larson and anyone else that ever had an unkind word to say about the Johannsen clan. And now, I get this loony "press release" sent to me by Barry's two kids, Willy Bennett Johannsen and Safire Strauss Johannsen, who I guess play in a rock band of some kind. That assistant Marisha -- the really sharp one -- tells me that they're fairly well-known around town for playing something she called "twee pop revival," which means absolutely nothing to me. "Instead of songs about having crushes on librarians, though," she tells me, by means of explanation, "they sing about having crushes on University of Chicago economics professors."

Anyway, here is is. It was sent not by regular mail, but via the My Space.

dear friends:

as you know, it has been a great year for willy & safire -- we've just returned from a triumphant showcase at sxsw, and finally released our latest ep, god and man at yale. but imagine our shock when we return from austin only to find that our dear father, who taught has so much, has passed away in a tragedy, only one year after our grandmother passed as well. the fact that both were taken too soon in pursuit of the contemptible old communist bastard dr. thomas jefferson harding only makes it harder to bear.

so are announcing our first-ever asian tour this spring. we will be doing a tour of laos, cambodia and vietnam, and focusing on vietnam. we will bring our music to the people of southeast asia, and also use our free time to hunt down dr. harding and bring him to justice to answer for his many crimes against armitage heights, and his role in the death of our father and grandmother. it's what they both would have wanted, and we'll put our skills as musicians and handgun aficionados towards that goal.

see you in hanoi!

remember, you can read our blog about the trip, get tour info and hear our new songs right here at www.myspace.com/willyandsafire.

love,

willy and safire

What the hell is it about these people? Don't they have better things to do than run off to Viet Nam and chase down a senile old Marxist?

I thought when I took over the internet diary from Sherman I'd be able to write about stuff around town once in awhile, and not just accounts of a bunch of crazy vigilante death trips on behalf of the local right-wing plutocracy. I see that's not going to be the case.

Barry G. Johannsen, 1964-2008

I have some tragic news from the American consulate in Viet Nam this morning. Seems that the chartered aircraft that was carrying Wihinapa perennial Republican city council candidate, building contractor and handgun activist Barry G. Johannsen and his small party of bounty hunters crashed somewhere in Laos following an apparent mechanical failure. Both he and his seven companions seem to have been killed, according to the wire reports that assistant Marisha has handed me.

As I believe I mentioned a few days ago, Johannsen was travelling to Viet Nam in hopes of tracking down the fugitive leftist urban guerilla and bringing him to justice. Or killing him, apparently.

It's worth noting that Johannsen's mother, Marla Manda Johannsen, died in Viet Nam herself almost exactly one year ago today under very similar circumstances. She, too, was in search of Dr. Harding.

Dr. Harding, of course, remains at large. He is believed to have assumed a senior position in the Viet Namese Communist Party.

Armitage Hill Christian Church, located at 8402 Gresham Avenue in Armitage Hill, will be holding a memorial service tomorrow evening. Donations will be taken and contributed to a fund set up in Mr. Johanssen's name. You may contribute online at this website.

My condolences to Johannsen's two kids, William Bennett Johannsen, 24, and Safire Strauss Johannsen, 22, both of Armitage Heights.

Where is Stedman Plaza?

The last known image of Stedman Plaza, from a Herald-Tribune Sunday Magazine article dated May 12, 1974. This image is most likely much older.

So when I started here last week, I asked that assistant Marisha -- the really sharp one -- to print all of the E-mail letters I got, so I could read them over bagels and coffee in the morning, like I used to back in the '70s. Well, imagine my surprise this morning when there's about a whole ream of letters stacked all over my desk. That assistant Marisha tells me she's been getting a huge amount E-mails all week, and there's more and more coming in ever day. And all of them are about the same thing: the vanished Stedman Plaza, which I referenced a few days ago in my cursory catalog of our neighborhood's 70s-era ills. Older reader might remember it as a nice little public space over near Armitage Square off Gilpin Avenue at Toucey Avenue that was misplaced somehow in 1974 or 1975.

Seems to have touched off a nerve. People wrote with all sorts of theories they'd over the years about where Stedman Plaza disappeared to, or where is was misplaced, or what the story is. It's one of the great mysteries of our neighborhood, and I thought it'd be fun to take a look at people's ideas here. That's the sort of thing Sherman liked to do on this internet diary, right? I know he wasn't so hot for posting minutes from the council meetings.

Wihinapa's Steadmann Park is the metric Stedman Plaza.
Ashley H. in the Poutine District suggests an interesting theory: that Stedmann Park in Wihinapa is actually Stedman Plaza. Ashley notes that when the city briefly switched over to the metric system in 1974, many of the city's master plans were redrawn. In the confusion, some of the distances between Toucey Avenue and Gilpin Avenue were miscalculated, and in official publications, Stedman Park was misplaced in Wihinapa. The name difference can be attributed to the fact that when the first UniLog system was developed for the computerized reprocessing of the city grid in 1973 (also under the ausipces of Mayor Freese's concurrent Future Now initiative, which called for metricization and computerization of all city services), the punch card was mangled, resulting in the addition of an extra "n" being placed at the end, and the automatic transfer of city funds into Wihinapa's subfunds for park maintenance. This effectively allowed a similarly-shaped parking lot in Wihinapa, three miles northeast, to be designated Stedmann Park. This explains Stedmann Park's unattractive, parking lot-like appearance, but the fact that there are historic references to both areas in the 1952 City Registry muddles this theory slightly. Why would you park a car in a plaza, after all?

Stedman Plaza fell victim to inter-factional rivalries in the hippie sculpture garden wars of the 1970s.
There were some pretty cruddy sculpture parks around here in the mid-'70s, but that one on Toucey was the worst. That was the one with the head of Salvador Allende made out of old Coke bottles, except it looked like Jack Klugman? And it kept catching on fire? Well, Murray S., who claims to have been a Parks Board operative at the time, takes us back to those heady days of the sculpture park wars: he notes that the poor record-keeping practices on the Board at the time may have led to funds being diverted into the upkeep of Giant Earth Robot Meditation Plaza, leading to the Stedman Plaza site to be illegally occupied by a sect of Neo-Gesturalists, who you may recall were a radical fringe of urban hippie sculptors that rejected the metaphoric flourishes of the major hippie sculpture gardens (this is all covered beautifully in two books, Ecce Hoedown: The Armitage Heights Sculpture Explosion, by Frank Carney-Nentzl, and Half-Welded to a Dream, by Groff Schwenson). By the time the site burned down in the '78 riots, all the records had been destroyed by the anti-Neo-Gesturalists who controlled the Park Board through most of the 1970s, effectively writing the Glass Bottle Allende Klugman Head out of the history books -- and disappearing Stedman Plaza with it.

Stedman Plaza was torn down by vengeful labor unions, under the cover of construction for the failed I-386 interstate spur.
This is the opinion of Jake T., who wrote to inform us that he worked as a union foreman in the 1970s on the crew that began tentative work on the failed I-386 spur into Armitage Heights in 1974. He said that the union wanted Stedman Plaza out of the way, due to the its unfortunate namesake, F. Cornell Stedman, the union-busting Gilded Age industrialist who is best remembered by those in the Labor movement for his 1917 promise to "devour the infants of the working classes betwixt my teeth and grind them into a fearsome paste, lest they be infected by the plague of Bolshevism" (this was even the epitaph on his grave in Kendall Park until 1966, I believe). In the course of their work in the area, the crew tarped the Plaza and tore it apart with small, noiseless drilling tools and steel brushes, obfuscating work logs and failing to inform city planners. Due to the blight in that area at the time generally, no one noticed the Plaza was gone until it was well into the 1980s. There is now a B.F. Chang's Chinese Bistro on the site in question.

Stedman Plaza was uprooted piece-by-piece by the Freemasons and illegally relocated.
I don't need to refresh anyone's memory about the neighborhood's roots in Freemasonry. So Vick H. in Hanley writes that there has been a popular theory circulating for years that Stedman Plaza, named for Freemason F. Cornell Stedman, was built at Toucey and Gilpin Avenues to complete a visual arrangment that placed the Plaza as the Unveiling Queen of Heaven in alignment with Toucey as the fourth point of entrance in the pentagram formed around Armitage Square when it was built in the 1840s. I'm not sure what all that entails, but apparently, when the fourth point of entrance was shifted from the pentagram by Grand Masterly decree in 1974...aw, this mumbo-jumbo never interested me. I guess Freemasons supposedly took the concrete fixtures apart and put it all back together again somewhere in their lodge in Hanley, and no one noticed it was gone because of the metric restructuring, rioting, interstate spur-building and sculpture parks. Sounds as plausible as anything, I guess.

There never was a Stedman Plaza.
The last theory is from "Dr. L," who teaches history at St. Rumwald College. His theory, about which he actually wrote his thesis on in 1999, is that there never was a historic Stedman Plaza. It was all a cover-up for a white slavery ring that ran out of a three-story tenement off Toucey until it was burned down by -- depending on who you believe -- a rogue cop, a crooked landlord, or the Kendall Park branch of Baader-Meinhoff in 1974. "Stedman Plaza became an illusory embodiment of our aspirations as a neighborhood that happened to coincide with the 3rd Ward's rise to prominence in the city during the first half of the 20th Century," writes Dr. L. "When those dreams began to die in the 1970s, the illusion died with it, leaving nothing behind but smashed-up tenements and a trash-strewn, urine-soaked legacy of cruelty and vice."

That's all very interesting. I think it's real neat how there's a B.F. Chang's Chinese Bistro there now instead of tenements. I ate there the other night, and they had a pretty good egg foo young, I thought. There sure isn't any urine there anymore, at least. So I guess that's good.

Maybe I'll look at introducing an act to establish that space near that building as the Stedman Plaza Memorial Plaza, if the unions, Freemasons and anti-Neo-Gesturalists didn't have too strong an objection.

The Johannsen family spectacle.

That nutjob Johannsen.

So I come into City Hall this morning with my cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, ready to tackle the business of the 3rd Ward and feeling very good (there was a Bix Beiderbecke retrospective on Mishipeshu Public Radio this morning, which I thought was a pretty good way to start the day off). Anyway, that assistant Marisha they assigned me -- she's the really sharp one -- she hands me a very interesting memo she's recieved. I don't know how Sherman did things when he was around here, but I won't lie to you, reader: this thing just about gave me a conniption fit.

It was from that maniac Barry G. Johannsen, who you may recall just lost the election to Sherman in a landslide last November. It was full of the kind of cuckoo horse-crap that the Johanssen family has been spouting since the heyday of their late matriach, Marla Manda Johannsen -- you know, SHERMAN MURDERED MY MOTHER THIS, WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY THAT, BLAH BLAH BLAH SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS THIS, YAK YAK YAK REVENGE ON YOU MARXIST NUTJOBS THAT. Jumping Jehosophat! These creeps never learn.

Sherman might have put up with the crap, but I won't. I began my political career in 1961 running against red-baiting Armitage Hill Goldwaterites that tried to smear my first wife as a a lesbian; she was a lesbian it turns out, but the point is, I learned politics in the good old days. I don't know how to play softball.

The gist of Johannsen's memo was this:

• The general election in November was rigged.
• Sherman intentionally resigned right after so the mayor could install me and I could return Armitage Heights to the leftist urban hellhole of the 1970s.
• Sherman is going to be made Secretary of Re-Education after the Hillary junta.
• Sherman is indirectly responsible for his mother's death.
• Dr. Thomas Jefferson Harding is fully responsible for his mother's death, and, lastly...
• He is travelling to Viet Nam to find Dr. Harding and kill him to avenge his mother.

So there's all these pictures of him with his nutty old lady's handguns, posing like he's Sergeant York or something. I don't know why he sent this thing to me, since I don't give two figs about any of it, but I thought you good readers should know the what-for. That nutjob is welcome to go to Viet Nam and find whoever he wants. It's no skin off my back. While it's true that Dr. Harding should be extradited and brought back to answer for his role in the Christmas Parade riots of '06, it will take someone like Interpol to do it, or at least someone with a lot more sense than a chuckleaded loony-bird like Johannsen.

Times sure change.

The last-known photo of the 1976 University of Mishipeshu Men's Varsity sculling squad, on the Vistula River in Krakow, Poland, August 1976. Thanks to that Marisha for getting it out of my storage bureau and up on here.

I have to say, times sure have changed since my last tenure as 3rd Ward councilman in the late-1970s. Back in those days, there was such a municipal budget crunch that the city council had actually rented out the Fletcher O. Casady Council Chamber to a group called the Armitage People's Temple, what we had thought was a community fraternal organization (it was, in fact, a sort of death cult that had close ties to the Mushkobewun Park Massacre). The council itself met in an unheated mooring room in the old Zeppelinarium here in the 3rd Ward through 1979. What time to be alive in Armitage Heights that was. Times change!

It's real nice to be working on people's good 2008 problems this time out. I mean, the community is in sort of rough times right now, I understand - the subprime crisis has hit south Hanley and Kendall Park particularly hard, and there's bad unemployment numbers all over. But gee, I don't know if this stuff stacks up against the problems we had in the neighborhood in the mid- to late-'70s. I mean, just a quick list and you can remember what it was like here at that time: besides the Mushkobewun Park Massacre, we also had Mayor Freese's doomed 1976 third party presidential run and subsequent kidnapping and brainwashing, Kimball F. Burin's knife-fight with Representative Thurston, the municipal water burglary of 1975, the Kendall Park Stranglers (Sr. and Jr.), nineteen separate gas crises, the heating fuel crisis, the motor oil crisis, the cooking offal crisis, the mobilization of the National Guard when 2nd Ward Councilwoman and Maoist Bethany Adler-Monacelli was elected City Council Treasurer, the general horticulture strike (right), the Esperanto Uprisings, the Hanley Fires of '74, '75 and '78, the shuttering of the Cassock District, that Bachman-Turner Overdrive concert at the old Armitage Palladium that no one showed up to, the various fires, arsons, explosions and implosions that claimed, among others, the Fitzhugh Building, Fitzhugh Hall, the Dubow Towers, the Bulgarian-American Friendship Palace, the Levinson Brothers Candleworks, the Cashmere Registry, Aldolf's Omaha East and the Tribune-Herald Telefax Archives, the disappearances of Baby Andrea, Baby Colleen and the Fitzhugh Twins, the Citizens Band Wars, the Mushkobewun Park Massacre reprise, the Kendall Park Zoo public auction, the bankruptcies of 1976-77 and super-bankruptcy of '78, the junk bond parade of 1979, the Fifth of July, Sixth of November and Maundy Thursday Disasters, the abduction of the 1976 University of Mishipeshu Men's Varsity sculling squad in Krakow, the marijuana-fueled motorbike death of Councilman Spence Whitmarsh and freezing of funding for his beloved hippie sculpture gardens, the unintentional- but- still- internationally- calamitous destruction of the Soviet Peace Plaza in 1975, the freeze-drying of Senator Franzen, the Black Panther Olympics (left), the Tarbaby Debates, the rise and fall of Allen Jeffreys and the Mellowhearts, the city council's Valium Act of 1977, the publication of Kimball F. Burin's Moloch of Stanton Ave., the 1976 land-yacht debacle that led to half the City Council's resignation, Mayor Freese's conversion to Zen Buddhism and subsequent repudiation of his official duties, the Voyageurs losing the NBA title to a pretty weak L.A. Lakers two years in a row, the still-unsolved disappearance of Stedman Plaza, the rise of the English Equal Progress Party and its disastrous merger with the Esperanto Rights Party, and of course the sexual healers scandal of '73. Those are just the few that occur to me off the top of my head. That Marisha hardly knows any of them, but let me tell you, it was a challenge to try to run the 3rd Ward at that time. Let me tell you.

I barely recognize the new City Hall, actually. It was built downtown in 1983 on the site of the old Telefax Archives.

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Stedman Plaza in 1919. Where was it misplaced in 1974-75?