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.
