What Happened to Gerri’s Palm Tavern?

“If I want to kill your identity, what do I do? Tear down something that is you.” In 1998, Gerri Oliver, longtime owner of the Palm Tavern in Chicago’s Bronzeville, was rhetorically answering her own question in the Chicago Tribune. Oliver was referencing the demolition of the Regal Theater, a legendary performance venue located across the street from the Palm Tavern at 47^th Street and South Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.¹

Twenty-five years earlier, the Regal, a lavishly decorated, atmospheric theater built in 1928 as a part of the Balaban and Katz theater empire, was demolished alongside with the Savoy Ballroom, a popular roller skating rink. Just a year earlier, the Metropolitan Theater, opened in 1917, and also within the vicinity of the Regal and the Savoy, had been demolished as well, leaving behind an empty parking lot.

The Palm Tavern, located at 446 East 47^th Street, opened in 1933. Over the nearly seventy years that it would remain in business, the Palm Tavern acquired a national reputation for hospitality—not exclusively in terms of customer service but in terms of the reception it gave to internationally known Black creatives. The Palm Tavern’s legacy is rooted in the era of de facto racial segregation, but it grew in importance as the places where those musicians performed, practiced, and recorded closed, and their buildings were demolished. As links to Bronzeville’s history were severed, the Palm Tavern evolved to become a critical, authenticity driven catch-all for the past, while also in its last years, evolving as an oasis for a new generation of musicians, artists, and enthusiasts. Gerri Oliver stewarded the Palm Tavern and its history for the majority of the venue’s lifetime until a convergence of civic misfires, power grabs, and agency failures locked the doors of the Palm Tavern forever in 2001.

“It was criminal. And it’s what goes on all the time with respect to Black people in this country. Their land being taken, their homes being taken, gentrification, eminent domain being used against them,” says David Boykin in a phone interview with the author. Boykin is a composer and saxophonist who played at the Palm Tavern during its last years as a member of the avant-garde jazz group The David Boykin Expanse. “It was an opportunistic land grab.”

Gerri Oliver had seen 47^th Street—and the world—change dramatically in her nearly five decades as owner of the Palm Tavern. Bronzeville, once a vibrant Black community dense with theaters like the Regal, the Metropolitan, and the Savoy Ballroom—as well as Black-owned small businesses, restaurants, taverns, hotels, and clubs—all concentrated in an area of Chicago’s South Side where many of the half a million Black Americans that arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration landed. Both federally funded and university-initiated urban renewal, highways, high-rise public housing, and disinvestment would contribute to the wrecking of the built environment that held Bronzeville’s history. Yet, the Palm Tavern, which would come to be known as Gerri’s Palm Tavern, remained a critical thread in the narrative of history, remaining resilient against the odds stacked against it.

Established in 1933 by James Knight, a former Pullman porter who became the first Mayor of Bronzeville—an unofficial title given first to Knight as an upstanding member of the Bronzeville community—the Palm Tavern was a “modern bar and restaurant” according to an advertisement in the Black-owned and operated Chicago Defender from June of 1933. The Palm Tavern served breakfast, lunch, and dinner within a lavish setting that included exotic murals of palm trees, camels, and pyramids, and high-back dark leather booths. On one side of the room was a long Art Deco bar with bookmatched wood and mirrors. Above, pressed tin ceilings, a remnant of the circa 1888 building that had first been built as a real estate office. On the rear wall were neon palm trees. Established the year prohibition was repealed in the United States and the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair was bringing people across the world to Chicago, the Palm Tavern opened during the apex of the movement of Black people from Southern states to Northern ones, like Illinois, in search of better jobs, housing, and education. De facto segregation caused Black people to settle in neighborhoods like Bronzeville by necessity, but as a result, they created their own economic systems where money circulated within the community.

The Palm Tavern acquired a reputation as a place where people could meet for a meal and a drink, and to both see and be seen. A photo of the Palm Tavern from around 1940 taken by Gordon Coster shows every seat taken by an elegantly dressed customer; women are wearing elaborate hats, and men are in suits and ties, and nearly every reveler is Black. On the menu were oysters and steaks, as well as toasted American cheese sandwiches. The proximity to the Regal Theater created a symbiotic relationship between the Palm Tavern and the clientele that would attend motion pictures, stage reviews, and concerts. The Palm Tavern would also become known for the relationship it would hold for jazz performers. Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong would perform at the Regal, but spend time either before or after their performances at the Palm Tavern, and then stay the night in a nearby hotel. It would also come to be known nationwide not only through the Chicago Defender, but through its presence in The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide published during the Jim Crow era that listed businesses that would serve Black customers.

In 1956, Jim Knight sold the Palm Tavern to Gerri Oliver, who had come to Chicago from Jackson, Mississippi, around 1941. Borrowing money from relatives in Mississippi, Oliver, who met Knight while working as a manicurist, purchased the Palm Tavern during an era when women experienced intense societal and cultural pressure to be wives and mothers above all other pursuits. Women who worked outside of the home were most frequently employed in fields like education and nursing. Black women were limited to employment in the service industry and were frequently subject to both gender and race-based discrimination. Yet, Gerri Oliver, a thirty-seven-year-old Black woman, began running the Palm Tavern as sole proprietor.

The popularity of the Palm Tavern grew once Gerri Oliver took over the business. Gerri applied a hands-on approach to hospitality and would personally supervise the food and drink service. “The Palm boasts one of the longest and most comfortable bars to be found anywhere on the South Side,” wrote the Chicago Defender in 1958. In addition, Gerri herself is usually on the scene to see that every want patrons may have is filled.”² Gerri began to build a rapport with celebrities, who would patronize what would become “Gerri’s Palm Tavern” because of both hospitality and her ability to manage a room that included both regulars, and international superstars like Josephine Baker. Famous names like Miles Davis and Count Basie would appear at the Regal, and then retreat to the Palm Tavern, but so would the musicians that played alongside them in their bands and orchestras, enriching the historical connections between the Palm Tavern and American musical history, with Gerri always in the mix. Regulars, musicians, and celebrities alike began to add their names to a section of the back wall, around a sign that read “Gerri’s Palm Tavern Salutes our Fine Friends and Customers.” In 1959, Oliver began featuring live music by popular demand, starting with a group called The Round Sounds, which upbeat Rhythm and Blues in a small space in the front of the room. Over time, the Palm Tavern’s kitchen would close, but Gerri would continue to make one dish available: her own recipe for red beans and rice. “It was a hospitality thing,” Gerri shared with the Chicago Defender in a 1981 interview, adding that performers would call her from the airport and request that the dish be ready for their arrival.

A trailblazer in her own right, Gerri Oliver would become active in social causes and local politics. As activists were organizing protest marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery in 1965 to apply pressure against segregation and racial injustice, Gerri Oliver collected $10,000 from fellow tavern owners on 47^th Street to help support Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for Black Americans to exercise their right to vote.³ When candidates would run for office, or when musicians were trying to get people to come to their performances, Gerri Oliver would allow them to post campaign materials and concert handbills. When Harold Washington was running for mayor in 1983, Gerri Oliver campaigned for him, holding fundraisers at the Palm Tavern.⁴ Oliver would open the Palm Tavern to host benefits for social causes like ending homelessness, or to send students enrolled in city college on tours to Africa.

Business at the Palm Tavern declined after the Regal Theater closed in 1968, yet celebrities continued to visit as the Palm Tavern began to gain status as an unofficial landmark. By 1969, it was known as one of the “oldest taverns on the South Side” and counted Reverend Jesse Jackson amongst its regular customers.⁵ For the twenty-fifth anniversary of her ownership of the Palm Tavern in May 1981, Oliver hosted a musical show titled “Nostalgia in Jazz and Blues.” Oliver would explain the need for live entertainment to remain on 47^th Street to the Chicago Defender later that year. “After they closed down the Regal and all the clubs within the inner city, people had to go to Mill Run, the Civic Opera House, and the Auditorium, which are faraway places.” She continued, “Some people are not fortunate enough to pay for an entrance fee as well as transportation to get there. Here at my place you can just walk right in and see artists you wouldn’t be able to afford to see otherwise.”⁶ Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Palm Tavern would host jazz sets and jam sessions on weekends, as well as art shows by the likes of outsider artists like Mr. Imagination. Celebrities like Quincy Jones, a native of the area, also kept coming, although less frequently.

In 1996 and 1997, scenes from the action thriller Mercury Rising, starring Bruce Willis, were filmed in Gerri’s Palm Tavern. For the production, a stage was constructed in the rear of the venue, and a new neon sign was created featuring the word “Gerri’s” in crisp red script, flanked by two new neon palm trees—elements that remained extant until the tavern closed. In one scene from the film, Blues vocalist Koko Taylor performs in front of a full room of enthusiastic patrons, illuminated by neon. In another, Gerri Oliver herself appears uncredited in a daytime scene with Bruce Willis. Daylight is filling the space, illuminating the southwestern corner of the bar and a sightline—Gerri’s sightline—to the front door. In hoop earrings and a short grey afro, Oliver buzzes two characters in from behind the bar. Behind her is a back bar crammed with books, paperwork, and ephemera—and a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. It is a scene, and a kind of spatial environment, that is so authentic and layered with narrative that only time could create it.

“If you look at those old pictures, it doesn’t look much different," says David Boykin. “And the Palm Tavern had that vibe, like this was something that had all this rich history, right here. It was almost kind of sacred. Like you were stepping back in time.”

While Gerri Oliver owned the Palm Tavern, she never owned the one-story brick building at 446 East 47^th Street that housed it. In 1989, the building was sold in a tax sale to the Midwest Real Estate Investment Company for $8,000. Gerri Oliver offered the owners $25,000, but the offer was turned down. Oliver rented space in the building on a month-to-month basis.⁷

Mike Medina met Gerri Oliver in the late 1990s, and the two developed a friendship that would last for decades. “I had an interest in Blues, Soul and R&B music,” shares Medina in an interview. “Someone significantly older than me told me that there was still a place on 47^th Street, where those performers used to hang out, and it’s like, the last thing.” Oliver was friendly, but not overtly welcoming with newcomers, and like the scene in Mercury Rising, customers would need to be buzzed in at the door. “You couldn’t just walk in” Medina continues, “you had to stand at the door and then Gerri would buzz you in.”

Andy Pierce would be introduced to the Palm Tavern and Gerri Oliver around 1999 through his then girlfriend, and now wife, Beth Eckerty. At the time, Eckerty was working for the City of Chicago Office of Tourism and had been taking tour buses to Gerri’s Palm Tavern as a part of the Chicago Neighborhood Tours program. “She was like, ‘you don’t know about the Palm Tavern?’” Pierce recalls in an interview. “My regular hangs were the Green Mill or the Velvet Lounge.”

While only five foot two, Gerri Oliver had a big presence. Fernando Jones, activist and musician, and creator of the interactive dramatic comedy I Was There When The Blues Was Red Hot, which ran at the Palm Tavern in its later years, describes Gerri Oliver in a phone interview as being feminine and articulate with a complex vocabulary, but also someone with a toughness that people respected. “I looked at her one day and I asked her, ‘Mama Gerri, how did you survive down here all those years?’ She stopped, and she looked up at me, and she said, ‘I got my bluff in first!’ Exact quote.”

Maintaining a presence in the corner of the bar, by the front window, allowed Oliver over fifty years of eyes on the street. What was in the 1950s a dense block of two- and three-story buildings, businesses like the South Center Department Store, and within the larger neighborhood, theaters and venues so plentiful that they competed with each other, had by the 1980s and 1990s became a series of boarded up buildings and empty lots. Across the South Side, almost all the theaters and venues known during the big band and swing era had gone, as had the jazz-oriented establishments, and those representing later mid-twentieth century eras of Black musical history in Chicago, like R&B and Soul. The roots of all these styles, the Blues, and the places where it would be performed, were empty lots.

Also gone were all the Palm Tavern’s contemporaries—the taverns, and bars, and restaurants that were supported by those venues. This ecology, by design or attrition, made the Palm Tavern both rare and significant. Yet, it needed maintenance. “It was raggedy on the inside,” shares Fernando Jones, who goes on to explain that the peeling paint in the bathroom made his skin crawl. “But it was home.”

In February 1998, the City of Chicago announced plans to create a “Blues Corridor” along East 47^th Street between South Calumet Avenue and South Vincennes Avenue.⁸ This plan looked to reimagine 47^th Street using history and nostalgia as narrative devices, redeveloping the commercial strip into a destination that would drive Chicago’s tourism economy. It would be Chicago’s version of Beale Street in Memphis or Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. This plan was to bring a theater back to 47th Street on the site of the Regal Theater and name it after entertainer Lou Rawls, create a roller skating venue resembling the one within the Savoy Ballroom, and to bring mixed-use developments with apartments and restaurants to the corridor. This plan also proposed an “African Village,” offering a bazaar that would accompany Caribbean restaurants, and included persuading the Checkerboard Lounge, a Blues venue on 43^rd Street that had been open since 1972, to move to 47^th Street. Led by then 3rd Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman, the plan also included statues of Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, and a park dedicated to Quincy Jones. This plan would begin with the placement of metal signs on the streetlights along 47^th Street with silhouettes of performers playing instruments. Below them it would read “Chicago Blues District.”

This multifaceted complex plan initially called “Tobacco Road” would be sanctioned by the City of Chicago’s Department of Community Development, powered by a new Tax Increment Financing District (TIF), and managed by Tobacco Road, Inc, a nonprofit organization with Lou Rawls on its board, as well as Dorothy Tillman’s chief of staff and campaign contributors. The theater would be developed by Elzie Higgenbottom, founder of East Lake Management, a Chicago real estate empire that included managing properties owned by the Chicago Housing Authority. Not coincidentally, Higginbottom had made contributions to Dorothy Tillman’s aldermanic campaign.

The plan faced criticism from business owners on 47^th Street, including members of the 47^th Street Business Association, who believed that Tobacco Road would displace them.⁹ It was clear that there would be no option for existing businesses to stay, and that Tillman was looking for a blank slate, not community engagement. Tillman defended her plan in a November 1998 article in the Chicago Defender, “We are going to acquire the businesses on 47^th Street just as they did in Goose Island, Little Italy, and in Bucktown so we can develop,” Tillman said.¹⁰ Businesses that did not fit the theme, be they a barbershop or the Palm Tavern, would have to go.

The plan was also inauthentic to the history of 47^th Street. Historian Timuel Black noted that the theme was inaccurate. “Do you know what Tobacco Road is?” Black asked rhetorically, in an interview published in the Daily Northwestern in 2001. “It’s in the low-down, nitty-gritty South. And not just the South, but the grimy South, the overalls-wearing South. Can you imagine Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois or Paul Robeson walking down Tobacco Road? I don’t think so. It’s an insult to give 47^th a name which in no way is descriptive of the population that once inhabited the street.” Black continued to describe the real 47^th Street, “You would get dressed up with your date and go meet people you knew, you’d go to places like the Regal Theater, torn down in 1973 and there would be Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and then you’d go to a bar and talk all night long.”¹¹ While not mentioned by name, the bar that Timuel Black spoke of was certainly Gerri’s Palm Tavern, which was conspicuously absent from the plan.

While Gerri Oliver had embraced the Blues at the Palm Tavern in its later years, “an antenna sort of went up amongst the people who were associated with the Palm Tavern,” explains Mike Medina. “Gerry would say this, and everybody would say this; 43^rd Street was the Blues–47^th Street was all Jazz.” Not only was the plan inauthentic but it also failed to include the most authentic living component of 47^th Street in the plans for its renaissance, as well as any input from business owners and residents. In 1998, the city began notifying business owners that their buildings would be acquired through eminent domain, despite no market analysis being done for the project, which was touted as a public/private partnership that would be a spark for development in both Bronzeville and neighboring Grand Boulevard.

Bernard Turner, Executive Director of the Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area, came to know the Palm Tavern and Gerri Oliver through Sherry Williams, president of the Bronzeville Historical Society, a group that formed in 1999. Turner’s interest in the history of Bronzeville brought him into the fold of people working to save the Palm Tavern. “I just fell in love with the whole thing,” shares Turner in an interview, who was captivated by Gerri Oliver immediately. “It was enchanting to be in her presence.”

A paradox emerged. The Palm Tavern, and Gerri Oliver, began to receive accolades, awards, and public attention. In May 1999, then Illinois Governor George H. Ryan celebrated Oliver for sixty-six years of ownership of the Palm Tavern. “It continues to be a historic landmark that preserves memorabilia of famous customers and patrons,” wrote Ryan. February 13, 2000, was proclaimed Gerri Oliver Day in Chicago by Richard M. Daley’s mayoral proclamation. “Gerri Oliver has been a cultural icon, refusing to alter the Palm Tavern and refusing to give up on 47^th Street,” Daley proclaimed.

“Gerri was being honored four or five times a week, in heavy rotation,” shares Andy Pierce. Attention from the media, related either to the history of the Palm Tavern or the 47^th Street redevelopment plan, directed attention—and some customers—to the bar. Gerri Oliver, now in her early 80s, remained devoted.

New devotees would be introduced to the Palm Tavern through I Was There When The Blues Was Red Hot, Fernando Jones’s interactive play about the Blues that was initially scheduled for only two nights at the Palm Tavern. It was so popular that it ended up running over two hundred times at the bar, beginning in 1998 and continuing until the summer of 2001. The Palm Tavern provided a unique backdrop for the production, as if it too were a character in the play.

Yet, despite the attention and accolades, the future of the Palm Tavern in terms of the revitalization of 47^th Street was unmapped, as was the role that Oliver would play in it. Her age and lack of agency in terms of the building’s future left her vulnerable, yet she remained dedicated to both the stewardship—and protection—of the Palm Tavern. In 2001, Gerri Oliver told the Chicago Tribune that she lost her apartment nearby to “swindlers a few years back” causing her to move into the tavern.¹² “She told me that the bar got robbed,” shares Medina, “and then she was like, I gotta stay there.”

The Palm Tavern’s physical form was also in a precarious position. The remarkable 1933 interior, a space that included original the Art Deco bar, tables, and coat stands, leather booths (including the one where boxer Joe Louis would propose to his wife), Jim Knight’s murals, black and white portraits of entertainment superstars removed from the Regal Theater after it closed, and the layers upon layers of physical and cultural narrative, was remarkably intact after almost seventy years, but in need of renovation and preservation. A fire in the building next door required the roof of the Palm Tavern to be vented, and while the roof was patched, holes remained in the decorative tin ceiling. Gerri Oliver had taken care to steward and preserve the history, but as a tenant she had little to no power, and no resources.

As buildings on 47^th Street were being acquired and ground was broken for the new Lou Rawls theater, neither Alderman Tillman nor the City of Chicago reached out to Gerri Oliver. Despite his accolades for Gerri Oliver a year earlier, Mayor Richard M. Daley would not intervene, nor would he speak further about the Palm Tavern. The people around Gerri Oliver began to marshal their resources, including musicians, The Bronzeville Historical Society, as well as her neighbors, regulars, and friends. Attorney Gary Fresen advocated for Gerri during the City of Chicago’s eminent domain proceedings, pro bono, which began in earnest against the Midwest Real Estate Investment Company in 2001.

When a team of surveyors from the Chicago Landmarks Division evaluated 47^th Street in 1986 as a part of the Chicago Historic Resources Survey—a twelve-year initiative to survey historic resources in Chicago’s neighborhoods—the Palm Tavern was given an orange rating: possessing potentially significant architectural or historical features. Under Chicago’s Demolition Delay Ordinance adopted in 2003 permit applications for orange rated properties, like the Palm Tavern, are to be held for 90 days before the permit is issued to provide the Department of Planning and Development the opportunity to explore options for preservation, including landmark designation. Over time, the original survey card including information on the Palm Tavern went missing.

Meanwhile, Pierce and Eckerty worked together to raise awareness of the building’s historic significance. In 2000, while the building was still owned by the Midwest Real Estate Investment Company, Eckerty and Pierce presented the Palm Tavern to the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (now Landmarks Illinois) as an addition to its list of most endangered historic places in the state. The nomination was rejected.

While there were many unknowns regarding the eminent domain proceedings, it presented a potential opportunity for the City of Chicago to assist in both the preservation of the Palm Tavern and to help Gerri Oliver. From Midwest Real Estate Investment Company, the City of Chicago would acquire a historic property with tremendous cultural significance that also had an advantage in terms of its integrity. All the material layers of the Palm Tavern were at the city’s fingertips, including its biggest champion and link to all its stories and narratives: Gerri Oliver. “She had the photos to prove it,” says Pierce. From behind the bar, Gerri Oliver would pull out a photo album crammed with candid photos of musicians, celebrities, and politicians.

“We already knew that eminent domain was going to happen, so we were just trying to throw out roadblocks and tie things up long enough to get this plan in front of enough people who were powerful enough to circumvent the process,” shares Mike Medina. In May 2001, Nicholas Bush, a business strategy consultant working pro bono along with Medina, Eckerty, and Pierce, prepared a document for the City of Chicago, and potential investors that included both a preservation strategy and a business plan for the Palm Tavern. This plan explored a number of realistic and actionable nonprofit, and for profit opportunities for the Palm Tavern—including the economic incentives available, and how they could be administered. The strategy presented solutions, yet it was ignored.

In May 2001, a Cook County circuit judge approved an agreement between the City and Gerri Oliver that would require Oliver to stop living on the premises but would pay Oliver moving expenses. As a part of that agreement, the city was to repair the roof of the Palm Tavern and provide a security guard to patrol the property.¹³ Gerri Oliver would be able to continue to run the Palm Tavern as the city’s eminent domain proceedings continued. At the time, a spokesperson for the Department of Planning and Development was quoted as saying that the city wishes to preserve the building and the business by finding a developer who would fix problems that had led to building code violations, including exposed wiring and outdated plumbing, as well as an exterior wall that required tuckpointing. On June 9, an agreement was reached between the City of Chicago and the Midwest Real Estate Investment Company that put the Palm Tavern under municipal ownership. Weeks later, the City agreed to buy assets from the Palm Tavern from Gerri Oliver for $89,000.¹⁴

In August 2001, Pierce and Eckerty presented the Palm Tavern to the Chicago Landmarks Commission as a potential addition to the city’s list of designated landmarks, an action that would prevent its demolition or substantial alteration beyond the orange rating in the Chicago Historic Resources Survey. The Landmarks Division was unwilling to designate the Palm Tavern, even as it had found itself under the city’s ownership. The lack of aldermanic support could have been a factor in the city’s disinterest. Meanwhile, construction of the new theater on the former site of the Regal Theater was delayed, and Lou Rawls had backed away from the project after Alderman Tillman dropped his name from the project in 2000.¹⁵

The Palm Tavern’s last day came in September 2001. Prompted by a call from Andy Pierce, Mike Medina arrived at the Palm Tavern to find a moving truck parked outside and the windows boarded up. Gerri Oliver is there, standing next to her son James Polk, who had traveled from California. The interior of the Palm Tavern was being hauled out and loaded onto a truck. “She’s crying,” shares Medina. “She’s inconsolable.” The painted wood letters below the parapet of the building that read “PALM TAVERN” in a cheerful, rounded font, flanked with palm trees, had already been removed.

The group asked if Gerri Oliver would be allowed in. “This is city property now,” Mike Medina recalls hearing.

As items were being removed from the building, Mike began identifying things he had never seen in person but were familiar sights in photographs of the Palm Tavern from the 1930s and 1940s. “They are just taking everything out. Everything you see in those pictures was in there.” Medina continues, “and when I say everything, I mean Gerri didn’t get rid of stuff.”

Included in the haul were the booths, tables, and chrome coatracks, but also pots and pans, and a giant butcher block from the kitchen, as well as items from the Jim Knight era of the Palm Tavern, including wood bar stools, presumably the first ones purchased for the bar. The second stools—with a square seat and embossed midcentury modern boomerang pattern—had been in use until the very last day.

Gerri Oliver was ultimately able to take her famous photo album, and a number of plastic bags full of newspaper clippings and clothes. Everything else—the entire interior of the Palm Tavern— was delivered to a storage facility at 78^th Street and South Exchange Avenue. The original Art Deco bar remained in the building.

Some items, including paper ephemera, photographs of Gerri Oliver with musicians and patrons, and printed material related to performances, became a part of the collection of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) when Oliver donated them in 2006. The wooden letters are also part of the Chicago History Museum’s collection.

Despite the heartbreak that had occurred when the inside of the Palm Tavern was hauled out, Mike Medina remained somewhat optimistic. While each element—the building, the interior, and Gerri Oliver—had been separated, the pieces were still intact. Mike Medina and Andy Pierce began taking turns monitoring the building and making sure that the City remained accountable.

Oliver moved into city-operated senior housing near East 49^th Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue. “She had some of her stuff there, like her photo albums and books,” shares Medina, who, along with his wife, Laura Coffey, continued to take Oliver shopping and to doctor’s appointments, as they had done when she was at the Palm Tavern. Oliver continued to walk as her primary form of transportation. The continuation of their friendship with Oliver, and their interest in making sure someone would always be nearby, Medina and Coffey left the Northwest Side and bought a condo a few blocks away.

After the doors were locked and the windows boarded up, the Palm Tavern, now the property of the City of Chicago, was freshly painted to include silhouettes of dancing women—similar to the silhouettes on the Chicago Blues District signs, an attempt to maintain the attractiveness of the property at street level. “They hadn’t figured out the next step,” says Andy Pierce. “What are we going to do with the property once we have it? That’s where it goes awry.”

In November 2002, the City of Chicago began negotiations to dispose of the property at 446 East 47^th Street, to developer—and member of Alderman Dorothy Tillman’s security detail—Sammie Parr Jr., who had already acquired the property next door. In a letter to the City of Chicago’s Community Development Commission, the developer states his interest in redeveloping the Palm Tavern property and describes the work that he intends to perform. The existing building is to be reskinned, and a new two-story façade of stone, copper, and glass will be created. Across the façade, portraits are to be installed of the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Ella Fitzgerald, some of the legendary performers that patronized the real life, authentic Palm Tavern. The original bar and stage of the Palm Tavern would be restored, and seating for fifty to sixty people would be added. The developers of this project would pay the City of Chicago $58,500 for the property, its market value. The new name for the project would be a prophetic one: Nostalgia Jazz and Wine Club. Alderman Dorothy Tillman was in full support of the project, and no alternative proposals were considered. The volunteer group of Nicolas Bush, Eckerty, Medina, and Pierce revised their planning document for the Palm Tavern once again and presented it a second time. Like the first time, it was ignored.

In May 2003, the City of Chicago advanced the sale of a building kitty corner from the new theater at East 47^th Street and South Martin Luther King Drive, to East Lake Management—Elzie Higgenbottom’s company—for a new Bronzeville outpost of Second City, a comedy club based on the North Side.¹⁶ Meanwhile, conversations between Tobacco Road, Inc. and the Checkerboard Lounge on 43^rd Street had fallen silent, and citing dangerous conditions inside, the City shuttered the Blues club. By the end of the year, it too would be an empty lot. (While the Checkerboard Lounge building was destroyed, the business moved to Hyde Park and remained there until it closed in 2015).

After four attempts by Pierce and Eckerty, the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois added the Palm Tavern to its list of most endangered places in the state in 2004. “Why tear down history, Black history?” said Gerri Oliver to the Chicago Tribune during the March 2004 announcement in Springfield.¹⁷ While visiting the state capital on that trip, Eckerty and Pierce took Gerri Oliver to Springfield to lobby then Senator Barack Obama. After introducing Oliver to Obama and explaining the challenges facing the Palm Tavern, Obama asked where the alderman and the mayor stood. Alderman Tillman was an early supporter of Obama, and the future US President would endorse Tillman in a bid for reelection in 2007.

Medina and Pierce would call Dorothy Tillman’s office whenever they would observe that the Palm Tavern, now privately owned, had a missing door or broken window. These calls became more and more frequent until June 2004, when the new owner of the building, Sammie Parr Jr., received a building permit to remove the roof and interior partition walls of the Palm Tavern. The Palm Tavern’s orange-rated status on the Chicago Historic Resources Survey should have, by law, required a ninety day hold between the filing of the permit and its release per Chicago’s Demolition Delay Ordinance, giving the Chicago Landmarks Commission time to consider the building’s eligibility as a Chicago Landmark. Parr, however, received the permit within 48 hours. This partial demolition work left the bar and interior open to the elements, causing both to rapidly deteriorate.

Then, in September 2006, the Palm Tavern was fully demolished, this time without a permit entirely, with nothing left but the remnants of the linoleum floor on the ground. In March 2007, the development team behind the Nostalgia Jazz and Wine Club was hit with multiple stop work orders and fines for failing to acquire a permit for the demolition of the previous building and for failing to pay the associated fine, for failing to work with a licensed architect and contractor, and for improperly installing a foundation for a new building without a permit.¹⁸

Amongst the ambitious medley of development projects that were planned as part of the Chicago Blues District—the skating rink, the African Village, the Second City outpost, the parks and statues to musical greats, and the Nostalgia Jazz and Wine Club—only the theater at the corner of 47^th Street and Martin Luther King Drive would become a reality. The Harold Washington Cultural Center opened in March 2004, six years after the project broke ground. The building’s arched entrance bares an eerie resemblance to the theater it took nearly thirty years to replace but stripped of ornamentation and authenticity. “It has not reached its potential” says Bernard Turner about the Cultural Center. “It’s there, and it’s used, and it’s a wonderful place, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the other places that were there before it, like the Regal and the Savoy.” In 2005, the Harold Washington Cultural Center was joined by four bronze sculptures on the parkway of South Martin Luther King Jr. Drive at 47^th Street. Standing atop twenty-five feet tall obelisks, these sculptures depicted four different musicians—not Quincy Jones or Miles Davis—but anonymous figures. The empty lots, blank urban canvases that Alderman Dorothy Tillman required to develop the Blues District remain undeveloped. In 2007, Alderman Dorothy Tillman, in city council since 1985, was unseated by Pat Dowell.

Medina continued to visit Gerri Oliver at her apartment on South Cottage Grove until her family moved her back to Jackson, Mississippi. Medina and Coffey then began to visit Gerri Oliver in Jackson. After a period of decline living in Mississippi, Oliver’s son moved her to California, and her memory and cognition improved. “We started going out to Santa Monica to visit her,” shares Medina, who would visit Gerri Oliver for the last time at an elder care facility half a mile from the beach, where she would spend the last few years of her life. Mike Medina and Laura Coffey saw Gerri Oliver for the last time on her 100th birthday. She died on December 7, 2020, at the age of 101.

Raised Catholic, Gerri Oliver converted to Buddhism as an adult. In one of the booths of the Palm Tavern she maintained a small shrine, and above the door to the bar she hung a sign that read “Happiness is Nan-Myoho-Renge-Kyo,” a Buddhist chant that can be understood simply as aligning oneself with the laws of the universe, and transforming negative karma and life challenges into opportunities for growth.

“How do you help the next Palm Tavern?” inquires Pierce. “It’s very hard for a city to admit its mistakes, even though we are a couple of administrations away from it now.” Pierce’s point is worth making. Every agency, ordinance, organization, and person in power with the ability to affect the situation failed the Palm Tavern, with the setting for the entire narrative a plan that had no plan.

The Palm Tavern was the last, and most authentic piece of a history that was more profound than Bronzeville, Chicago, Jazz, Blues, or Art Deco. It slipped through the cracks of a culture that was on the cusp of recognizing the kind of cultural history that the Palm Tavern held, but that itself couldn’t hold. Even for those, like Gerri Oliver, who worked to cultivate a positive outlook, it is difficult to see hope in such an abject failure of systems. The effect of the destruction of the Palm Tavern could never be commensurate with any consequences that could be leveled on the parties—public or private—that purposefully or negligently allowed it to be destroyed. Chicago’s system of wards and alderman was created to ensure that people in communities have a say in the decisions made in City Hall, not to give alderman the ability to play God, or to distribute wealth or power to their friends. Yet, time can be a silver lining. Mike Medina believes that had the Palm Tavern hung on for another decade, his approach would have been more informed, and that the cultural conditions would have been more tempered to embrace a future for a place like the Palm Tavern. It deserved better.

Today, at 446 East 47^th Street, where the alley meets the corner, stands a large black pyramid with stylized hieroglyphics. Installed in 2017 by Gallery Guichard, an art gallery located at 436 East 47^th Street that now owns the lot, the pyramid, designed by solar artist Olusola “Shala” Akuntunde, is sited close to where Gerri Oliver would, for nearly fifty years, put eyes on the street from behind the bar of the Palm Tavern. It is a powerful location for such a symbolic object and, thankfully, it is authentic and needs no nostalgia to power it.

The Palm Tavern and Gerri Oliver—both cultural institutions—no longer exist in physical form. “Cultural institutions are not just the building,” says Bernard Turner, “They are what they bring to the community, and what people get from them.” Places like Gerri's Palm Tavern and the efforts put forth to save them—and destroy them—are ingrained into Chicago’s complex legacy of cultural heritage. While the built environment is just a vessel, a keeper for history, processes and best practices on how to tell stories without it are still a work in progress. Until then, it is critical to keep the cultural history we have lost around us alive by talking about it, contemplating its relationship with the current time in which we live, and by continuing to interpret the knowledge they offer. “And that’s what you do at the Palm Tavern,” says Mike Medina. “You just listen to the wisdom. Just sit there and dig all that.”

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bernard Turner, David Boykin, and Fernando Jones for their time and recollections. Thanks to the staff of the Abakanowicz Research Center at the Chicago History Museum. Thanks to Andy Pierce for his time, thoughtfulness, and generous images of the Palm Tavern. Thank you to Mike Medina for being a friend to me like you were a friend to Gerri Oliver, and for sharing this story.