Bughouse Square, Chicago's Parliament of Cranks

Ahead on your right, the modest square facing the Newberry Library once held its own coronation every summer, and the crown went to whoever could out talk everyone else. Chicagoans had been calling this patch of grass Bughouse Square since at least the eighteen nineties, borrowing old slang for an insane asylum, because by night it filled with soapbox speakers who sounded, to passersby, like escapees making their case to the open sky. From the nineteen tens into the nineteen sixties, this was the city's open air parliament, the local answer to London's Speakers' Corner. Radicals climbed up on crates to denounce capitalism, poets recited for whoever would stop walking, and self declared prophets argued scripture with self declared atheists, sometimes within shouting distance of each other. A knot of regulars organized themselves as the Dill Pickle Club, built around that same appetite for argument without a permission slip. For years the orators even elected an honorary king of the square, a title that meant nothing officially and everything informally, since it simply went to the loudest or sharpest voice of the season.

The crowds thinned through the nineteen fifties as television kept people home and the rooming houses around the park emptied out, and the city took the square over outright in nineteen fifty nine. By the mid nineteen sixties, the great soapbox era was essentially finished. It was not forgotten, though: starting in nineteen eighty six, the Newberry Library revived the spirit for decades with annual Bughouse Square Debates timed to its summer book sale, inviting a new round of arguers to stand where the old ones had stood. The crates are gone now, but for half a century, this small square was the place in Chicago where anybody with nerve and a loud enough voice could claim, however briefly, to be heard.