Speaker A
If you drove west on Cermak Road anytime between 1989 and 2007, you saw this.
Explore Berwyn, IL's unique history from Czech immigrant roots to iconic car art and Route 66 culture.
Key Takeaways
- Berwyn's identity is deeply tied to its Czech immigrant heritage and working-class community.
- The city’s unique blend of culture, art, and commerce created a distinctive suburban character.
- The Spindle sculpture became a symbol of Berwyn's quirky and artistic spirit despite initial opposition.
- Berwyn played a significant role in Chicago’s automotive history through its Route 66 'Automobile Row'.
- Local media and festivals helped cement Berwyn’s place in Chicagoland pop culture.
What the video covers
- Berwyn, IL, transformed from farmland to a bustling suburb with a large Czech immigrant population by 1930.
- The city is known for its extensive collection of brick Chicago-style bungalows, reflecting its working-class roots.
- Cermak Road, named after Czech mayor Anton Cermak, became a financial hub nicknamed 'Bohemian Wall Street'.
- In the 1950s, Cermak Plaza opened as a modern shopping center with popular stores like Walgreens and Jewel.
- Berwyn gained regional notoriety through a local TV joke linked to its annual Hoby Day mushroom festival.
- Developer David Bermant introduced modern art installations to the plaza, including a floating McDonald's and the 'Spindle' sculpture.
- The 'Spindle' featured eight cars impaled on a 50-ft steel spike, sparking controversy but eventually becoming a local icon.
- The sculpture appeared in the 1992 film Wayne's World, boosting Berwyn's national recognition.
- The Spindle was removed in 2008 to make way for a new Walgreens, though parts of it remain in storage.
- Berwyn’s stretch of Ogden Avenue was known as 'Automobile Row' on historic Route 66, highlighting its strong car culture.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Berwyn and the Spindle Sculpture
- 00:46Origins of Berwyn's Unique Identity
- 01:26Czech Immigrant Influence and Housing
- 02:27Cermak Road and Financial Growth
- 03:33Development of Cermak Plaza
- 05:00Berwyn in Local Media and Hoby Day Festival
- 06:29David Bermant’s Art Installations
- 07:06The Spindle Sculpture Controversy
- 08:22The Spindle in Popular Culture
- 08:53Removal of the Spindle and Legacy
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Eight cars, real ones, impaled on a 50-ft tall steel spike sticking straight up out of a shopping center parking lot at Harlem and Cermak. No explanation, no plaque, just eight rusting cars on a stick in front
Speaker A
of a Walgreens and a grocery store. That sculpture is not what made Berwyn so interesting because by the time it went up in 1989, this town had already been the punchline of Chicago television for almost 20 years. Every kid in the metropolitan
Speaker A
area could do the joke. Many of them never even found out why. So, let's go back and figure out how an ordinary little bungalow suburb, 10 miles from the Loop, ended up with one of the strangest identities in all of Chicagoland.
Speaker A
Berwyn became a city in 1908, and for a while, it was nothing much. Farmland, actually. A few blocks near the railroad.
Speaker A
Then the '20s hit, and the whole place filled in over about 10 years. In 1920, roughly 14,000 people lived here. By 1930, more than 40,000.
Speaker A
They were mostly Czech families moving west out of Pilsen, out of the crowded near west side, buying into Berwyn in such numbers that Czech-Americans made up a quarter of the city by 1930.
Speaker A
A lot of them worked at Hawthorne Works over in Cicero or at Electromotive down in La Grange.
Speaker A
And they built the same house over and over and over. A brick bungalow, a story and a half with a low-pitched roof and an overhang. Usually stained glass windows in the front, a basement underneath, an alley behind, and a gangway between you
Speaker A
and your neighbor. The historic district in Central Berwyn alone holds more than 1,300 contributing buildings, and roughly 1,100 of those are brick Chicago-style bungalows.
Speaker A
I've mentioned these in a couple different videos, but Berwyn has the most significant collection of these bungalows anywhere in the country.
Speaker A
Which tells you what Berwyn actually was. Not an artist colony, not a rich town, but machinists and tailors and factory men who saved every dollar they had and bought a brick house on a 25-ft lot. The center of everything was Cermak Road.
Speaker A
It's named after Anton Cermak, the Czech immigrant who became mayor of Chicago and was killed in 1933 by an assassin aiming at Franklin Roosevelt. The city renamed 22nd Street in his honor as it ran west through the Czech
Speaker A
neighborhoods, through Lawndale, through Cicero, and into Berwyn. And Cermak Road in Berwyn earned a nickname, the Bohemian Wall Street.
Speaker A
Because these people didn't spend money, they saved it. And the street filled up with banks and savings and loans. As late as 1991, the Sun-Times reported that Berwyn had the highest concentration of financial institutions in the world, and credited directly to
Speaker A
the frugality of the people who built the place. Then, in the mid-'50s, a real estate man came out here looking for a site. He worked for Walgreens.
Speaker A
He found 29 acres at Harlem and Cermak, and he brought it to a developer named David Bermant. Cermak Plaza opened in 1956.
Speaker A
It was modernist, low-slung, absolutely covered in neon, Jewel, Woolworth, Fannie May, Kinney Shoes, and of course a Walgreens.
Speaker A
So, this was the spot people were going to on a Saturday for sure. The Jewel, the Woolworth counter, and the Fannie May case right at eye level if you were 7 years old.
Speaker A
Now, we'll come back to the Walgreens a little bit later. In 1968, Berwyn and Cicero started a festival together. They called it Hoby Day. Hoby is the Czech and Slavic word for mushroom. And the festival celebrated the fall harvest the
Speaker A
way the old country did. There's a parade down Cermak Road. There's a Hoby Queen. 25,000 people came out for it.
Speaker A
In 1970, a man on Channel 32 found out about it. His name was Jerry G. Bishop, and he was hosting horror movies on WFLD Sven Goolie. He had noticed that Johnny Carson and Laugh-In were getting laughs off Burbank, and that the horror host
Speaker A
Goolardi over in Cleveland was doing the same thing to Parma. He wanted a local suburb of his own to pick on, and he found the one out west that held a yearly parade in honor of mushrooms.
Speaker A
Berwyn. That's it. That's the whole reason. If you see people in the comment section of this video shouting Berwyn with a question mark and an exclamation mark, that's the origin story of that. Later, Rich Koz picked up the character in
Speaker A
1979, and he kept the joke running. And that Berwyn joke from Sven Goolie ended up permanently installed in the vocabulary of everyone who grew up watching television in the Chicagoland area. Meanwhile, out at the plaza, David Bermant was getting bored.
Speaker A
Newer, bigger shopping centers were opening further west and pulling his customers away. Bermant collected modern art, and he decided that people shouldn't have to walk into a museum to see it. So, he started putting it in the least likely
Speaker A
place imaginable, a strip mall parking lot in Berwyn.
Speaker A
In 1983, he challenged McDonald's to build something different on his property. They gave in, and they picked a design by the architect James Wines. A McDonald's that looked like every other
Speaker A
McDonald's, except the bottom was recessed so far back that the whole restaurant appeared to be floating a few feet above the ground. Yeah, there was what looked like a floating McDonald's in Berwyn.
Speaker A
There was a huge piece called Big Billboard. There were bell trees. The parking lot slowly filled up with things nobody could explain to their kids.
Speaker A
And then, in 1989, he put eight cars on a spike. The artist was Dustin Shuler.
Speaker A
50 ft of steel, eight automobiles driven straight down through the roofs. Bermant said the foundation went nearly 30 feet into the ground, and that the whole thing cost more than $75,000.
Speaker A
And that was back then. He donated his own BMW to sit second from the top. A Volkswagen Beetle went above it.
Speaker A
Berwyn lost its mind. The city council fought about the plans before it ever went up, even though the Plaza was private property and no permit was required. In 1990, the residents voted overwhelmingly that they wanted the thing removed. The mayor called it an
Speaker A
icon of the community, and Bermant claimed his shopping center was doing 30% more business than comparable centers because of the weird art. So, it stayed.
Speaker A
And then a funny thing happened. People got used to it. Kids stopped asking about it. Every single time you and your parents went to that shopping center, it was just there. And of course, in 1992, Wayne's World put it on movie screens
Speaker A
across the country during the Bohemian Rhapsody scene. The joke suburb had gone national again. On purpose this time. Although the movie was actually set in Aurora, which meant people came looking for the Spindle and kept ending up in the wrong suburb entirely.
Speaker A
David Bermant died in 2000. The Spindle lost the man who spent 11 years protecting it. And the shopping center changed hands.
Speaker A
But the conditions that let something like that Spindle exist in a commercial strip mall were gone. In 2007, it was announced that the site of the sculpture had been earmarked for a new Walgreens.
Speaker A
There was already a Walgreens at Cermak Plaza, but this one would have a drive-thru window. On May 2nd, 2008, a crowd stood in the parking lot taking pictures while a crane lifted the top two cars off the spike. Then
Speaker A
they cut the base and pushed the rest of it over. But the top two cars survived.
Speaker A
Apparently, they sit in storage. The last two pieces of that iconic and weird piece of art. And strangely enough, the subject of cars leads into another part of Berwyn's history that I almost left out. Because long before
Speaker A
Berwyn came famous for putting cars on a spike, this town already had a serious car culture.
Speaker A
And if you grew up around here in the '50s, '60s, or '70s, you might know exactly where I'm going with this.
Speaker A
Ogden Avenue. But guys, before we get into this last part, I just want to take a second.
Speaker A
Ogden Avenue was Berwyn's stretch of Route 66. And back when the automobile was king, this stretch became known as Automobile Row. Dealerships, garages, gas stations, and businesses built around the car lined the road. [music] But, if you talk to people who were
Speaker A
actually around here back then, that's not necessarily what they remember. [music] They remember cruising Ogden.
Speaker A
My dad describes it like something out of American Graffiti. You had hot rods, muscle cars, whatever somebody had managed to fix up or get their hands on going up and down Ogden.
Speaker A
And this was a time when all you would see were [music] '50s or '60s or '70s cars.
Speaker A
And you would just cruise. You weren't necessarily going anywhere. That was kind of the point. You drove, you showed off your car, you saw who else was out, you stopped somewhere to eat, and then you got back in your car and did it again.
Speaker A
For generations of kids around Berwyn and Cicero, Ogden Avenue was the place [music] to be seen.
Speaker A
And I love this part of the story because it makes the Spindle seem almost weirdly appropriate. Of course, the suburb where everybody used to cruise Route 66 eventually became famous for eight cars stuck on a giant spike.
Speaker A
Today, the old car culture obviously hasn't completely disappeared. Ogden is still historic Route 66. And Berwyn still brings classic and custom cars back onto the street for its Route 66 car show.
Speaker A
Which brings us back to where we started because the more you look at Berwyn, the harder it becomes to explain the place with just one story.
Speaker A
It was a working-class immigrant suburb where thousands of families built nearly identical brick bungalows.
Speaker A
Cermak Road became the Bohemian Wall Street because the people living there were famous for saving their money.
Speaker A
They threw a parade every year celebrating mushrooms, which caused a horror movie host to turn the name Berwyn into a joke heard in living rooms all over Chicagoland.
Speaker A
Then a shopping center developer started filling a strip mall parking lot in with modern art until eventually somebody drove eight cars through a 50-ft tall steel spike.
Speaker A
This is Berwyn and there is only one. Guys, if you grew up here, tell me what I missed. I want to know where you went and what you did. What were the hangout spots you went to growing up in Berwyn?
Speaker A
[music] And that's it, guys. And thanks for watching today's episode of Chicagoland history.
Topics:Berwyn ILChicago historyCzech immigrantsChicago bungalowsCermak RoadBohemian Wall StreetSpindle sculptureDavid BermantRoute 66Automobile Row
