The now-shuttered legendary Prairie Avenue Bookshop: gone, but never forgotten

“He’s an architect; I had it for breakfast,” Marilyn Hasbrouck says. She’s referring to her husband, Wilbert Hasbrouck, who chuckles and nods. We’re at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, the venerable architecture bookstore they own in the Loop, in the shade of the overhead El tracks. I’m sitting between them at the head of a giant bankers table from Scotland, circa early 20th century (designer unknown), whose ivory-colored, high-backed chairs dwarf Marilyn and me, but suit the 6-foot-plus, gray-bearded “Bill” just fine. I don’t tell him, but he reminds me a bit of a tall Colonel Sanders, in suspenders instead of a string tie.

Stroll through one of Chicago’s oldest cemeteries

Whoever said you can’t take it with you has clearly never seen the final resting places of some of Chicago’s original movers and shakers. Buried among the majestic maples and elms of Graceland Cemetery in Lakeview, you’ll find plots for the Marshall Fields, the Potter Palmers, the Pullmans, the Gettys and many others whose names now grace Chicago streets and cultural and commercial institutions.