NEWS & POLITICS
HOUSING
THE LAST MEN’S HOTEL
For those who live there, the Ewing Annex Hotel is a refuge, an artifact, and a last chance. The man who’s been holding it together for more than 20 years is about to retire. By KATIE PROUT
W
hen Mike Bush was 12, all knees and soft eyes, he won a scholarship to attend youth classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was summer 1968, hot and angry and hopeful, and while it would end with young anti-war protesters getting beaten with billy
12 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 15, 2021
clubs by Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention downtown, it began with Mike, a young Black aspiring artist from the Wild Hundreds by way of Memphis, slinging his bag of paper and pencils over his shoulder and stepping out into the sun. “105th and Moore, to 111th and Michigan. Thirty-four [bus] from Michigan to 95th,
95th to Adams and Wabash,” Mike recites to me 53 years later. From there, he’d walk one block due east, the promise of the Art Institute’s tall columns and Lake Michigan’s cool waters pulling him home. Mike has lived in the Ewing Annex Hotel, located in the South Loop, for the last 24 years, working as the manager for 22. It’s the last of Chicago’s
men’s-only hotels, left over from an earlier era in an earlier century when meatpacking and manufacturing were the city’s golden coin of promise, and hotels like this were a common way for men, single and attached alike, to live on the cheap as they saved up for an apartment of their own or sent their wages back to their country families. In this century, it’s the fi nal refuge for many of the 200-plus men who live there now, between themselves and homelessness, where small rooms—sometimes called cubicles and sometimes called cages—rent for $19 a night, and where many, like Mike, live for decades of their lives. A single stairwell lit by fluorescent lights runs from the ground f loor on up to the fourth, linking the hotel’s two wings like a spine. To choose your wing, your room, and
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