“Looking for someone?”
When he drew Moulin Jimmy’s, as the original artwork is fondly known to its few surviving subjects, Arturo (later Arthur) Teodoro Castillo was a 24-year-old contradiction—not a University of Chicago student, but part of the institution’s intellectual orbit; a keen observer of Hyde Park’s social intricacies, but not much of a talker himself; a caricaturist who regaled his friends with inked likenesses, but who considered himself primarily a writer.
Then and now, no Hyde Parker calls the bar “Woodlawn Tap,” though that might be the watering hole’s formal name. To patrons, it’s always been Jimmy’s, after the late James Wilson, its longtime owner and barkeep. He’s in Moulin Jimmy’s too, of course, cradling heaps of cash behind the bar. Over his shoulder is Art’s sendup of a backlit University of Chicago seal (here a cooked bird instead of a phoenix), which still looms over the center of the bar. Ottenheimer’s likeness shows off a pamphlet titled “Wright Is Love” in the bottom-right corner of the tableau. Nearby is George Tolley, an economics professor emeritus at U of C and acquaintance of Castillo’s. He still lives in Hyde Park, but spoke to me while hunkered down in Michigan.
Cartooning may not have been Castillo’s be-all end-all, but it was certainly most revealing of how he viewed the world. Plus, it paid the bills, at least for a time. Throughout his career, Castillo’s biggest commissioner was Doubt, a magazine put out by the anti-government, anti-science Fortean Society, as well as a handful of sci-fi fanzines. The closest Castillo came to going corporate was painting window displays for department stores and illustration work for Mages Sporting Goods. Both gigs were, unsurprisingly, short-lived.
Then, the collateral. Pre-urban renewal, dozens of taverns, clubs, and small businesses lined Hyde Park’s arterial streets. By the end of the 1960s, only a select few survived. Gone was Compass Theater, the birthplace of improv comedy, once just a few doors down from Jimmy’s. Gone, too, was the Beehive, the smoky jazz club where Charlie Parker performed one of his last gigs, seared off the map by a behemoth I.M. Pei housing complex that still bisects 55th Street. All in all, an estimated 4,000 families were displaced, most of whom were Black.
Of course, there would be no next time, and no long career. Castillo died on April 19, 1962. He was 32 years old.
