Mares Drugs, 1950s, by Francis E. Kazemek
From MemoryArchive
Who: Francis E. Kazemek What: Mares Drugs When: 1950s Where: Chicago
It’s hard to find a café or soda fountain today that serves “real” Cherry Cokes that don’t come from a bottle or too-sweet Green Rivers made from syrup and soda water. It’s hard to find a teenage hangout where Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica might sit around under the watchful eye of Pops Wagner. Mares Drugstore was such a place during the 1940s and 1950s.
Mares was a bustling soda fountain, pharmacy, and meeting place in our Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. Located on the corner of Bonfield and Archer Avenues, it was an after-school hangout for teenagers and an after-Sunday Mass treat for parents and children who stopped on their way home for chocolate malts and strawberry sundaes in tulip glasses.
None of us knew at the time that Mares was a vivid example of art deco style. We simply took the sleek black counter, black-and-silver spinning stools, and wall-length mirror that reflected the silver soda handles and ice cream containers as natural. The revolving wire racks that held pulp fiction, Westerns, and science fiction collections stood next to the stationary stacks full of crime stories, women’s magazines, comic books, and such outdoors magazines as Field & Stream. The daily newspapers, including the long-defunct Herald Examiner and Chicago Daily News, were stacked on the floor next to the door.
In the back section of Mares were five black tables with wooden chairs where teenagers would drink Cokes, eat hamburgers and fries, smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes, flirt with one another, and talk about the world they were going to see far from Chicago. Their youthful conversations and dreams were bounded by the glass counters and shelves of the drugstore which held the salves, medicines, hot water bottles, and enemas of mortality. The pharmacist would often “sshh!” the young people as he tried to wait on a customer.
Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica are all retired now and receiving their monthly Social Security checks. It’s nigh impossible to find a neighborhood soda fountain where you can get a real Green River made from syrup and soda water. Teenagers today hang out in shopping malls, and parents take their children to McDonald’s after Sunday Mass. Mares itself closed in the late-1950s, and for a while during the Cold War the building was used to sell fall-out shelters.
