On the West Side was the National Laundry Journal, run by brothers Sam and Charles Dowst. Halsted.Ĭhicago was a center of the laundering profession-the National Laundry Owners' Association was in Joliet, where it had an institute of laundering (the Coin Laundry Association is still here, in Oak Brook). He came to Chicago, and in 1896 opened a laundry, eventually located at 3629 N. It's an amazing story, and if you have a Monopoly set-and who doesn't?-dig out the iron and look at it, because it is the key actor in this drama, crawling like Sweet Pea through the construction site chaos of the past century, yet miraculously untouched. It isn't as if Hasbro is going to come collect our old sets, and they last for decades-that's why the company is doing this in the first place, to create a little false urgency and move some product during the post-Christmas slough.īut since Monopoly tokens are in the news, I should point out one overlooked aspect: They have local roots in fact, Monopoly tokens are as Chicago as deep-dish pizza. Still, I'm not going to bemoan the loss of whatever token is cashiered by this stunt. What's the point? Efficiency? Why not just let the computer play the whole game while you go off and do something else? My boys learned to count by playing Monopoly, which made my wife and me shake our heads at the electronic version, where a computer counts. Part is just the physical act of throwing the dice, marching the top hat-always the hat-around the board, passing "Go," counting up the money. Part graphic-the question mark of chance, the familiar property colors, the cop, the diamond ring. The central joy of Monopoly, to me, is its pure form. Yes, I am a traditionalist I wince at all those themed Monopoly editions-for individual cities or sports teams or whatever. "Here's your chance to make those wishes known," the AP ballyhooed. Thus, I smiled to see Hasbro take a page from the old PR lab manual and add a gram of "Survivor": a popularity contest for its 77-year-old stalwart, Monopoly, that will eliminate one current token while adding one of five new token designs. Suddenly, in the words of Arthur Miller, "attention must be paid." Or when you have a beloved icon, the standard formula is to mess with it in some insignificant way. If that doesn't produce the desired result, mix in a spoonful of crisis-allow the elephants to "escape," then watch the photographers come running. Start with spectacle-parade the circus elephants through downtown. 19, and rather than try to suss which was the "true" holiday for the board game, I decided it would be the perfect post to save as a fire axe behind glass, to run when for whatever reason I didn't come up with anything better. I pulled this up thinking to post it on World Monopoly Day, which is March 19, but doing my due diligence uncovered a rival National Play Monopoly Day, Nov.
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