Chicago Loses Another Wholesome Waft: Cocoa
Chicago is losing another pleasant smell: the permeating cocoa that’s emanated from the Bloomer Chocolate Factor at Kinzie and Milwaukee since 1939. Tweeted Washington Post reporter Kim Bellware: “People outside Chicago don’t even KNOW what a big deal this is. My bike route downtown used to be Gonella Bread, neighborhood lilacs and Blommer’s. It smelled like the city was taking you on a date.”
I wrote about smells in a Newcity cover story in 2004 (a version of that is forthcoming). In a Newcity Best Of Chicago item in the nineties, I wrote about a long-gone breeze, at Chicago and Carpenter east of Milwaukee: the Gonnella Bakery.
INDIAN-SUMMER NIGHTS ARE THE BEST, when you push through the sleeping city fast as you can on your bicycle, the wind warm-to-cool on the cheeks, hair lost to muss and motion. The city is quiet and night buses and taxis amble past. Deep inside certain buildings, work is done. Offices are cleaned, accounts are balanced, food is prepared. The air around Chicago Avenue near Milwaukee is toasty as dusk draws into twilight, year-round. Keep your Blommer's chocolate factory and its cocoa-powder cloud that blooms over River North. To arrive at the tang of toasted bread, the olfactory landscape on that stretch of street shifts by the hour.
Late in the morning, near lunch, the powdery touch of refined white flour invisibly mists the air. Come past a few hours later, the yeasty rise of bread fills the nose. As night falls, the reek of garlic swirls. And as the stars punch brightly into the sky, the waft of finished bread, of loaves split and lacquered with butter and garlic, smuggles out and into the clear air and through your bloodstream.
