Life with Emil and Minnie Anschutz

Within weeks after Darger returned to Chicago from the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, he moved into the Workingmen’s House, a dormitory reserved for employees of St. Joseph’s Hospital. It was located at Burling and Garfield, now the southwest corner of Oz Park, in Lincoln Park. He had begun working at St. Joseph’s as a janitor in 1909, and the Workingmen’s House was a convenient, inexpensive place to live.

He lived at the Workingmen’s House until the late summer of 1922, when he rented a room from an older couple from Germany, Emil and Minnie Anschutz. Their house at 1035 Webster, a block south of DePaul University, was a two-story, wooden building that stood at the southwest corner of Webster and Kenmore. It had four extra rooms that Emil and Minnie rented out—always to men. The move meant he would be attending a new parish, St. Vincent DePaul’s Church, which was across the street.

Emil was a cook at a local lunch counter when Darger became their tenant, but after a few years, he retired. Minnie’s job was to take care of the house, including the boarders.

The area in which Darger lived was, for the most part, a swathe of boarding houses where young, single men and women, who couldn’t afford more expensive digs, rented single rooms in houses like Emil and Minnie’s.

During his eleven years at 1035 Webster, a colorful array of characters also roomed under the same roof as Darger. They arrived unexpectedly, left after a short time, and were replaced by others. Darger witnessed the cycle. One man stuck in Darger’s memory. “During my stay there,” he recalled,

there were quite a number of roomers who were not steady roomers but come and go. After one particular one left, the police came looking for him, on some swindling charge, but he had left on short notice, at night told no one not even the landlord, and left no address. (A History of My Life 100-101)

Darger had answered the door when the police arrived and took them upstairs to the man’s room, but he and “all his belongings” were gone. Darger added, “Usually swindlers are very shrewd and clever.”

Others were just as colorful as the swindler, in their own way. One man had an “in growing goiter that strangled him,” and another committed suicide. The suicide, Darger quickly added, didn’t kill himself “where he roomed” but somewhere else (History 101), and he willed some of his ashes to the Anschutzes.

Life with the Anschutzes had its light moments, too. Late one night, Darger was awakened by plaster falling from the ceiling of his room onto his bed and the floor. It was so loud when it hit the floor that it woke Mrs. Anschutz, who screamed, “‘Amiel Henry fell out of bed.’” (History 201) The Anchutzes went upstairs to Darger’s room to investigate, and even after he pointed out the obvious hole in the ceiling where the plaster had been and the chunks of it on his bed and all over the floor, he had a hard time convincing them that he hadn’t fallen out of bed. “I cleaned off of my bed enough plaster fragments,” Darger recalled, “to fill a bushel basket.” (History 202) The next morning, the neighbors told Darger that the sound was loud enough that they thought it was an explosion and called the fire department.

In the fall of 1932, Darger got some disturbing news.

The Anschutzes had decided to trade properties with an Italian immigrant who lived on 2752 Logan Boulevard, three miles to the west. Darger immediately made arrangements to move, and in fact, he quickly found a larger room to rent at 851 Webster.

He’d been very creative at Emil and Minnie’s, finishing many smaller and at least one of his largest canvasses. He completed The Battle of Calverine, which is generally considered to be one of his masterpieces and which is nearly ten feet long and three feet high, around August 28, 1929. He’d also completed several volumes of his novel The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. To move out of what appears to have a place where he could work successfully seems wrong-headed, so why did he move?

For the answers to these and other mysteries surrounding the life of outsider artist Henry Darger, be on the lookout for Throw-Away Boy: A Life of Henry Darger….