The Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal™

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Gyros, the first servied in America were in Chicago.

The first Greeks to inhabit Chicago came by ship in the 1840s. They worked hard to establish themselves upon landing in Chicago, and eventually, many of them became restaurant owners. This fledgling community was originally concentrated around Harrison, Blue Island, and Halsted. Since most of this population was Greek, the area quickly became known as Greektown.

In the 1960s, Chicago saw development on the West Side; the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois at Chicago were built. Thus, the Greek community was forced to relocate a few blocks away. They settled in what is now known as modern Greektown. Although the Greek community was established by this time, it wasn’t until the first gyros in America were made in Greektown around 1965 that the Greeks began to have notoriety in Chicago. The instant gyros were introduced, and they became wildly popular.

Using this success as a starting point, Chicago’s Greek community celebrated its heritage more boldly. Over the next two decades, the number of restaurants and small businesses grew dramatically and Greektown became the most popular destination for Greek cuisine.

The Taste of Greece and several parades were also instituted as annual celebrations during this time. In 1996, the City of Chicago funded street renovations and the building of traditional Greek pavilions at various points in the neighborhood.

The Greek Islands is one of Chicagoland's favorite authentic Greek Restaurants.

[1] Gyros Cones: Several people lay claim to have been the first in America to mass produce Gyros cones.

George Apostolou says he served the first gyros in the United States in the Parkview Restaurant in Chicago in 1965 and nine years later opened a 3,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, Central Gyros Wholesale.

Peter Parthenis says he beat Mr. Apostolou to mass production by a year with Gyros Inc. in 1973.

Andre Papantoniou, a founder and the president of Olympia Food Industries, says the gyro plant was actually the brainchild of John Garlic. Mr. Papantoniou swears that during the rotisserie-making phase of Mr. Parthenis’s career, a John Garlic appeared in Chicago searching for a partner in a gyro plant he’d started in Milwaukee. Mrs. Garlic tells the story; “John got the idea for Gyros from me,” Ms. Garlic said. “One afternoon, I was watching ‘What’s My Line?’ and there was a Greek restaurant owner on the show, and he did this demonstration, carving meat off a gyro. I immediately called an operator and asked for the number of a Greek restaurant in New York. The owner I got on the phone said, "Go to Chicago. There’s a huge Greek community."

”At the time, Mr. Garlic was a Cadillac salesman in his late 30s, but he quickly saw his future in gyro cones. After finding a Chicago chef willing to share a recipe, the couple rented space in a sausage plant and cranked out history’s first assembly-line gyro cones. They were a hit. “We supplied summer festivals, universities, and some restaurants,” Ms. Garlic said. “John could sell anything.”

The C.J. Vitner Company, Chicago style snacks.

Marie and Charles Vitner founded the C.J. Vitner Company in 1926. The Company was originally formed as a collection of retail outlets consisting of five storefront shops selling candy, magazines, tobacco products, and ice cream on the southside of Chicago.

Once the Great Depression began and, with sales dwindling, Charles started looking for other opportunities to keep his business going. He saw that the tavern businesses were flourishing and thought that selling snack foods to the tavern trade would be the ideal way to help his business during those trying times.

Charles invested in a popcorn machine and put it into his store on South Ashland Avenue. The stores sold the fresh popcorn in paper bags to their walk-in customers and Charles then put the excess popcorn in five-gallon pails and peddled them to the local taverns out of the back of his car.

The concept went over well and Charles started distributing other items such as potato chips and pretzels to his growing list of local tavern customers.

By the end of the 1930s, Charles had developed a growing route distribution business with 6 route trucks on the street selling a variety of products exclusively to the tavern trade. He provided everything the taverns needed from soup to glassware and, of course, popcorn, potato chips, and pretzels.

In the late 1940s, Charles' son James, just out of the Army Air Corps, joined his father in the business and started looking for ways to further expand their customer base. By the early 1960s, with Jim's foresight, the C.J. Vitner Company had 13 route trucks and a budding wholesale department selling a complete line of snack foods to schools, jobbers, vendors, etc. They built a distribution facility at 6010 S. Kedzie Avenue in Chicago and continued to grow.

The 1970s saw another great expansion for the C.J. Vitner Company. First, an additional building was purchased at 59th & Kedzie to ease the congestion at the facility at 6010 S. Kedzie. Then, with Charles looking to retire, Jim brought in his son Bill, the third generation of the Vitner family to join the Vitner organization and together they relocated the Company to a larger facility at 4343 S. Tripp Ave on Chicago's southwest side.

Until 1977, the C.J. Vitner Company distributed only products bearing other company's brands such as Fairmont Foods, Chesty, Blue Star, and Rold Gold. The Vitners knew that if they wanted to continue to grow, they would need to establish their own brand, get into manufacturing and start selling products using the Vitner label.

In 1977 that opportunity presented itself when Blue Star Foods, a potato chip manufacturing company in Loves Park, Illinois went up for sale. Jim and Bill knew that this was a golden opportunity and purchased the 10-acre manufacturing facility lock, stock, and barrel and began producing products bearing the Vitner brand.

With the Vitner brand now appearing on the packaging, the Company really began to flourish. A 68,000 square foot facility at 4202 W. 45th St was purchased to handle the demand for the Vitner line of snack foods in the Chicagoland area.

As the Company moved into the 1980s, it also slowly transformed itself from its strong tavern business base to also delivering its products to convenience stores and supermarkets. By the mid-1980s The C.J. Vitner Company had 70 Direct Store Delivery routes and 6 Wholesale Distribution routes serving the Chicago land market.

In 1987 the Loves Park manufacturing facility was modernized and expanded. The 4.5 million dollar project included a state-of-the-art kitchen and the most advanced machinery available at that time. Vitners was not only servicing Illinois and the Chicago market but it also had distributors in eight neighboring states selling Vitner's Snacks in their local areas.

As the Company moved into the 1990s, management saw that they were rapidly outgrowing the Loves Park facility which was landlocked and had already been expanded to its fullest capacity. Sites all across the Midwest were investigated and considered but eventually, management chose a 55-acre site in Freeport, Illinois, not far from its existing manufacturing facility.

Construction started on the Freeport manufacturing facility in the early 1990s. The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place in February of 1992 and was received with much fanfare from the local press and government officials. The plant was the most modern snack food-producing facility in the country with all state-of-the-art equipment. And, whereas the Loves Park plant only produced potato chips and popcorn, the added capacity of the Freeport facility added extruded products, corn chips, corn pops, and tortilla chips to the Vitner's Snacks product line.

In December of 2011, Vitner's Snacks was acquired by Snak King Corp., another family-owned and operated snack food manufacturer located in City of Industry, CA. Since the acquisition, Snak King Corp. has almost doubled the size of the Freeport manufacturing facility with future expansion a definite possibility looming on the near horizon. Snak King has once again elevated this manufacturing facility to an industry-standard state-of-the-art facility and added Vitner's Snacks to its ever-growing line of high-quality and delicious snacks.

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

C.J. Vitner Company

Sunday, November 26, 2017

The Broadwell Inn & Tavern dates back to 1824 in Clayville, Illinois.

Moses Broadwell, the Inn's first proprietor, was a Revolutionary War veteran from New Jersey who migrated to Illinois through the Ohio River and Cincinnati, arriving at Beard's Ferry landing in 1820. He settled south of Richland Creek about 12 miles west of Springfield. He arrived with his wife, Jane, and their nine children in June or July and proceeded to build a log house. Three years later, Broadwell bought the 550 acres on which he lived. His sons later purchased additional land to bring the total to 790 acres.

The brick house or Inn was built around 1824 in the architectural style of the Federal period, not unlike those of the New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio areas from which Mr. Broadwell had come. The Inn, built with native clay bricks, originally had two two-story wooden porches on its north and south facades. The structure and cabinetwork of this Inn are unusually fine for its day, and the building has been recorded by the Historic American Buildings as an outstanding example of early architecture in Illinois.

Great exposed, hand-hewn center “summer” beams run through the structure at three levels for support. The walnut mantels, cabinetwork and most of the flooring are original, and the doors have great hand-forged strap hinges and large iron or brass locks. The bricks were handmade on the site. A brick oven built into the kitchen fireplace is one of the few beehive ovens in this region where bread or other goods are still baked. Outside, the original hand-dug stone-cased well still has good water. The furniture for the Inn, in addition to its glass, china, pottery, and kitchen gadgets, has been obtained mostly from old families of Sangamo Country. The structure represents a transitional period between the cabin of the rugged pioneer at New Salem and the more comfortable homes of Springfield before the Civil War.

In 1842, the area around Broadwell's Inn was renamed "Clay's Ville" because of the sentiment for the perennial Whig candidate, Henry Clay.

During the heyday of the Inn, Reverend Peter Cartwright often spent time at Broadwell's Inn. In fact, Reverend Cartwright held a large camp meeting at Clayville in 1832. Mentor Graham, Lincoln's teacher, held classes at the Clayville Schoolhouse in 1830 and 1836; and according to Carl Sandburg, it was at this log schoolhouse at Clayville that Lincoln sat and listened to students recite their lessons.

Dr. Charles Chandler, the founder of Chandlerville, was a frequent visitor to Clayville on his way to and from Springfield. Lincoln himself is said to have stayed at the Inn, even though no actual proof exists. Lincoln was the lawyer of the Broadwell family, and it is unlikely that he made the journey from Springfield to confer with his client and returned home all in the same day.

To the traveler, Clayville tavern offered comfort and warmth within its walls. To the Broadwell's, it provided an income that was needed to raise their large family. In addition to the tavern, the Broadwells also operated a store and a tannery nearby on Richland Creek. According to the store daybook, the Broadwell store stocked flour, sugar, molasses, salt, whiskey, gin, nails, dyestuffs and other staples of the day. The tannery ledger shows that approximately twelve men were employed in the tanyard and that this business operation supplied leather to farmers, bootmakers and harness makers.

In addition to the family's businesses, a mill and blacksmith shop and schoolhouse completed this rural community. Ten miles to the north at Sangamo town, the Broadwells operated their own grist mill. (During the tavern restoration, a barrel stencil and stencil brush used by the miller were found under the boards in the stairway.)

Moses Broadwell died in 1827, and the family operations fell on the shoulders of his son John. In 1834, a fire broke out in the Inn and partially destroyed the west end. The tavern was rebuilt, but even today, evidence of the fire can be seen in one of the upstairs bedrooms. After the structure was rebuilt, the family prospered until the advent of the railroads. With the iron horse also came the death of the Clayville community.

All of the businesses at Clayville depended upon the post road and stagecoach line. The post road, which originally opened in 1825 and ran from Springfield to Beard’s Ferry, was extended in 1829 to Quincy on the Mississippi River. With the railroads in the 1850s, the need for a tavern no longer existed, and the Inn became a family residence. The structure was used as such until the 1930s when it became a storage barn for hay. It remained that way until the Pearsons came along.

In 1960, Dr. Emmett and Mary Pearson purchased the property from the family of Dr. Fink and began a restoration process. Two log cabins, two large barns, a blacksmith barn, and other outbuildings were acquired and moved to the site over the next few years. In 1972, the Pearsons donated the site to the Sangamon State University Foundation; the university operated the site until 1992 as the Clayville Rural Life Center.

In 1992 the site was sold into private ownership, and over the next several years deteriorated to a point that in 2007 it was declared one of the ten most endangered historic sites in the State of Illinois.

In 2009, headed by Jim Verkuilen, The Pleasant Plains Historical Society was formed to purchase and save The Clayville Historic Site. In May of 2010, the purchase of the site was finalized.

In 2012, Landmarks Illinois, the organization that in 2007 had declared the site to be one of the most ten endangered sites in Illinois, awarded The Pleasant Plains Historical Society it’s advocacy award for saving the site.