Quality Street

MANNERS & MORALS

As board chairman of Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, Ellen Borden Stevenson, ex-wife of Adlai Stevenson, functions as deficit sponge and guardian angel to Chicago's spindly poetic colony and to artists in general. So vigorous a patroness is Mrs. Stevenson that no cultural gathering in the city is considered quite legitimate unless she is on hand.

Lots of Gumption. A year ago, when Poetry was turned out of its offices after 40 years, Ellen Stevenson fruitlessly searched Chicago for new quarters. Then one night as she lay awake a solution came to her: "Why don't I have the gumption to rent my own house to myself? So I did!" Into the 70-year-old Borden mansion on Bellevue Place on little cat feet moved Poetry and also nine other worthy cultural refugees, including the English-Speaking Union, a little theatre group and a highbrow FM station. The old house where Ellen Stevenson grew up on Chicago's Gold Coast had fallen on hard times, had been, since World War II, a boardinghouse. With a $40,000 remodeling job, Patroness Stevenson fixed it as a comfortable warren of culture, renamed it the 1020 Art Center.

The householders on Bellevue Place, tenants of sleek new apartments and keepers of genteel rooming houses, didn't mind the idea of a local poets' corner until word got out that Mrs. Stevenson planned to convert the basement and garden of her house into a bohemian bistro. Chicago Gossip Columnist Irving ("Kup") Kupcinet confided in the Sun-Times that Mrs. Stevenson planned "a European style cafe [with] a combination of theatre and nite-club performances." The neighborhood exploded. In vain did Mrs. Stevenson and friends explain that the basement club would be private, the garden performances Shakespearean and very high-toned. "I could sue some people, including some newspapers," cried Mrs. Stevenson, "but I shan't."

Lots of Yelling. Ellen Stevenson's request for a food & liquor license was turned down. She appealed, and when her lawyer, Sydney Wolfe, appeared last week at the city's Zoning Board of Appeals, the Bellevue Place neighbors, the executive director of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association and the 42nd Ward's alderman brought the hearings to a grumbling halt. Most truculent was Mrs. Martha Woodard, 75, operator of four Bellevue Place boardinghouses. She shouted at a reporter, "I don't think we need a bar there. The street'll be crawling with the artistic temperament, with the boys with long hair and ribbons in the hair--or they should have ribbons in them.

"Never from these buildings have the police picked up anyone for dope or anything like that." And Scottish-born Mrs. Woodard wasn't impressed by Mrs. Stevenson's social position: "I had a title when I came over here. I was Lady Rogers. But that's all in the past now. I'm very proud of my name, Mrs. Woodard, and very proud of my buildings."

Sighed Ellen Stevenson: "I had to incorporate. Then I had to do all these other things. I just want to get that liquor license in my pocket and then I'll talk. It's completely routine. They always turn down the first application. There was a slight misunderstanding."

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