Prospect’s restaurants work to restore the avenue’s legacy, one good meal at a time

Unless you’ve stopped in for a double cheeseburger, a pig-snoot sandwich or a chicken-wing dinner at Jim’s Diner, at 6901 Prospect, you’ve probably never heard of Gertrude Ramsey.

Miss Ramsey, as everyone here knows her, raised 11 children just around the corner from this restaurant, which Dave Crane purchased seven years ago. Once or twice a week, she takes her place at one of the two upholstered benches in the tiny dining area — a room dominated by only one high-top table and three chairs, and a very large Pepsi vending machine — and turns on her battery-operated boom box to play gospel music. As the songs float up, she chats with the customers as they buy one of those Pepsis or wait to pick up an order.

“I’ve lived near Prospect for over 40 years, and I’ve seen a lot of changes on this street,” Ramsey tells me. “And now that I’m older, I’m seeing a lot of changes for the better. You hear a lot about what Prospect was, back in the day. Long before I moved here, they say it was a major business corridor. Well, all those places were gone by the time I moved here. The movie theaters were closed, and a lot of the shops. But there is still shopping. There are still things to do. I can step out of my house and get on the bus and go anywhere I want to go. But sometimes, I just want to cross the street.”

For the first half of the 20th century, Prospect Avenue was the bustling thoroughfare that others told Ramsey about. You could catch a streetcar downtown and ride it south, well past 75th Street, passing tidy homes with neat lawns. Or you could get off at one of the neighborhood movie houses: the Emerald, the Oak Park, the Linwood. There were family-operated cafés and candy shops. There were beauty salons and grocers. People liked the doughnuts at Gold-N-Glaze, where the busy avenue met 46th Street. There were a few saloons.

As late as 1957, when the streetcar line ceased operation, Prospect still was an important commercial corridor for the African-American community. The 1957 city directory lists dozens of businesses along the route: department stores, service stations, drugstores, barbershops. But Prospect’s fortunes turned as planning began for a highway (then called the South Midtown Freeway, today Bruce R. Watkins Drive) that would raze or disrupt properties east and west of Prospect.

“The changes were very subtle at first,” says local historian Tom Taylor. “My grandmother lived at 44th and Wabash, and she and I took the bus up and down Prospect quite often to go shopping or to see a movie. One day, my grandmother and I realized that we were the only white passengers on the bus. And then, after the 1968 riots, we were among the only passengers on the bus. It was as if Prospect had just emptied out.”

Steve Noll, executive director of the Jackson County Historical Society, says, “In the 1960s, the city started purchasing property to assemble the right of way, but there were accusations of block-busting and a lot of neighborhoods were simply wiped out.”

By the time the highway officially opened, in 2001, the vibrant midcentury Prospect Avenue had utterly vanished, leaving swaths of vacant properties. Some movie theaters were torn down, others turned into makeshift churches. Commerce fell away. The city abandoned Prospect.

The first Wednesday of December, Ramsey was wearing one of her favorite pullovers, screen-printed with the words “Think B.I.G. Believe In God.” Her chunky CD player was working its way through an album by the Gospel Hummingbirds. Ramsey says she loves God and her church, and she’s crazy about Dave Crane, too. One reason: The broad-shouldered owner of Jim’s Diner stayed up all night the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to deep-fry 150 turkeys for regulars who had brought him their birds to prepare.

“I’m a restaurant owner, but having a place on Prospect is a lot more than that,” Crane says. “You don’t open a restaurant on Prospect Avenue hoping to make a lot of money. I knew what the challenges were going to be when I bought this business from the previous owner. But I felt like I could make a difference here. This community needed something different. Why shouldn’t the residents of this community have the opportunity to eat good food? I mean, the kind of food that people can get in Westport or the suburbs? They need to know someone cares.”

He went on: “Jim’s was, more or less, a typical burger place when I bought it. But I’ve tried to enhance it and bring a new level of quality. I get here every morning at 4 a.m., and I’m making hamburger patties from fresh beef. We make our own chili. We bring in fresh doughnuts and cakes from Vee’s Sweets & Treats, at 80th and Paseo. And I’m seeing the changes taking place.”

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Crane knows how people imagine Prospect. “People drive by and see these buildings, some of which don’t look that great from the outside,” he says. “But when they meet us, we’re able to change those old perceptions. And I’m seeing a lot more innovation on Prospect. A lot of new businesses are opening, and they’re producing quality products. A lot has changed in the last two years. I’m glad other businesses are feeling the same thing.”

Raheem Malik gave up counting the number of people who warned him against the address where he and his Italian-American wife, Monica, had decided to open their sit-down Italian restaurant, Mo’s Italian Spot, at 5932 Prospect.

What used to be a Niecie’s Restaurant has changed a lot. The tables are covered in red-and-white-checked vinyl cloths, and the menu is composed of Southern Italian favorites: hot-beef sandwiches, spaghetti and meatballs, fettuccine Alfredo in a creamy house-made sauce, and garlicky chicken spiedini. Monica Malik makes the cheesecakes from scratch each day.

“They absolutely told us that we’d lost our minds,” Raheem Malik says. “There’s a negative stigma to Prospect Avenue that’s left over from the past. And that’s our biggest challenge, to overcome that stigma.

“What we saw, instead of the negatives, is that Prospect is a high-traffic area with a lot of potential,” he adds. “It’s just getting other people to see that potential, too. When customers walk into our dining room and see how nice it is … they look at us and say, ‘Wow, we had no idea this was such a nice place.’ It’s all about getting them in the door.”

That hasn’t been easy. The stigma dies hard.

“There are days that our business is very good, and others when it’s disappointingly slow,” Raheem Malik says. “But things are picking up every day. We’re getting all kinds of new customers — of all races — who might not normally stop in to eat at a restaurant on Prospect Avenue. I think the Bruce R. Watkins highway has something to do with that. People from outside the neighborhood can stop in, have a meal, and hop back on the highway to go back to where they really live.”

“It’s all about the food,” says Dyamund Shields, who moved his Chicken Macaroni & Cheese restaurant from a smaller venue, at 53rd Street and Prospect, to more lavish quarters at 7025 Prospect a year ago. Shields, who runs the restaurant with his son, Dyamund Shields Jr., spent a small fortune turning the former banquet hall into a sit-down restaurant with its own wow factor. And a separate sound of audible surprise often greets the best-selling dish here, the “chick-a-roni” sandwich. It’s made with a soft hoagie bun and filled with chopped pieces of crunchy, spicy fried chicken, and then blanketed with an absurdly rich and smartly seasoned macaroni and cheese. The rest of the menu consists of seafood, barbecue, chicken and waffles, and a few Chinese-inspired dishes. Shields obtained a liquor license last April and now offers beer, wine and cocktails.

He’s happy that he stayed on Prospect.

“When you open a restaurant in the urban core,” he says, “you’ve got to be in the light. People need to know that you’re professional, that you create the best possible product, that you’re part of the community. Yes, there are challenges that come from running a business in the urban core, but we’ve been successful without a lot of promotion, and our clientele is evenly black and white. We’ve built a steady regular business, and as long as they’re happy with us, we’re doing well.”

“If being on Prospect is a negative,” Crane says, “then the only answer is to try to change that negative into a positive. And I see that happening. When we started making changes in the way we approached our food and our customers, I saw other businesses on this street making changes, too. You can make what you want out of what life offers you. We’re building good word-of-mouth here. Let our customers come and make their own determination.”