Neighbors bid farewell to 'The Pigeon Man'

At a memorial in Lincoln Square, mourners honor his life by feeding birds he befriended

By Barbara Mahany | Tribune staff reporter

January 7, 2008

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Under misting skies, on a balmy January Sunday, beneath the terra-cotta brow of a boarded-up old bank where 87 pigeons roosted, the mourners came with nine loaves of bread, a sack of cracked corn and 200 black-and-white photocopied cards with a word, "compassion," defined.

A No. 49B Western Avenue CTA bus pulled to the curb, and the driver leaned forward in his seat and whispered his prayer, making a sign of the cross as he steered back into traffic. A Chicago beat cop, in her squad car, pulled up too. With tears in her eyes, she gave her blessing to the flurry of feathers and crumbs and an old friend, now gone.

They came, this little knot of friends and strangers, because the sadness that swelled their hearts, they said, could not be contained. Nor the yearning for a proper goodbye.

They gathered around a weathered red fire hydrant along Western Avenue, just north of Lawrence Avenue, in Chicago's Lincoln Square, to whisper words of thanks and scatter corn and bread crumbs for the tender-hearted man who, until he died nearly three weeks ago, had tended all the pigeons, twice a day every day, for nearly a decade.

And who, as he sat for hours, arms outstretched, covered in pigeons, tried to teach the tens of thousands of passersby his most essential lesson, that to be kind is easier than to be cruel.

Joseph Zeman, best-known as the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square, was killed Dec. 18 when a van pulling out of a parking lot struck Zeman, who had just turned 77, as he was shuffling down the sidewalk along Devon Avenue, near McCormick Boulevard.

There was no clergy at this fire hydrant funeral of sorts. And no coffin either; Zeman was cremated and his family plans to hold a memorial in a few months. Communion came in the form of squishy white bread, on sale at the Aldi, passed out in single slices to dozens who wandered by. Some kept right on walking. Others stopped, stunned to hear the news, or just to add their story.

Ginny Burns, who befriended Zeman a few years back, hobbled over on her cane because, she said, "he woulda just adored this, being remembered. He felt so forgotten. Joe got from the pigeons the unconditional love that he never got from people."

Within hours of Zeman's death, as word spread that the man who seemed to be a St. Francis of a city would no longer be at his sidewalk perch, the hydrant was piled with a battery-operated candle, a votive light that burned for days, a silk-flowered wreath, a stuffed blue bird, a Santa, a pumpkin and a thick dusting of bird seeds.

But until Tara Theobald, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, dreamed up this streetside memorial for Sunday afternoon, there had been no public gathering to remember Zeman.

"He was someone taking care of the community, the animals, the corner. He showed the neighborhood what it means to care," said Theobald, 21, as she pulled out a pair of scissors to cut apart the cards she'd printed with Zeman's picture, the definition of compassion, and the words, " Be the Change. Joe Zeman 1930-2007."

Marie Jochum, 25, who lives just around the corner and works with refugees for Catholic Charities, didn't know of the memorial when she set out on an errand shortly after 1 p.m. But when she was handed a slice of bread and the card, she sighed and began to scatter the bread in little bits.

"I'd walk past him in the morning, kinda hurrying, and I'd feel kind of bad. I'd think, 'Now, this is someone legitimately doing what I should be doing,'" Jochum said. "I work with the poor every day, but he was being kind and gentle and loving. And it's a good reminder for me in my everyday working with refugees to be that way, and not rush."

Then, she stood silently, staring at the crumbs and the slush puddled at the curb.

A pigeon fluttered down, then swooped away with a fat bit of bread.

Lindsay Hunter, 27, who had pedaled her pink-and-white bicycle over to the hydrant, cleared her throat, turned toward where the pigeons roosted and read a poem about Zeman by local poet Mary Cross, who was Hunter's teacher at the School of the Art Institute.

Titled "Endangered Species," it describes the "old man, with hunched spine," sitting "embryonic" on the hydrant, and how, impulsively, he scooped up rice from a bucket, and soon was lined with pigeons, on his arms, atop his head, on his lap.

It is the poem's last line that lingered as the clutch of mourners dissolved, leaving behind the hydrant: "Who is to say you cannot collect love?"

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bmahany@tribune.com