Tucked away down in the southernmost part of Chicago is Hegewisch, a wonderful community of great people and history. As a born and raised north sider, I’m proud to add Hegewisch to my list of top favorite Chicago neighborhoods. What’s not to love? There isn’t an ounce of pretentiousness to experience. It is a modest neighborhood built on a marsh, with old, cracked sidewalks and crumbling, weedy alleys. Abandoned railroad spurs disappear into dark woods. Children play in a park located between an old Ford assembly plant and a 67-acre pile of slag. It is home to Chicago’s only trailer park. It is one of the few places I’ve been to where time seems to have almost stood still. It hasn't been polished up through gentrification and I hope it remains that way (the Superfund [slag] site needs to be cleaned up but its presence only adds mystique to the current aesthetic).
Leave it to a place like Hegewisch to host an individual known locally in his time as “the Goat Man”. The Goat Man wasn’t just a guy who kept goats. The Goat Man was a guy whose story is both unbelievable and very Chicago. He has long been forgotten, and I thought the tale was worth exhuming.
In the spring of 1956, Steven Patkoff was living at 12828 South Marquette Avenue in Hegewisch. He was 55 years old and had been living there for the past 24 years. It is important to note that at that time, that part of Hegewisch was very sparsely developed. In fact, the area now occupied by hundreds of single-family homes, bounded by South Torrence Avenue, East 126th Place, Carondolet Avenue, and East 130th Street, was still prairie in the 1950s. An attempt to develop that section of Hegewisch began in the 1920s with the installation of sidewalks for planned streets, but the plan was then delayed several decades (think Wolf Road Prairie in Westchester). Patkoff lived in a shack next-door to a brick two-flat, and these two dwellings were all that existed in the four-block stretch of South Marquette Avenue.
On Patkoff’s property, he kept cats, chickens, and most notably a “large flock of goats”. This in itself wasn’t unusual at that time. What was unusual was that Patkoff would make clothes out of the skins of his goats when they died. Because of his goat-keeping pastime and strange attire, he earned the nickname of “Goat Man of Hegewisch”.
By order of the Illinois Animal Welfare League, Patkoff was arrested on March 27 and charged with cruelty to animals and for keeping these animals within city limits. When officers arrived at Patkoff’s property, they found five dead and three live goats. The law stipulated that dead animals must be disposed of within twenty-four hours, and evidently these goats had been kept in the shack longer than that.
The arrest was spurred by the league’s representative, Allen Glisch, who had a reputation as a dogged investigator throughout the south side.
The next day, Patkoff went before a judge in court. The judge in this case was Judge Frederick Wayman “Duke” Slater, a former NLF lineman and first black lineman in NFL history (and second black judge in Chicago history). During the hearing, Judge Slater asked Patkoff what he did with the goats, to which Patkoff replied, “I milk them”. Patkoff also stated that the goats sometimes died during the cold winters, implying that no other factors contributed to their deaths. Judge Slater was not moved; he sentenced Patkoff to thirty days in jail in order to “clean up”.
And as if this story wasn’t strange enough, it’s about to become even more strange. In jail, Patkoff staged a food strike. On May 22, officials of the county jail reported that Patkoff had died. What is not known is whether or not Patkoff was still in jail at that time - May 22 was beyond the thirty day sentence. Did Patkoff starve himself to death as a protest against what he believed was an injustice? Did he feel that strongly over the ability to keep goats and make clothes out of their hides? There isn’t much information about Steven Patkoff, the Goat Man, out there. Based on the cumulative circumstances of this story, it’s not implausible to think that he may have been mentally ill. Everything from living alone in an undeveloped expanse of prairie, becoming a martyr over dead goats, and everything in between.
A couple of blurbs in some old, faded newspaper archives is all that is left of Patkoff and his sad end. Everything else appears to be a mystery - where he was from, and where his remains are today.
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