"[About Illinois's electric chair:] There was still one fugitive on Illinois's books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff's basement [...] stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O'Connor's return. [...] Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O'Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait. / For it well might be that the little room would be the great city's most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river."
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Chicago murderer evaded his hanging in 1923.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Arm
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The Man with the Golden Arm
' (1949) is a novel by American writer Nelson Algren. It won the 1950 and was adapted into the 1955 film of the same name.
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