Harold’s Chicken Shack is legendary. The Black-owned fried chicken chain started 75 years ago on Chicago’s South Side is name-dropped in lyrics by Chicago rappers-gone-big from Common to Juice WRLD to Noname. People argue over which location is the best, even setting out to try every one and rank them objectively. It has its own markers and customs: an ax-wielding figure chasing a chicken for a logo, a turnstile through bulletproof glass to deliver your food, specific lingo for orders, and vinegary mild sauce that ends up dousing the bread and fries that come with the chicken.
As with all good legends, it can be difficult to discern solid facts about Harold’s from the hazily remembered lore that has accumulated over the decades. The first shack was opened by Harold Pierce, who had come to Chicago from Alabama in 1943 as part of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South. He and his wife Hilda ran a restaurant called H&H that specialized in chicken feet and dumplings, the kind of food he might have grown up eating in the South. (Many Harold’s still serve liver, gizzards, and giblets.) Supplied by a friend and poultry shop owner named Gene Rosen, Pierce decided to try his hand at fried chicken and opened a take-out joint called Harold’s Chicken Shack in Kenwood in 1950.
Pierce’s daughter and current Harold’s CEO Kristen Pierce-Sherrod told the Chicago Tribune in 2019 that some people place the first Harold’s “at 43rd and Greenwood, but it was Kimbark.” But Kimbark Avenue doesn’t intersect 43rd Street, and other press accounts over the years have located the original at 47th Street and Kenwood Avenue or 47th Street and Greenwood Avenue. (We could not reach Pierce-Sherrod for an interview.) All that’s to say: take any information about Harold’s with a grain of salt – or lemon pepper, the popular proprietary seasoning available to flavor orders at many Harold’s, including the one located at 917 W. 87th St. in Auburn Gresham…