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chicagoland1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
I’m seeing rain clouds in Chicago. Not in the sky, which is unchanged from my last visit: a hard Midwestern blue, serenely clear behind the downtown spires. But at street level, a repeated cartoon tag: a few puffy clouds, a curtain of raindrops descending. I probably miss 20 of them before I spot the first on a dumpster in the Loop. Now I’m seeing them on walls and mailboxes, on a door in Wicker Park. They wink from the shadows, forecasting a change of weather with a cheeky smile. The sky holds. And yet atmospheric shift seems ever-present in what locals still call Chicagoland. Twelve years ago, I came in by train, crawling into the commercial west side past looming seas of garbage. I counted dead car tires and disemboweled household appliances until I lost track. Then we disembarked at Union Station and I crossed over soot-black L tracks into the canyons of the famous Loop. A young writer, I was there because of words, the library left by Bellow, Algren, Sandburg, Terkel. And I found their essential legacy in a down-market bar called Weeds in the looming shadow of the Cabrini-Green housing project, where I made my way to Open Mic Night, a bohemian, tequila-soaked word fest presided over by bartender/owner Sergio Mayora. And from behind the slumping mic stand, poet Gregorio Gómez read his satiric paean to Chicago called The City, and the crowd chanted back the poem’s title as a chorus. “The Ci-tee,” they sang. Like the words were holy. Like we were in church. Which we were, in a way. I never wrote it down. I forgot the words. And when I finally had a chance to return to Chicago – to rediscover the city that had entranced me, that had lived so long in memory – I was changed myself, wife and three-year-old boy in tow. I entered the Loop by taxi. A familiar sky overhead. Yet the streets were lined with flowering planters, the L tracks clean and repainted. No garbage to be seen anywhere. “I too am sentimental about urban ugliness,” sighs Bellow’s character Charlie Citrine as he considers the transformation of Lincoln Park from poor Polish slum to Puerto Rican carnival. How Charlie would be reeling now, the Puerto Ricans long gentrified out past Humboldt Park into the fringes of the city. Lincoln Park on a sun-dappled August afternoon is leafy, boulevarded, like it was never ugly or surprising, edgy or dangerous. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is playing outside the Paul Frank boutique. There’s a happy, multi-ethnic staff picnic outside the Children’s Memorial Hospital. People smile and nod as we wheel our son down West Fullerton in his stroller, the air full of country fair music and the down-home smoke from a Maxi Sweet Corn Roaster. And we find ourselves at Lincoln Park’s Green City Market, where every summer Saturday, you can choose from 15 kinds of tomatoes, artisanal bread, organic cheese and peaches from family farms in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana. We picnic stupendously on the grass by the South Pond, watching a chef in immaculate whites load flats of blueberries into the back of a Range Rover. It doesn’t take many hours of strolling to realize that everything in central Chicago to the north and west has been gentrified. “You’re going where?” a conservative local asked with alarm when I announced a trip up to Wicker Park. He wasn’t impressed by the legendary artists’ community, one of the largest in North America at that time and much improved already from when Nelson Algren lived at Evergreen and Damen and the whole area was a slum. Algren, to whom loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose: “There may be lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.” |
