Chicagoland

“This is not a F**king Second City” Tom vehemently announces to me.

It is 4:23 AM.

An hour earlier my more-than-slightly-intoxicated friends had placed me safely in an Uber, attempting to send me off to the airport for my in style.  Unfortunately I am not drunk enough to have missed the Price-Per-Ride-List which waskindly posted behind the driver’s seat. $80, one way to Midway.

At the first stop light I high-tail my way out of the car. Now I sit on the steps of the ‘L’ Orange line, listening to Tom, the night-watchman of the Harold Washington Library as he tells me a bit about the history of Chicago….

Apparently the city was nicknamed the “second city” in the 1950’s in a New Yorker article written by  A. J. Liebling. It is also more commonly called the “windy city” or “chicagoland”. The former referring to the big mouthed politicians of the 1930s and the latter to the city and the nine sprawling  “burbs” which surround it.

I tell Tom I thought I did pretty well as a tourist for my first time in the city. In Millennium Park I joined thousands of tourists taking pictures in “The Peanut” and I frolicked with children at the Crown Fountain. I read on the grass while the Chicago National Symphony rehearsed in Pritzker Music Pavilion. I learned about photographic styles while visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, (Abelado Morell’s The Universe Next Door)  and took a tour through the Planetarium University of Chicago. I even found time to gawk at the Sears Tower and to waved at tourists on riverboats chugging down the Chicago River..

After telling me I did alright for a beginner, Tom tells me city didn’t always look like this. When he was growing up and The Blues were still rampant the town was dirty with non-of these “sky-hugging buildings”. The warehouses were not hotels for the homeless, but rather places which chugged out “Good American products”.

Today, the gentrification of the city is one of the things I, as a traveler find easy to appreciate about the city – from Wicker Park where my friends take me thrifting, to the lake-front bike paths- the city displays itself as a cleaner and quieter version of New York, with the better parts of Boston mixed in, such as serious public arts funding, nature preservation/enhancement and many not-too-divy-dance clubs and all around delicious restaurants…

Perhaps crossing into the realm of a hipster- I am thrilled to explore the warehouse district when visiting a friend’s art studio and to stare unabashedly at the chandelier hanging above the fire-place in another friend’s Humboldt Park home. The architectural reclamation and growth of the arts  in the city over the last ten years certainly heralds economic stimulation and an overwhelming progressions towards modernity in my eyes.

Tom, who has lived in the same home on the edge of Logan Square for over 40 years sees all this growth as a good and a bad thing. Don’t get me wrong, he says. All you white kids is sweet, but the rent goes up and things is changing all over. The area is loosing it’s old soul, what was left of it anyway. It’s being turned into something else. Crime is down. But my grandkids aren’t gonna grow up in the same town I grew up in….

4:36 AM- The train attendant unlocks the front gate to the ‘L’. I stand and shake Tom’s hand. He continues on his rounds patrolling the library block.

Feeling considerably more sober while contemplating Tom’s comments I hug my newly purchased artwork, Wolf Whistle II (by Zac Franzoni) to my chest and trudge up the metal stairs towards the the outbound train.