What a long strange trip it has been. The original plan was for a quick in-and-out for two people over three days to catch a ball game and use up some airline credits that were in need of being used up by a certain date. Simple right. Not so much. The trip had evolved. In its final iteration there were five of us, four over eight days and one over three.
There were a couple of additional weirdnesses which can be chalked up to travel in the good ole contemporary USA. We were given the world’s largest pickup truck, a good 15% larger than the average Chicago parking space, by the car-rental company, absolutely brand-new, and were told that this was our only option. And at the end of our stay we moved from a moderately fancy hotel to an Airbnb that was a tad haphazard involving a busted bed, a replacement giant inflatable bed, no discernible toaster, and a lack of cold water in the only bathroom. The later a somewhat inverse problem relative to convention.
We covered some ground. I mainly stuck to the subway system or ‘L’ in the common vernacular to limit my interaction with the monster truck as much as possible, and I liked the Airbnb because it was located on the street on which I was raised but in a part of town where, heretofore, I had had no idea that it existed, and our particular bed wasn’t broken and there was a really nice very-large ceiling fan right there above this unbroken and plentiful bed. We also did, with some assistance and a few hours in, figure out how to make the cold water work.
As a Chi-town native who hasn’t been there much in the past ten years or so, I am pleased to report that rumors of the city’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated. If one comports oneself with some diligence and stays in a sensible neck-of-the-woods, one is just as likely to return unharmed as from any north American or European city. I was almost taken out, while on foot, by a crazed bicyclist, in his bike-lane albeit at maybe 60 mph, in the loop of all places. But I guess that could happen anywhere.
The loop, for those who might be unaware, is the heart of downtown. It is defined by a squarish loop of above-ground, above-street-level train tracks. It is the ‘elevated’ or most simply the ‘L’. It is just set back from the lake on the east, and the Chicago river on the north and the west. It was and, to a lesser extent, remains the home of the banking, legal, and financial industries servicing the middle-west, and several corporate headquarters, hotels, major governmental offices and courthouses as well as the theater district.
My impression on revisiting is that the loop is not in good shape. It had also been home to the major department stores and catalog companies and is feeling the pinch related to their closing a while ago and the general urban malaise associated with remote work and diminished downtown white-collar worker presence. This phenomena is not limited to Chicago by any means.
I’m a big fan of the remote work revolution. Why spend life locked up in an office building in a sterile part of a town or city where people are only present during working hours and also spend a large chunk of the day getting to and from that office building. It seems to me that the revolution in access to remote work is entirely due to changes in technology. It is now possible to work remotely just as easily as in an office. And in many cases the work can be done from almost anywhere. It used to be a lifestyle afforded only to various and sundry groups of workers.
Then around the turn of the last century it became common for phone-based workers for large corporations like banks and insurance companies. Prior to the Pandemic any list of companies with remote work options was led by these big employers. This was initiated by the corporations as a way of saving money on real estate, not by the workers as a way of avoiding the office. So when I hear Elon Musk questioning the morality of remote workers because other largely blue-collar workers can’t choose the option, I wonder if he has given much thought to those workers who are directed to work remotely by their employers as a matter of efficiency. I also remember that one of his primary roles is as a car salesman and killing the commute can’t be a good thing for car sales. And also that, from what I have read, he has chosen to save money on office real estate using other methods.
I do understand the complaints, largely by big city politicians and those involved or invested in urban real estate, about the toll that the absence of the office worker is taking on the big cities. I think they are legitimate. Crime and poverty abhor a vacuum. Perhaps other options like reworking malls and office buildings into residential uses might be a better solution than curtailing the progress and efficiencies brought by the technological advancement of remote work.
The area immediately surrounding the loop, the shoreline parks and museums, the Michigan avenue shopping district, the new to me ‘Riverwalk’, many of the peripheral north-side hipster, for lack of a better term, and/or upscale neighborhoods, and the youthful academic liberal ‘burb’ of Evanston all seem to be doing pretty darn well. Although my sampling of the city’s neighborhoods was fairly limited on this trip. Many neighborhoods, all of them along the lake and on the north-side, that I remembered as being dicey at best back in the 70’s now generally look like pleasant places to live. Views from the ‘L’ back in the day of disheveled wooden staircases attached to the back side of crumbling brick buildings are now replaced by fancy new staircases attached to fancy restored buildings. Balconies and backyards once strewn with junk and trash now are strewn with trendy outdoor art and barbecue grills and occasional splashy, colored patio-umbrellas.
When I first learned of the change in plans for the longer and more-involved trip I decided to go full-on flaneur for all seven days. The eighth would be a travel day. This would be where one grabs one’s camera or cameras and hits the streets with only a vague sense of direction or intent. I knew, with it being Summertime, that it would likely be hot away from the lake, so the game plan was simple. Stick to the ‘L’ or on foot, stay by the lake, maybe even occasionally get into the lake, don’t go anywhere that feels unsafe.
On arrival, ‘avoid the pickup truck at all costs’ was added to the list. Shortly thereafter, both daughters decided to go to a Beyonce concert at Soldier field, just south of the loop and on the lake. So we spent a day hanging out next to the lake on a spit of land called the Museum Campus adjacent to Soldier Field. This allowed us to investigate the option of their taking the ‘L’ to the concert the following night. All went well.
I like to research photography options before visiting a place and noting the good spots on a map. The research is usually limited to reading a few books, guidebooks in particular, and searching the internet for things like ‘Instagrammable spots Chicago’. This is not so much to direct me where to go, but more so to inform me of what is in the vicinity wherever I might be. Google MyMaps works great for this. At any point I can take a quick gander at my phone and see on Google maps where I am, what photography spots, per my research, may be right around me, and the lay of the nearby streets and the transit system including train lines and stops. It also helps me from becoming lost. Being lost, I must admit, is welcome in a place like Paris but not so much in Chicago.
Compiling your list of places worth photographing and putting it into Google MyMaps involves only opening the app on a computer or on your phone whenever a new spot enters the mind, searching for the spot by name or address in a search box on the app, giving the spot a category per one’s own category system, and assigning a color and symbol associated with the category system to the location. It is both easy and fun, and ultimately quite useful.
The MyMap I developed for this trip is included below. The train lines and stops can be seen by turning the transit layer on in Google Maps on your phone. Of course to see your location on the map it would be necessary to be in Chicago.
Visited spots included a ritzy neighborhood just north of downtown called the Gold Coast, similar to New York’s Upper East Side, Roosevelt Road and the Museum Campus on the lake just south of downtown, the Loop, the Michigan Avenue shopping district, Wrigley Field, Wrigleyville and Belmont Harbor, all on the lake on the near north-side, and the lakefill and the Northwestern University Campus in Evanston. I did the Chicago river twice. Once walking on the relatively new Riverwalk and then on an architecture-tour boat. Others also wanted to hit up the Museum of Science and Industry on the lake on the south-side, and the Chicago Botanical Gardens in Glencoe. The later was both inland and required the use of the pickup truck but was the second most productive location on the trip behind only the Chicago river.
In the Gold Coast neighborhood I did run into the new mayor of Chicago, while I was waiting for the Vice President. But the Vice President took the back entrance to leave the building so I didn’t get to see her. I didn’t go there looking for either. I just went there to take a few photos of the buildings and kept running into cops, and then many more cops, and finally a ton of cops and cops with dogs and a TV camera crew. Life is good for the informed flaneur. I had seen on television the night before that she was expected in the city for a fund raiser at someone’s home. I had no idea where and I had forgotten about it.
It was a productive week in a kind and generous and diverse city full of good people, many of whom happen to talk sort of like me. Chicago was there for me and took care of me for a long time when I needed it, even though I was a pain in the ass, and I am thankful. On hearing the rumble of the ‘L’ for the first time in a long time I smiled and I said, ‘And that is the sound of freedom’, because the village that raised me was a very big village. And that is how I got around. I did take away around 2,250 photographs of my particular village on this trip. These can be found in my photography galleries at the end of chicago usa 2 and all of chicago usa 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. A lot of the photography is a bit redundant. Sorry. Some day I will get around to cutting it all back. In the course of looking through some old Chicago photos of mine from around 2000 – 2005 I think, I ran into a bunch from northern Utah and Vancouver which were taken at around the same time. I’ve also added those to my northern utah usa 8 and 9 galleries and a new british columbia gallery.
I left with a renewed sense of why I am so fond of Paris. I’m not a fru-fru sort of fellow. In Paris I like the beauty of the city, and it is a constructed beauty. And I like the literature, the food, the wine, the brusque kindness and culture of the people, the jazz, and the history. For me there is a lot of Chicago in Paris and a lot of Paris in Chicago.
For old times sake, a dated poem I learned in elementary school, a very long time ago, in between being herded on to school buses to visit places like the Museum of Science and Industry which is not my favorite museum but a place with a coal mine, and a farm, and the Zephyr, which once ran from Chicago to San Francisco, and a u-boat which had been captured and was the source of the enigma coding devices and corresponding manuals that somebody figured out and which won World War II, or so they told me when I was just a kid:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Chicago by Carl Sandburg
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.