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Any-Old Story
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| Maybe the myth most retold about Chicago is of its inevitability—a glance at a North American map implores a city at that spot, the nexus of a passage from the eastern seaboard deepest into the heart of the continent. The French explorers Louis Joliet and Fr. Jacques Marquette, S.J. searched the Louisiana territory in 1673 and were shown the short portage over the leek-riddled swampland between the south branch of the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River, which in turn ran to the Illinois River, to the Mississippi, and to the Gulf of Mexico, girding the French New World like a giant freeway loop. As early as 1674, Joliet envisioned a canal through the portage to complete the continental shipping line. As early as 1674, so the story goes, the then-nameless city was envisioned at this point. When Joliet drew his map of the known North America, he sat the future Chicago at the center, as if imploring future generations to build a city at the axis point of his continental graph. |
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| A geometric point is defined as an object without volume, area, or length. It is the extant thing nearest to nothing. Early descriptions of the axis point that was to be Chicago nearly approximated this geometrical definition. Gurdon Hubbard, a fur trader who traversed the portage in 1818, had this to say of the place (cited by Libby Hill in her excellent book on the river): “Those who waded through the mud frequently sank to their waist, and at times were forced to cling to the side of the boat to prevent going over their heads; after reaching the end and camping the night came the task of ridding themselves from the blood suckers.” It’s definitely not orphaned twins suckling at the she-wolf’s teat. Chicago, at its heart, is a nothing—two piddling branches of stagnant stream dribbling into a great, blue lake. There are no mountains or vistas, no fantastic features of the landscape to set Chicago apart. As Nelson Algren opens City on the Make, the book that gives this magazine its title, he describes the place thusly:”To the east were the moving waters as far as the eye would follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach. Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea. Till between the water and the wind came the marked-down derelicts with dollar signs for eyes. Looking for any old prairie portage that hadn’t yet built a jail. Beside any old second-hand sea.”
The operative words being “any old.”
In fact, for all Joliet’s certainty, the location of the Midwest’s capital was widely debated over the subsequent century and a half. After Thomas Jefferson wrested control of the continent from a cash-strapped Napoleon, one advisor was adamant the western portage be built at St. Joseph, MI. And while the Illinois General Assembly debated the location of the canal that would connect the rivers and birth the city, many wanted the waterway to meet the Calumet River, now 15 miles south of the Loop. |
| When the site for the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the city of Chicago was finally settled, in fact, the city that was built might have been any old city. Its plan was a Cartesian plane on a fortunately featureless landscape. The real-estate prospectors, supplanting both Hubbard’s blood suckers and Algren’s second-rate derelicts, drew grid after grid to flash for New York speculators. Here’s Hathaway’s map of 1834, the year the canal was approved, imagining streets and avenues. |
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| Unencumbered by geology, history, or ethics, Chicago grew through these grids as wild as the onions which once sprouted from the swamp and gave the place its name. Founded in 1833, by 1900 it was world’s fifth-largest city. Seemingly more discussed than other modern city, Chicago’s appellations piled up like the wood frame buildings that filled in the grid: The Second City. The Windy City. The City that Works. City in a Garden (That one in Latin). And, as Carl Sandburg famously said, hog-butchering, wheat-stacking, “City of the Big Shoulders.” The mythology rose as quickly as the buildings. By 1920, H.L. Mencken called Chicago the “Literary Capital of the United States.” But there seems to be little reason to romanticize this place. It is the most American of cities because it is one whose location is tied more to man’s plans than the natural space. What’s of more interest and value are the people passing through, those doing “the building, breaking, and rebuilding,” as Sandburg said.Chicago’s lone geographical feature was itself forever altered by the people’s breaking and rebuilding. In 1900 engineers, creating a second canal to supplant the I & M, reversed entirely the flow of the Chicago River, so that it now moved water and sewage away from Lake Michigan. And when the grid plan set by the first developers began to sink into the swamp, engineers simply drew a new grid, setting the city eight feet higher and turning residents’ first floors into basements. Like the wild onions sprouting out of the muck, like the letters of “I WILL,” which is Chicago’s motto, Chicago’s story is of an upward rise from nothing and over anybody in the way. |
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| Traditionally, Chicago has been called the most ethnically segregated city in the United States. Even today, within a mile of each other there’s Greek Town, Chinatown, a Little Italy, and a neighborhood named after the second largest Czech city that hosts one of the largest Mexican communities north of the Rio Grande. But these nationettes aren’t separated by tiny mountain ranges, rivers, or oceans. Instead, Chicago delineators are entirely man-fashioned: canals bubbling with the bones of dead cattle, railroad viaducts and el tracks with a history as thick with intrigue as that of any undulating border between nascent nation-states.Whether laced with lines of poetry, the marks of street battle scars, or the rigidly graphed streets that have been plotted, sunken, and laid out again, Chicago is lined and shaped by man’s demarcations, signifiers and slurs. The topic of this blog is that City, constantly redrawn; how, since 1674 and even before, man has come up in cities and stories of his own imagination; how sometimes he has drawn his own landscape, and how other times he has fallen in the cracks between the two levels of sidewalk, never to be heard from again. |
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| On Damen Avenue, near 27th Street, in the neighborhood called “Heart of Chicago,” sits a graffiti-riddled plaque to Marquette, marking the location where he and Joliet made their winter camp. From the top of the glass-covered overpass, one can look southwest and see how the I & M Canal was replaced by the Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1900. Southwest runs the canal, and alongside it run the scores of docks and ports. Southwest too run the rail lines, first the AT & SF, then tens of others. Man built Archer Avenue, the backbone of the Southside, along roughly the same route, and the first Mayor Daley built the Stevenson Expressway all the way out to St. Louis. Most recently, out the same path, man built Midway Airport. Miles and miles of decrepit factories, foundries, brick works, scrap heaps—the rubble of “building, breaking, rebuilding” stretch out that native portage. Each time, men and women remade the city, re-edified themselves over the landscape, each time the town was remade, the city rebuilt, and the myths of Chicago were re-written by Chicago poets with an eye out for the men and women doing the building and an ear listening to those gone. And at the site of Marquette and Joliet’s camp, an abandoned concrete granary rests on the canal, cloaked both in graffiti tags and a “For Auction” sign. Covered with edits, the concrete hunk awaits its own rewrite, while in its Sunday afternoon shadow, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, seagulls, and geese rest in the purple brown water under the reeds and grasses swirling in the wind and the swamp. |
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