Copper-Colored Yesterday
Copper-Colored Yesterday
By Joseph Drogos
There are ghost corners throughout the city; drive south on Ashland and you’ll see them every eight blocks: Forty-seventh, Fifty-fifth, Sixty-third, Seventy-first, places that once were hubs of consumerism. You can see them in the sepia-toned neighborhood histories’ pictures, hundreds of people piling off street cars, hundreds of hats and jackets cluttered together at seemingly random intersections of the grid.
My mother grew up in Bridgeport but trekked south on an Ashland bus to Ninety-fifth Street to buy her prom dress, on one of the most fashionable of the grid’s convergences. Even in those days, the very last of the 1960s, living in the city generally meant living without an automobile. You took the streetcar and later the Green Limousine, to one of these nodes, where hundreds of even the most common of people tried on taffeta dresses and patent leather shoes in a finely adorned department store.
The city must have seemed like it could swallow you up at any minute, not a few blocks from an attentive tailor, a neighborhood packer, mothers toting shoes to be repaired, men strutting to the hat store, loan sharks swarming, bakers on corners, car horns and showering sparks of El lines, legs and arms and hundreds of voices. These spots are gone now. There aren’t hundreds of people piling off busses onto Sixty-third and Kedzie or other places, though cars pull into the Best Buy parking lot there; there’s room to breathe, and walking on Kedzie these days is a lonely stroll through carbon-monoxide clouds and barbed wire fences around used-car lots.
The parks are filled with ghosts, too. Marks on the grid selected seemingly at random-so well disguised was Burnham’s plan-where the grid vanishes. Like lichen growing in sidewalk niches, the penny pitcher’s pal, the parks grew in grid cracks large and small, seemingly God’s gardens clamoring out of the cement, Horti ex rbe, gardens escaping the city.
There are massive natural landscapes such as Marquette, Garfield, and Humboldt Parks, with prairies and ponds, dragonflies holding sway over lands large enough to host their own neighborhoods and proud enough to lend their name to the communities that surround them. And there are tiny lots stuck in vacant spaces on the gird, like Arrigo Park, set on a block between housing projects and hundred-year-old town homes, landscaped with hills and fences, a natural divide while the gilded doors of nearby St. Francis Church are shuttered by man. And even tinier places, like Miller Playlot, tucked in some extension of an alley, or the fenced-off doglot under the Dan Ryan on-ramps on the West Side. And the entire lakefront, a great green stretch interrupted only by the mile or so of downtown and the river’s entrance into the city.
These places, too, once drew people by the thousands. Back before air conditioning, our city let people escape the summer by sleeping in the parks at night, so I was told. When city life became too much, the hordes of the slums could escape to tiny isles of nature in Dvorak, Mark White, and Sherman Parks.
The parks mark the most liberal of our aspirations. “Here is found a true art that is grown out of the soil and the heart of those people,” Jens Jensen said, “They belong! They fit! . . . Who can say but that in the event of time a great leader might grow out of such environment, as the thought of beauty developed from generation to generation in the soul of the people who lived there, until it came to fulfillment in some form or another, just as the great tree of the forest is an expression of all the trees surrounding it, its friends and companions that contributed their share towards its growth.”
It was Jensen who created many of these open places, the overgrown spots on the grid. He created Garfield Park and its conservatory, the haystack shape meant to imitate the landscape west of the city. He fashioned rivers and meadows for the West-Side poor, so that the bustling sons of the stockyards and the factory both could find respite, find a limestone-lined pool directly from the fantasies of an Eakins oil painting. It was Jensen who first planned the forest preserves, lining the city with natural spaces for deer and heron. And situated in them are his council rings, circles of stone benches whereby the men and women of the city might sit as equals to share stories, discussion, and contemplation.
Jensen himself grew out of the city, a Danish immigrant who started with the park district as a common laborer, taking wagons to the countryside to collect wildflowers and planting them in Union Park, bringing the prairie into the city. Giving the Bohunks and Poles their first real scene of American wildflowers. An American agricultural Assisi.
And while Jensen sought to grow great men from the soil, Lorado Taft placed great men in stone, copper, concrete, and bronze among the populace. What a sight it must have been, when at the turn of the century, Taft, a student of Paris, presented a fountain on Michigan Avenue of gentle ladies awash in water. Presenting to the business captains and beggars alike an image of the Great Lakes as our most refined selves, with water entangling the natural forms with lines of grace. He would dream of populating Jensen’s glens with sculpture, so that “every small park and playground might have its kindly genius of the spot. . . . One’s affections will gradually entwine these gracious symbols and serve to make happy memories more vivid.” So that Jensen’s conservatory in Garfield Park is today visited by marble genii with names such as Idyll, caressing and dressing each other in garlands, entwining themselves with your memories and his dreams.
And yet he must have known-working in the civic leaders’ park system-that man, predisposed as he is to villainy, soon sheds tears. And so across the doorstep of Washington Park march the sadly determined faces of the Fountain of Time, a hundred concrete faces who trod inexorably onward, tearing their hair and clutching each other as they approach their end, while Father Time, cloaked, stands and speculates from a distance.
From the car window of my youngest days was a Chicago that seemed to be monumentalized everywhere, the green bronze statues spread throughout the parks were relics of it, the field houses their palaces, the city where our series of benevolent dictators granted the people vast expanses to civilize themselves. We were gifted with the ability to move freely, never more than four blocks from a bus line. The buses were the same green as the sculptures, which was the same green of the illuminating arc lamps. And in that light, I’d thought the statues of Lorado Taft scattered throughout the city were the suspended remnants of the past. But these are faded monuments, uncompleted.
At one end of the Hyde Park Midway, Taft’s Fountain of Time shows a cloaked Time watching us in a stumbled march. The concrete of the fountain erodes, the basin dries up, the kids that used to have splash fights at the foot of this image of our mortality are toweled off and gone away. In what I thought were the last eye-rubbing moments before the city grew up, I had imagined these parks to be our Periclean project, these commercial centers with adorned facades to be Chicago’s former agoras. But Taft had meant for a Fountain of Creation to be presented at the other end of the Midway, naked maidens rising out of the city, not monuments to the past, but novelty as well as nostalgia. He died before he could finish it. And time didn’t pass Taft by, as the standard story goes. Time stayed, Taft went. In fact, the silver-colored yesterday never was.
It’s the same for Burnham’s plan; never built, never finished. There is no grand lagoon connecting Jackson Park to the downtown for a Sunday on La grande jette de les ordures ont refusé. And we can weep or we can cluck our tongues, move away or vote anti-machine when we see some black mother tossing garbage from car window into the parks with the refuse-excuse, “I’m giving somebody a job.” And we can imagine the oxidizing copper-colored streaks on Taft’s Fountain of the Great Lakes is the Grand Dame, Lake Michigan herself, weeping at the paint-peeling off the South Shore Country Club’s ballroom walls, now opened for proletarian use. We can imagine the Second Paris’s seconds ticking away. And we can shake our heads slowly at the neglect Sherman Park has received ever since the boulevard running through the Back of Sherman’s Yards was no longer occupied by people who looked like Sherman. And we can blame the Gangster Disciples of our sludge-covered Saturday nights for terrorizing bodice-clad, boulevard-strolling ladies from vanished afternoons of the white city past. We can even lament the lost city’s sinister sons, because we remember them as the picaresque siblings of the city’s saviors. We imagine the city of tumultuous barebacked shoveling, of thumbs in the meat grinder, of rubes from the prairie seduced under arc lamps, and we imagine Sherwood Anderson bumping into Vachel Lindsay in a Louis Sullivan skyscraper’s atrium on grand old Michigan Avenue.
We become as unconnected to the world as the Pullman town pamphleteer, an old ninny who nattered the year after the strike, “The history of civilizations exhibits a steady growth and progress of the masses of the human race to higher levels, and in showing to the world that the interests of capital can be amply provided for while operatives, more largely than before, are made sharers in the results of good work.” We sound like the wife of Pullman herself, speaking to her diary of Pullman’s Arcade, the world’s first mall: “It was in the Arcade that people congregated to shop [and] make use of various conditions contained in the great building. . . . [It was] the animated scene of dozens of people occupied in their pursuits or gathering in groups to talk in friendly gossip.” But these places never were. And fact is the more we misplace our nostalgia, the more we find ourselves displaced in a city remade by out-of-towners, subject to their indifferent machinery-just breezes through the tower cranes or echoes of a pile driver’s persistent pangs.
