Breeding Chicory

http://wildeherb.com/2008/08/21/chicory-blossoms-decorate-country-roads-with-sky-blue-wild-flowers/

I am worried about the shuttering of my own optimism. It is late spring in Chicago, chicory and queen anne’s lace spring from every curbside after a rare rain, the White Sox are in first place, and I’m nonetheless resolutely gloomy. I am in despair over the closing of a restaurant. I know it is childish and conceited. There are, after all, other things to care about: elections and economic injustice, poverty, and the scores of people who will become the victims of gun violence during the hot Chicago summer. While I, my brother, and my mother have found work, my dad is still unemployed from 2008’s corporate revitalization. But it is the closing of a restaurant, and what it means, that has me grumbling out of bed with dismay, from April through the start of summer. I’m going to be honest and choose not to evade my stupid preciousness; this is how I feel.

This began in the last throes of winter. A development group had arranged to tear down the Evergreen Golf and Country Club, which acted as much as haunted dale as a golf course at 91st and Western Avenue. The city surrounded the golf course, bordering it on the north and south, and stretching west of it on both the north and south sides. Evergreen Country Club was run and owned by Babe Ahern, who lived her entire life on the course itself before dying at 103, her wooden bungalow laded like a creaking hull heavy with relics, including a gun belonging to the mastermind of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, who was also the course pro. The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times both ran stories on the massive auction of Ahern’s possessions, among them a nude portrait of Ahern herself.

Right up until her death, Ahern’s dogs scrambled up and down the hills and trees of this old public golf course. (The “country club” title was only a conceit.) Though Bobby Jones helped her design it, the ragged Evergreen was laid out by nature. It resided more or less at the entrance to Beverly, up the tallest hill in Chicago, amid 10,000-year-old sand dunes where the melting glaciers made the original shores of the Great Lakes. The ridge is now home to the Dan Ryan Woods forest preserve, the exclusive Beverly Country Club, and what used to be the Evergreen Golf and Country Club. When you drive down Western Avenue, through used car lots delineated by chain-link fencing, amid the base-rattling American sedans, truck exhaust, swirling debris and the radiant pavement heat, the climb up this hill through a canopy of woods and golf-course grass becomes the most refreshing point in the city. The temperature drops ten degrees. A breeze seeps through the old oaks of the Cook County Forest Preserve and the old oaks of the golf courses. Cattails and reeds cluster over busted up and rare sidewalks and — from April through August– the violet buttons on green shoots of chicory, the white doilies of queen anne’s lace spring around the roadside. What I am trying to convey is that this was not so much a golf course as a gateway into the wild– a tamed wild, a sort of simulacrum of the bucolic countryside. Just up on the ridge, amid the deep green of these huddled tree canopies, for instance, you can see the 1930s neon sign and orange stucco of the Rainbow Cone building, with its Palmer House flavor, and structure seeming to suit long slungback sedans, whitewall tires and gravel roads. Do you see this area? It’s a little stretch seemingly forgotten by time, trapped in the 1930s, like the antique cottage on the golf course. Ninety-first Street sneaks out from north Beverly and Chicago west between the two golf courses and into Evergreen Park. There was no sidewalk on the road, so as children we’d walk down the street, past an ancient pond on Evergreen that brimmed with geese. In the winter, we’d find places to pry the chain link fence up, sneak inside, and sled down the hills amid trees on the golf course. The back of the golf course, especially, the Evergreen Park side, was covered in remnant hills, just as the Dan Ryan woods are. When we were very little– in the eighties and early nineties– the golf course itself was bordered on the south by a vast prairie lot, a grassy expanse that expanded to 95th Street and surrounded a bank on the corner of 95th and Western. The prairie, too, was a favorite place for illicit explorations. Sometime in my early teenage years, though, a developer brought in a Sam’s Club and a few other shitty discount stores such as Party City, and began to block in Evergreen. When I was a kid, the golf course was ratty and shaggy, offering $15 early-bird rates (later $25) on a 1950’s style painted sign before its gravel driveway. It was as mysterious as the woods, perhaps more so because it was just as wild, but fenced in, too. We were not supposed to be there. On the course grounds, across Western and thus just in Evergreen Park, was a shaded tavern that serviced the otherwise dry neighborhood of North Beverly. And somewhere on the lot, in a cluttered, shuttered bungalow, lived surprisingly spry, possibly senile lady who was older than the oaks themselves. Do you understand yet, that this was not just a golf course, but something supremely mysterious and weird?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/06/chicago-beat-cops-share-t_n_891164.html

So, when Ahern got up in years– she was hovering around 100– she began to look to sell her family legacy. For some reason– perhaps greed (though she apparently had no close heirs), perhaps bitterness over some long-ago grudge– she refused to offer the property to the city of Evergreen Park, who wanted to buy it at a fair price, and instead sold it a discount rate to the developer who planned to put in a Meijer and a Menards and a pile of other retail stores. (The mayor of Evergreen Park insists that some of the site will be saved “for a park or some kind of green space or something,” though he also said, “Trees don’t pay the bills.”)

I was crushed. There was nothing to do about it. The old woman wanted to sell her land, and for whatever reason she had settled on building discount hardware and dry and frozen good warehouses on her beloved property. The people of Beverly– a white middle and upper class neighborhood I grew up in — made their usual tardy, smug and ineffectual noise, putting up yard signs that smarmily rhymed, “If they chop, I won’t shop,” though it was clear that the developers weren’t marketing Meijer to the folks who had bought into what had been an undulant, ancient-oak and large lawn recreation of a country village on the far Southside. If they had stones that at all resembled the limestone slabs surrounding their gardens, the 5-bedroom-Tudor-tending biddies of Beverly would have long ago began collecting cash to buy the property, would have petitioned the aldermen, the Cook County commissioner, would have seen to it that the property became a part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District. After all, this is a neighborhood that in recent years has been the home to the Chicago Fire Commissioner, the Cook County Sheriff, the chief of the Chicago schools. The Rotary was founded there, and the founders of the Montgomery Ward and the first president of the Art Institute lived there. It was a neighborhood that didn’t need clout because it was the clout. But the neighbors stalled and in the end resorted to smug lawn signs. Sigh.
And I know, I could have done more, but I didn’t. In this strange-weathered spring, at first absurdly warm, and then cold again, a spring when the may apples came up ugly in the Dan Ryan woods, and the trillium seemed not to come up at all, the bulldozers and cranes went about their work with inevitable certainty. In order to be ready for construction season, for new buildings to rise, the trees and the ancient sand dunes and the age-old, or at least century-old pond had to be filled or flattened. The earth had to be made ready for the rising of a new shopping center. By June, the entire lot was leveled and denuded. There are no ponds, there are no secret little berm valleys where you might find a ditched case of beer, there are no swans, no chicory, no queen anne’s lace. There are no fucking trees. It’s a flat, brown waste, crossed by excavating equipment. It is the most depressing site it could possibly be until it becomes a Menards. My mother, who came from the hard neighborhood of Bridgeport to raise us in Beverly, who was never sewn into the Beverly yenta, who never played golf in her life, my mother cannot go by the site because she cries every time she sees it.

In August 2012

In Richard Manning’s book Grassland–which is a popular explanation of the importance and scope of the biome that stretched, essentially, from the shores of Lake Michigan to the Rocky Mountains, from the time of the glaciers to 1800s– he describes essentially the difference between a prairie, savanna, or grassland, and the wheat, soy, or corn fields that took its place. A prairie is a mature grassland, he argues, one in which dominant species have– sometimes to the ratio of as many as 20 to 50 per square yard– been surrounded and balanced by other species of wildflowers and grasses. That bountiful balance is the primary characteristic of a mature, stable biome. By contrast, a field of corn or wheat is essentially grassland kept– through the manipulation of seeding, tilling, and chemical control– in a perpetual state of immaturity. The land is turned over so one simple species can grow quickly, so its roots can blast through the soil. Right now, flattened, rutted with the tire tracks of heavy equipment, the ancient ridges of the Evergreen Golf and Country Club most resemble a plowed field, an immature ecosystem waiting for the absurd thrust of new, cheap retail construction. I’m sure they will rise faster even than the golf course came down.

I simultaneously saw this same process take place, though in a fashion less ecologically destructive, I suppose. This same winter, some vacant acreage on the near west side made the same transition. It too was plowed up, this time to sow a Costco in its place. The lots, between Roosevelt Road, the 16th street viaduct, Ashland and Damen, had been made vacant by the removal of public housing– and other buildings– a few years back. Three or four remnant homes remain, as do the streets, but most of the land was green grass, trees, and the odd rusted chain link fence. The CTA Pink Line tracks roar over this spot– a few single family homes sit amid deserted streets; rabbit fields; a patch of rotting garden tresses, cracked ashphalt paths, and plastic flowers called “Gesthemene Garden;” and a plethora of parking meters installed two years ago. I’ve seen coyotes in these vacant lots, rabbits, a variety of native prairie plants. Kids practice baseball and soccer there. Trees that had grown to envelop chain link fences entirely still stood even though neither the fences nor the houses they surrounded still existed. My summer mornings or midnights spent running on the empty streets next to an exchange where the rail lines unloaded to semi trucks, would even reveal city dwellers camping on the vacant lots on hot days amid thousands of dandelions and catalpa trees’ flower bundles, which look like ice cream sundaes dropped into the bowers from a great height. In runner’s hallucinations, I used to fantasize that, since the south end of these vacant lots was bordered mostly by the viaduct which had been mostly gated off from west Pilsen and Heart of Chicago, that some kind-hearted mayor would see fit to surround these lots with an unbreachable fence and to create a small savanna preserve there. So, then, riders of the Pink Line could peer down at tall grass prairie, deer, elk, a mountain lion or two. I had already seen the coyotes and the campers! But the plans for the Costco had probably already been drawn up. It was disheartening, of course, for the sight of my most imaginative flights of fancy to become the least imaginative place imaginable.

http://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/mickelberrys-restaurant-2300-west-95th/

As every spring moves to every summer, the roadsides and the busted up sidewalks, the vacant lots which city kids called prairies, the places where buildings have been torn down and which are inhabited only by memory, will be further eroded by the growth of white doilies of queen anne’s lace, by the violet buttons of chicory. The street, the lots, the buildings and our memories will continue to erode. Roger Ebert, in his autobiography, lamented the “brutal corporate leg-lifting” that has moved Olympic organizers to destroy neighborhoods of London he has visited every year of his adult life. “What gnaws at people until they are driven to destroy the past?” Ebert asked. And thoughts such as Ebert’s have driven me– all spring and summer– to depression, listlessness, apathy. But perhaps, as Annie Dillard suggests, cruel fecundity is inevitable. What’s more, perhaps our memories are as overrun with growth as the present moment, and this growth is far more diverse, more balanced than we think at first glance. In his book, Ebert mentions as an aside driving the four or five hours from Urbana to Mickelberry’s Log Cabin for dinner with his dad. I hadn’t known of Mickelberry’s, but through the internet found old postcards of it sitting there, a southern-style banquet hall, surrounded by elms and oaks, right on 95th and Western, right across from oak-ancient Babe Ahern, nestled amid 10,000 year-old sand dunes. And because of Ebert’s off-hand memory that place — which is home to a Sam’s Club and a Target and a few strip malls– has become more bountifully balanced in my mind. Like a prairie grassland, the landscape grows richer, more mature, by the great number of things living in such a small place of my memory and imagination. While this knowledge of the wilder, more diverse growth in my mind doesn’t excuse the morbid fecundity of what Ebert calls the desire of “corporate vandals” to plow up the land and sow homogenous seeds, I am now at least able to explore with some hope the ever-fecund city. “I am the grass,” Carl Sandburg transcribed for the prairie of our cities and neighborhoods, our memories and imaginations, “I cover all.”