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Power Line Sublime
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About a month ago, I was lugging two suitcases down Ashland, south from Cermak to Archer. I live nearby and have traveled this stretch—from Heart of Chicago (West Pilsen) to West Bridgeport—by car or bicycle at least five times a week, every week for the past five years, constituting more than 1,000 trips. It is familiar territory. With the exception of a pair small parks, this area is claimed by public and private industry: the Chicago Forestry Bureau and the Chicago Electricity Bureau both have warehouses here, and there is an entrance to the International Produce Market—a collection of way-station warehouses for fruits and vegetables from around the globe. On the west side of the street: the Battaglia bread trucks await their distribution orders, the blue yacht yard on the river stores sailboats through the winter. On the east: a “native species” park plot marks Marquette and Joliet and Bridgeport’s beginnings with plaques, invites truck beds hocking watermelon in the summer, and looks across at a launching deck for crew skulls beneath a section of Bridgeport cordoned off by river, canal, the Stevenson and the Orange Line. At the far southwest end of this stretch, an industrial park hosts the Sun-Times‘ printing presses, and cameras propped on the street lights monitor the entrances and exits. I could—or thought I could—recount almost every patch of weed and gravel with my eyes closed. |
| While I was trudging down Ashland this time, though, I noticed something I’d seen but not appreciated before. Right at the canal—south of the yacht yard, but north of the prairie park, giant sky-blue electrical towers stretch power lines south and west from downtown, across the bridge, then down Ashland to Archer and the Orange Line. I’d seen these towers before—seen them hundreds of times on foot, from car window, flying by maniacally on a bicycle while Ashland traffic swept carelessly around me. Perhaps because I was burdened by sixty pounds of baggage and plodding at half my usual pace, I found myself awestruck by the size of these towers. Spaced fifty or sixty yards apart, they seemed at least 12 or 15 feet in diameter at their base. Spoke-thin rungs poked in the side plotted a dizzying ascent, and the thought of climbing that far skyward made my knees week. Just south of the canal, across from the yacht-yard, a second park—this with a little path and pole-holders for fishermen—lay along the canal. At the entrance to this sliver of park, one of the electrical towers fell from the sky and planted itself in a concrete plot cordoned off by a short steel fence.
From the sidewalk, about 40 feet away, the fence didn’t make sense. I am freakishly long-legged, used to surmounting obstacles, and it occurred to me that I could easily step over this fence in stride. Even a feeble-kneed hobbit could hoist himself over it; it kept absolutely no one with an interest from climbing up the electrical tower. What’s more, by standing atop the fence and jumping, a good leaper could feasibly grab hold of the rungs and begin ascending the workman’s ladder. I resolved to see if this were indeed possible and went over to the tower in the park. |
Up close, the power lines seemed to grow. I realized that these towers were the largest things within a mile at least—this on stretch of street that includes a sailboat warehouse, semi-truck yards, two train lines (on for the El, and one for freight), and a CTA bus turnaround. Numbers welded onto the side of the tower seem to put its height at 180 feet. The fence, while slightly larger than it seemed from a distance, provided no deterrent. Any one with two functional legs could easily hop over it. A small wooden ladder leaned against the side could get you up to the rungs in fewer than 10 seconds. Its presence was puzzling.
I had an urge to go up to the tower, to make physical contact with it, and so I hopped over the fence and leaned against it. I was immediately doused with vertigo. It was as though the tower ran though the world like a pin, that the world spun around it, and that this enormous spike was the largest and most important thing on the planet—that I had to cling to it or be flung by inertia from the surface of the earth. I know that seems like an exaggeration, but it’s a sensation I’ve had before. As a freshman college student in Washington, D.C. twelve years ago, I made the obligatory spring visit to the cherry blossom festival on the National Mall. It was my first time there, so I went to all our national sites of pilgrimage: the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and the Washington Monument. In those pre-9/11 days, tourists could walk right up to the Monument, plant their backs against it, and gaze up to the sky against this mammoth obelisk. (I include an embarrassing photo here as proof and illustration.) The effect approximates what Edmund Burke described in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of the Sublime and Beautiful. David Nye, in his book, American Technological Sublime, describes Burke’s conception of the sublime as growing “out of an ecstasy of terror that filled the mind completely. The encounter with a sublime object was a healthy shock, a temporary dislocation of the sensibilities that forced the observer into mental action.” At the Washington Monument, as on 28th and Ashland, I was struck dumb in a similar way—by rapid and total sensory disorientation. I couldn’t tell what was up or down; the ground seemed to drop away and my knees went weak. I could only sense the massive size of the object and how small I was by comparison.
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| As I stepped away from the electrical tower and re-oriented myself, I started to consider this sensation and the few times I’d felt this way. (One popular way to experience this feeling in Chicago is to lean with your back against the curving Chase Tower—the tallest building in the Loop—and look up as the building seems to bend over you.) I also started to think about why I hadn’t noticed these electrical towers before—even though I encountered them almost daily. I began to realize that the purpose of the fence wasn’t to keep people from climbing up the tower, or painting it—the fence was useless toward that purpose. Instead, the purpose of the fence was to keep passers-by from approaching this tower and realizing just how impressively these structures intruded into the landscape. Even though I had passed these electrical towers more than a thousand times, at least a hundred times on foot, it hadn’t been till I was dragging luggage past them that I was forced to move slowly enough to notice that they were the largest thing within a square mile. That is why the fence was there, to discourage an intimate inspection and a true understanding of the tower’s size on a human scale. That must also be why the towers are painted baby blue: they fade into the sky and the domineering presence (one might intrusion) of infrastructure in the landscape is less pronounced.
This is, after all, an industrial stretch cut right through the city’s geographic center. Public spaces—a prairie preserve and a river walk park—have been put along Ashland in the last decade to soften this gulf between Pilsen and Bridgeport, but the land is carved out for industry: warehouses, factories, train lines and a functioning industrial canal. Even the public street lights have private security cameras perched on them like birds. And it seems the “powers that be” (if that term at all survives irony) are interested in somehow mitigating their infrastructure’s intrusion into the public domain, or at least the public’s awareness of that intrusion. And yet, in doing so, Commonwealth Edison or whoever operates these towers may very well emphasize their frightening mass.
Edmund Burke explains one relevant aspect of the sublime experience: “to make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.” With this in mind, these “hidden in plain sight” electrical towers exert a sort of impending, subconscious dread; unless we fully recognize them, even become intimate with them through touch, close inspection, or (for those less fearful of heights than I) climbing up, over, and around them. It’s only through head-on, hands-on recognition of these structures and others— such as the coal power plant on Cermak, or the concrete and stone elevators on Halsted and Chicago—by sizing their girth and heft first with our senses and then with out reason, that we may gain a sense of astonishment—astonishment we can then shed in favor of reasoned judgment about the necessity and cost of their presence in Chicago’s urban landscape. |
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| A post-script: I didn’t want to include this into the above essay itself, for fear that I was simply making a stab at the readers’ hearts amid a more fruitfully “philosophical” examination. It’s worth noting however, that the subtle attempts at camouflage apparently were effective enough to fool a great blue heron—one of the largest and rarest birds in Chicagoland. At the foot of the tower, I found this half-skeleton of a heron that had either run into the wires, or else chosen a fittingly symbolic place to spend his final moments. More pictures of the electrical towers can be found here. |
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Lastly, I should add that the use of some of language in this essay—”infrastructure” in particular—was prompted in part by an advertisement for the Version 10 Arts Festival which took place in Bridgeport this spring. I didn’t attend the festival, but you can find more about it here. |
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