Chicago’s Loop, towering over itself, can loom as imposingly cluttered as any city in the world. Trains shower sparks and blast exhaust. Busses and cabs run red lights. And we circle through revolving doors, chatter on street corners, munch and mutter over spread newspapers. It’s the Second City’s nature too protest too much, to boast of its biggest, bests and busiests, and we’re proud of the rapid pulse of our concentrated city heart. We’re proud that at the end of the 19th century, State and Madison was called the busiest corner in the world, and we tout the Chicago Board of Trade as an icon of 20th Century capitalism’s frenetic, hive-like activity. When the city experimented with becalming State Street in the 1980s by making it a pedestrian mall we deserted a thoroughfare devoid of blaring horns and swerving sedans. But though the Loop at rush hour can still be terrifyingly frenzied to both hayseeds and jetsetters, not every hour in downtown Chicago is rushed. On holiday mornings and weekend dawns of the early 21st century, the Loop can seem eerily serene. It can also be revelatory. Ride your bicycle at sun-up on Sunday and as you careen through the cavernous Loop you’ll realize Chicago’s distinctive trait is not its busyness, but how the city is shaped by open spaces: the alleys, the vantages between buildings, the boundless and vast sea of grasses grand and waving westward. The city’s skyline is most iconically photographed from the empty acres on Lake Michigan, and the next most spectacular views are from the artificial vistas of the city’s approaching expressways as they offer distant glimpses of the prairie metropolis. You can only understand the grandeur of 333 N. Wacker from across the open river, as building and water bend in gradual green arcs.
 - Andres Gursky, “Chicago Board of Trade II”, 1999
North and south along Lake Michigan, the condos and office towers cast shadows over the streets and we scamper from under them to find a patch of sunlight. But as you leave downtown and move west, Chicago opens up. When you walk the old-name streets of the West Side at dusk— Cabrini and Desplaines, Clinton and Canal— styrofoam cups and the religious insignias of the obituaries page shuffle around your feet, the yellow shadows of trees entwine with chain link fences and the skeletons of generators and transformers. Busted glass blocks on the Bays’ English Muffin bakery or the Lyon and Healy Harp factory preside beside vacant parking lots and wide sidewalks caked in glass, snow salt and carbon dust.
The overpasses at Kinzie, Roosevelt and Harrison roll out of the raised downtown and over the river, railroad tracks, and the expressway interchange, and from atop them the sky opens up for you in oranges, reds, yellows and purples. Clouds rise from smoke stacks of coal plants and candy factories, steam escapes though street grates even in June, lordly church steeples surge skyward and penitent pendentives bow beneath the clouds. Just blocks out of the Loop, on the swale of the overpasses, the streets stretch out forever, always leading west. From the city center, the angled avenues, such as Archer, Ogden and Elston (many built atop ancient Indian trails), spray out like the gold tines from the monstrance of our communal commercial center to the Chicago vulgate. |
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 - Aaron Bohrod, “Landscape Near Chicago”, 1933
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- At one time the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the city to the Mississippi River and later the Galena railroad led the way out from the city along the same route: along the portage over which all the explorers— Native American, Indian, French, Haitian, Anglican— once tugged canoes. West from the city, out of the waters, out past Palmer’s hotels and Sears’s offices, out from Montgomery Ward’s warehouses, past the Fannie May factory and Nabisco plant, the city spread as far as the eye could reach. Those waterways were obviated by the railroad, the trains made obsolete by the airlines. The prairies begat farms begat flyover, but Chicago kept its Janus status. Its airports became the country’s gateways. For decades, Midway was the busiest airport in the world, then O’Hare. Our two diagonal expressways reach out to these airports, as though demonstrating that Chicago extends west, not only to the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico, but to anywhere in the world.
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- Midway, right along the route of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, of Archer Avenue, of the Stevenson Expressway, is the commoner’s point of departure, the place where everyone and anyone can uproot themselves, take off and find a new city, a new state, new possibilities. Landing at Midway at night is a scene unlike any other. The golden Chicago street grid is lit for miles, and the neatly plotted rows of bungalows and ranch homes, lawns and cyclone fences, stretch from the Lake to the forever west. As you touch down, the city busses, the corner stores, even the uniform trashcans lined neatly in the alley, become visible. In a matter of minutes your view has narrowed from the expanse of the vast American heartland to the sprawl of one of the world’s great cities, down to the humdrum life of a West Side block club in a changing neighborhood. If airports have freed us from Indian trails, rivers, and railroads so that we leap about the planet as we please, then Midway frees us even from social hierarchy. Where else could you step our of a corner bar, stumble a few blocks into the terminal, and claim your own Southwest Airlines seat at the front of the cabin? Three hours later, you, the saloon pioneer, could find yourself in the mountains of Colorado, the deserts of Phoenix, the beaches of San Diego or the casinos of Las Vegas. If that isn’t Horace Greeley’s mandate to “Go West” made completely, democratically manifest, what is?
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 - image from http://thetransitpass.wordpress.com
One 4th of July at the turn of the millennium, I found myself standing on the edge of Midway’s hazy airfield: vast, flat and spooky. The sky at dusk was orange from summer smog and the powerful lights of trucks and tarmacs. My friend was refueling private and chartered jets at a small terminal off 63rd Street, and it was his idea that we come to the airport to watch the fireworks going off over the Southwest Side. So, at midsummer sunset, up I went in the de-icing truck bucket: five stories high in the tilting, swaying cherry picker with only a dent-riddled metal grate under me, sweat sliding from my shirt, dripping and evaporating in the gasoline fumes below. From there we could oversee the entire West Side. In every direction trees burst up from the neat bungalow parkways, and as the sky darkened the fireworks of the Southwest Side exploded above ever-extending Chicago. There were so many fireworks going off that night you couldn’t watch them all: gold, emerald, indigo haloes by the hundreds, exploding into being, collapsing, fading, every quarter of a second in every direction. And the passenger planes kept plummeting gracefully between them to the runway lines of deep blue lights.
 - photo by Alex Haugland
 - Blazingstar
I am chokingly afraid of heights and so was gripping the metal rails, the humidity and my fists seemingly dissolving the paint in my palm sweat. As the bucket titled in the wind, despite my fear I had a feeling of expanding possibility and so trepidation shook itself away and suddenly I, too, wanted to take off, wanted to float above all these tree-lined streets of gridded bungalows. From there you could just hover above block-busted Marquette Park, above the “changing” St. Bede parish, above Marshall High School, which the city barricaded with CTA busses the day Martin Luther King was shot, above the above the blue flashing lights of spied-on corners, above the descendant divisions between Oak Park and Austin, between Lawndale and Little Village, between Westchester and Bellwood.
Floating over Daley’s Stevenson Expressway, next to Santa Fe’s railroad and Archer’s canal, which all lead out to the Marquette and Joliet’s statue in the Cook County Forest Preserves, peering over all these demarcations, our bucket kept dipping forward and pitching back. Hanging over air thick with petroleum, over Texaco tankers and oil-blotched asphalt, we were elevated above the trees, just up high enough so that all the city’s imposed demarcations—viaducts, train tracks, canals and chain link faces— were invisible under the trees and fireworks. It was as though we were standing in an immense prairie field, looking out at the free space just stretching out forever, just above the grass, watching the flowers of a thousand summers bloom and fade.
Infinite scenes play out on these west-sent streets. In parks and parkways, in alleys and empty lots, over taverns’ beers and diners’ coffees, millions look back on their days and plot their nights. Fat men sway doting hands over the buffet at Bobak’s, and murmur over burbling beer. Women jab at the glass cases in heaven-white strip mall dulcerias. Lincolns wind around the corner to fetch the girls on the stoop, babies bathe in kitchen flat sinks, kids light fires behind garages, old ladies alone watch telephones and listen to the TV. Snow is shoveled; hydrants opened. A family lights a barbecue and a straggly teenager who lives with his aunt awaits the Cicero bus in the dust. The used car salesmen on Western Avenue are flicking on their kilowatt-devouring halogen lamps and parking the late models in the median. The neon is beginning to glow, the sprinklers are spraying on sidewalks, the air purples, then yellows under the green streetlamps, and the blue cop cameras flash over prairies of busted glass and concrete-growing grass, as the city, block-by-block, evolves into suburb, into exurb, into country.
Despite downtown’s fiscal busyness, it feels sometimes as though sentiment and nostalgia are what Chicago traffics in these days. During the city’s heyday after the fire to the middle of the 20th Century, the world saw in Chicago a city representative of commodities, of mechanization, of the wrangling of the wild into the manifested destiny of man. Chicago was not so much a city in progress as a city in revolution. Growth, one English writer put it in the 1880s, is much too slow a word for the transformation of a scattering of log huts into a western New York City in the space of a few years. And an Italian echoed the common sentiment at the close of that century that in ten years time Chicago was certain to become America’s first city. But that growth leveled off, and Chicago stopped revolting. In population, finance, and cultural renown New York still presides over the country, and Los Angeles follows it. Neither Midway nor O’Hare is any longer the world’s busiest airport, and Chicago’s status as America’s rail center smacks of ironic praise. Our buildings aren’t the tallest, and no matter how many museums we built our culture could never be called sophisticated. One has to wonder what the purpose of all those dreams were, of all the huge plans, of the laying of the rail yards, of the straightening and reversal of the river, of the endless building, destroying and rebuilding that Sandburg wrote about.
But when you cross an overpass, be it Kinzie, Roosevelt or Harrison, or when you drive into the sunset on the interminable streets of the West Side, or if you end up spending Independence Day in a place where your town explodes onto the great heartland of the world, you realize that Chicago can still be a symbol of relentless American dynamism, a place that evokes endless democratic possibility. Sure the stretching streets of the West Side can serve as artificial boundaries of class or race or parish or neighborhood, but in each of these thousands of hunched bungalows are lives of countless aspirations, some secret, some proclaimed. In Julys on each of these tiny blocks, someone is wildly setting off a ludicrous fireworks display. Chicago may not move as many goods and commodities as it once promised, it may not command global commerce, but it yet harbors and harvests from memory and imagination. Stories and plans still scamper through prairie lots and down empty alleys, across church basements and museum atria, in fallow factories and baseball palaces, under condo complexes and construction yards.
Perhaps this essay amounts only to untethered lyricism, or to dreamy civic boosterism, but the fact is that when you face out west, and you overlook the city itself and gape at the planes soaring over the grid, the fireworks exploding over the rigid streets, the wind itself lilting through the honey locusts of the proscribed boulevards, you can’t help but feel that sense of The West. Chicago, you realize, is essentially only a map made up of boundaries: streets and avenues, viaducts and railroad tracks, canals and expressways. These demarcations are arbitrary. These lines– what makes up the captials-and-quotes “City of Chicago,” of road repair signs and sponsored downtown parks– are built and maintained by metropolitan planners and clout mongers, motorcycle gangs and drug slingers. But that’s just artifice. From just a little bit above, you can see and sense that what is the real “Chi-caw-gou”, the “Land of the Wild Onion”, is only and will forever simply be this place’s openness, its possibility, its West-Side wildness. From just above, you can see this prairie and swamp and thicket and savanna blending together and stretching forever.
Even if you have to imagine these fields of blazingstar and bluestem and blue vervain and black-eyed susan, you can sense them under the landscape. Beneath the streets that stretch for miles west still reside acres of prairie grasses and wildflowers, growing higher than your head and exploding across the west, just like the vast, flat West Side streets of Chicago detonate in countless illicit, rowdy, terrifying and wild fireworks displays, every year, on every Independence Day. Above Chicago there is no planned city of hemmed and fenced either/ors. Chicago is wild, forever aspiring, forever ruing, still stretching out forever, in “maybe”, “I hope”, “I remember”, and “yes”. |
