“An October sort of city even in the spring. With somebody’s washing always whipping, in smoky October colors off the third-floor rear by that same wind that drives all the yellowing comic-strips down all the gutters that lead away from home.” -Nelson Algren, Nobody knows where O’Connor went, Chicago: City On the Make, 1952
I’m undertaking this eccentric essay, a birthday card which meanders along railroad tracks, gangways and alleyways, to mark the 187th anniversary of Chicago’s incorporation as a city.
Admittedly, it’s the Chicago I knew growing up decades ago. I can’t help, nor excuse, the use of the noun “town,” as it has long been described. It felt like a town or network of towns when I lived on the West Side. It’s how I percieve it when visiting again. Algren even called it a “particular patch.” Chicago is a town that has inspired wild and beautiful orations of poetry and prose. The Chicago Daily News was less charitable when reviewing Algren’s 150-plus paged prose-poem capturing the soul of Chicago. The journalist called it “an exercise in R(ant) Control.” I suppose you could make a case that Algren’s prose had its origin in Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, were further refrained in Studs Terkel’s writing and more recently rings a bit in the short fiction and poetry of the son of Polish immigrants, Stuart Dybek. The wonderful thing about Algren’s approach, apart from the magnificant writing, is it reflects a town defined by working, grime, hustling, tendencies toward graft and political corruption as all parts of the story of a city’s evolution. They are not simply works of pastoral nostalgia. In some of these works you can find bold admissions of the lack of racial and cultural equality in the city. It became a brand for cultural historian Studs Terkel who envisioned justice and equanimity in future Chicagos and Americas that otherwise fail to reckon with their history.
Like many who lived in the city, I have drawers full of love letters to the town as an object. The description of a forever October-tinged town resonates well with me. But camping more often in my heart is the sentiment I scrape from the title of Dybek’s debut short story collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980). I lived in the town long after speakeasys, hog-butchering, and the initial shaping of the city by immigrants from global communities. But, I visited a vast array of neighborhoods, in part shaped by those events, people and industries they created. For me these were ten years of a highly accelerated childhood experienced after my family moved from a more bucolic southeastern Tennessee.
I sampled the metropolis along its congested shoreline from the South Side to North Shore, and walked, biked or railed to the western suburbs, including Riverside with its unending fenceless backyards. I tramped the far West Side where we lived along the dividing lines seperating the big town from Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn. This included knocking about a long, homely and often unsafe strand of Roosevelt Road. Then, it was a strip with almost as much broken glass as sidewalk and asphalt. With my brothers I trespassed across a freight railyard just steps away from our front door at Railroad Avenue. The railway ran west to Oak Park and beyond, east through a then industrial wasteland which has been replaced by film studios and onward to the Loop. We were run off at least once, nearly catching buckshot from railyard security. In retrospect, I think my brother got a pellet in his rear.
My folks weren’t “helicopter parents,” to say the least. Wherever CTA fare and transfers would lead me, I explored, and with very little caution. An L platform atop nearby Austin Ave lead to the now famously named Blue Line. I had immediate access to low-cost solo adventures in Grant Park and the Loop. For a kid without a driver’s license I chalked up many miles and built very sturdy calves. I spent increasingly less time in this childhood neighborhood by the time I was in high school seven miles north in Irving Park. Here I developed friendships in yet another Chicago and became an early trendsetter in the art of couch-surfing.
In my “old neighborhood,” I ambled across lawns and took shortcuts through gangways or breezeways to my elementary school friends’ residences. Which takes me back to the Algren quote. I saw plenty of “third-floor rears” with laundry flapping in the wind and even envied a life among the skinny passageways ringed around these residences. We lived in a small detached house, but even-so, this felt less special then the exotic European enclaves that evolved from tenement days.
My patch of Chicago was narrow, lurking in the shadows of chimneys of a gasket factory and those three story residential blocks. The schoolrooms of the elementary school I attended mirrored the closeness of the neigborhood. The rooms housed multiple “tenants.” Two rows of desks comprised Junior High: one arranged as seventh grade and another as eighth (proctored by the same teacher). It was like a country schoolhouse. The neighborhhood was (and is) even called “The Island.” This ia as much a callback to racist redlining as it is a description of a final western particle of Chicago. A speck attached to the landscape of bungalows in the Bohemian suburbs and the wide canyon to the north called the Eisenhower Expressway. You need an express pass to the Lake in such a claustrophobic environment.
So here’s to the big town, the neighborhoods in my mind, the park like villages to the west, and vast grassland and wetlands even farther afield. I also celebrate the splendid split-personality Lake, sometimes placid, sometimes angry, and how it spit out dunes and steel plants to the south/southeast and leans into Michigan harbor towns with its broad southern paddle. I know these latter places have their own industries, personalities, and cultures, but in the neighborhood of my mind, they are extensions of my expereince of a big October town.
Image: Sourced from Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, CTA Lake B Train turning onto inner Loop at Randolph and Wells station, Chicago, IL on June 13. 1968
Wild, Abandoned 