Searching for Real

I apologize for my lack of new material. I've been taking quite a bit of time off from work lately, and my best two-paragraph output seems to come to me while walking from the train station to my office. On top of that, most of my creative energies at the moment are being channelled into a short story I'm working on for submission to The Boston Review for an upcoming fiction contest. Here's another entry from the archives. Incidentally, though I was raised in the suburbs, I'm actually a fourth-generation Chicagoan, having lived in the city for over six years before moving away in 2000.

Searching for Real
I want to connect with the past, but present won't let me--at least, not here. I read about Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, czars of the notorious First Ward, and I want so much to make the smallest and slightest of connections with their world. I know that the old vice district is long gone, but I just want to see, if nothing else, the buildings that Bathhouse and the Hink knew.

I know that the old Irish neighborhood of Connolly's Patch and the "old Levee", having been in or near what is now the Loop, have long since been obliterated. More than likely, the plots on which those neighborhoods stood have already seen two or three waves of buildings come and go. Same for Hairtrigger Block and Gambler's Alley, which have long since made way for the progress of office towers.

But somehow I held out hope for the "new Levee," at 22nd and Dearborn. I thought maybe that neighborhood had withstood the ravages of progress, and I would be able to glimpse what was once the Everleigh Club or Freiberg's dance hall. Maybe the neighborhood never got popular enough to be developed, and the ancient buildings would remain.

But I drove down there on a brief detour, only to discover 1960's-modern concrete highrises springing up from where the new Levee once stood. I probably should have expected this, having seen the once-great Coliseum--former home to the legendary First Ward Ball--reduced to a few piles of rubble years before.

I was saddened by all of this. It seems the Chicago our city fathers want us to see is limited to the glorious modern highrises of downtown. The fathers don't ever want to acknowledge that Chicago used to be a disreputable, yet oh-so-real, town. They want to present us with the gleaming towers, and the starched shirts and the silk ties, and the ridiculously whimsical Ferris Wheel at Navy Pier.

You have to go out to the neighborhoods to catch even a fleeting glimpse of Chicago as it really was, warts and all. Where people know it's possible to rejuvenate a neighborhood without demolishing and building back up. Where eccentricities live and flourish, where the shirts are rumpled and the garbage not always picked up. Where life is real.

8/18/98