“Are you taking me to the ghetto?” Valerie won’t stop asking me this.
I try to assure her that no, South Side does not always mean terrifying and no, I wouldn’t even think of making her walk through any area I considered dangerous. In reality this statement is only half-true, as I am only vaguely aware of exactly where we’re going.
The plan was for us to walk the length of Archer Avenue, from State Street at its northeast end to Midway Airport at the southwest. Part of this stemmed from her practical need to train for a 40-mile fundraising walk, but most of it was out of my own simple ingrained desire to see the other parts of this hateful city people like she and I call home, the parts away from the tacky bars I keep going back to and the useless stores that never have anything I need but plenty I’ll buy anyway.
Valerie’s agreement to go along in all of this is inherently a big deal to both of us. For starters, she swears by the North Side and in Chicago, once you swear an allegiance you’re kind of stuck. If you consider yourself a North Sider, then the South Side to you is basically the other city. The one that’s never on the news for any good reason. The one with all the vacant lots and the neighborhoods no one’s ever heard of. The one where the White Sox play.
Of course, this works both ways. To the South Sider, the North Side is nothing more than a playground for vapid yuppies to overexaggerate their non-existent problems, a glorified suburb broken up only by ‘L’ stops whose names the great Stuart Dybek so brilliantly compared to the last names of butlers: Morse, Granville, Belmont. You get the idea.
These assumptions are both patently false and could only take root in the kind of three-block-radius tunnel vision Chicago thrives on. Truth be told, there’s not much difference between the run-down ghettos on the South Side and the run-down ghettos on the North Side, nor does either side of town show any more class, restraint or equality when it’s time for developers to stage a good old-fashioned land grab in hopes of hitting three-flat pay dirt.
The idea was to watch the city evolve over the course of any of its major interior roads, to let the neighborhoods rise and fall and rise again, all under the same umbrella. For better or worse, this is still the city we live in and we might as well see as much of it as we can.
I suspect Valerie had different ideas when I first told her the plan. Perhaps she’d imagined we’d stroll (and shop) the relentless luxury of Sheffield Avenue, or size up a potential new home for her amidst the middle-class usefulness of Addison Street.
“No, I’m thinking of doing Archer.”
“Where’s Archer?”
“South Side. We’re walking to the airport.”
“South Side? Are you taking me to the ghetto?”
After months of mildly confrontational negotiations we finally found a day that would work for both of us. We chose a Sunday, we two ready to face these strange new lands armed with varying degrees of hangover and our own reasons for following this road to the edge of the world.
II: Partially-True Romance on the Near South Side
We were maybe thirty seconds into our little adventure at the corner of Cermak and State when we first found company. He was maybe in his mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell through all the dirt and grime on his face, hands, and sweatshirt.
“Excuse me, sir, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course,” I tell him, leaving out the part where I knew exactly where this was going.
“Let me just say – and I mean no disrespect – that she is a beautiful lady,” he says, motioning to Valerie. “You, sir, you should marry someone with such pretty eyes.”
She smiles at this, and I couldn’t help but chuckle a little to myself as well. Not that he was wrong about Valerie, but if he knows of any girl that wants to walk through that particular stretch of State Street I would die to meet her. But alas I have not and Valerie, as she so often does, has gracefully stood in for this imaginary person. Someday I will thank her for this, but not today. Today I will just tell this stranger in need that I have nothing to give him.
Moving north on State to the head of Archer Avenue, we stop to photograph the beginning of our little trip. One block back, gutted housing projects stared down anyone bold enough to enter the invisible border around the neighborhood, but just these few steps away we’re looking up at brand new banks and boutique shops. Condominiums-to-be announce their arrival on half-empty lots and gorgeous empty buildings.
“Who are they trying to sell these to?” I wonder aloud.
“Us?” Valerie proposes. Of course. And to the casual observer, we probably fit the bill of the young couple looking to invest: matching fleece pullovers, slight north suburban vocal inflections, confused looks at every street corner we came to. Two blocks in and already real estate developers are passively courting us newlyweds. Perhaps this would not be such a bad afternoon.
III: Forget it, Jake
While most immigrants in the late 19th century were moving westward, the Chinese came east from California as race-based discrimination took hold of the tightening railroad construction job market. Most originally settled in the corner of the Loop near Clark and Harrison Streets, but the downtown development priced many residents out of the neighborhood and down to the area near the intersection of Cermak and Wentworth Roads, forming what is now known as Chinatown.
With time, the Chicago Chinese population grew 5,300 percent, from 600 in 1890 to 32,187 in 2000. Chinatown proper claims near 11,000 of these residents, although estimates vary on the “true” population of both the community and the neighborhood. The Nine Dragon Wall outside of Chinatown Square plaza welcomes visitors, and the annual Chinese New Year parade remains one of the city’s most popular cultural events. Celebrants don traditional Chinese attire while fireworks light up the sky and a 100-foot dragon dances through the streets. You can get a hell of a meal here – Szechwan, Cantonese, Hunan, you name it – and you can also get a hell of a deal on bootleg fashions and electronics if you know where to look. Down here in the shadow of the Red Line, the far corner of the world is anyone’s for the taking.
And despite all of this interesting history and only-kind-in-the-world entertainment, Valerie has never been to Chinatown. Ever. I tell her this needs to change, and soon. She agrees.
IV: State Trooper Knocking in the Middle of the Night
If you ever wreck your car near the Stevenson/Dan Ryan interchange, don’t bother pulling off the highway to assess the damage, as the city or state or whoever has rendered the investigation sites all entirely useless by design. For one thing, there’s no off-ramp from either interstate to the lots below on Archer. For another, the lots all have six-inch tall curbs, likely impeding the approach of any newly-crushed vehicle.
“So how are you supposed to check everything out?” Valerie asks.
“I don’t know.”
“What if your tires are flat?” she continues. “What if your ground thingys are hanging down, or your tail end got smashed and is dragging on the pavement?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat.
“Reilly, what the hell is going on down here?”
My answer stays the same.
V: Where the Streets Have No Aim
Farrell. Lock. Broad. Bonfield. She’s never heard of any of these streets, and neither have I, but that’s not why they’ve got our attention. It’s not the potholes, nor the weird graffiti nor the general noisiness of the traffic around us that make us take notice. What we see are streets that begin 50 feet to our left, but then end abruptly 30 feet to our right, all split by a concrete wall in Archer’s middle lane or feeding into a gravel road with no way in besides through a chain-link fence and guarded by signs issuing perilous threats to anyone who would dare enter.
The tiny stretches of navigable road all house one building at best, some totally empty, and quite a few with a small line of cars parked in front of nothing in particular. Never in either of our lives have we been so perplexed by so much of so little. With literally nowhere else to turn, we press on to the south and west.
VI: A Real Fine Place
Valerie says she needs some kind of caffeine. “Do you think we’ll find a Starbucks or a Caribou down here?”
I try to forcibly contain my laughter, ultimately failing. “Are you serious? Do you know where we are?”
“So what?” she asks. “People drink coffee on the South Side too, you know.”
“Not for $5 a cup,” I inform her.
“Well, I would if there was one.”
“But there isn’t one,” I say.
“Well,” she retorts, “maybe I don’t live here because there aren’t any Starbucks or Caribous.”
“Or,” I tell her, “maybe there aren’t any Starbucks or Caribous because you don’t live here.”
She informs me that all three of her apartments have been within an extremely short walking distance of either of those venues. I want to laugh, but the realization sets in that part of the reason chain coffee houses have become so big is exactly what she just described: they’re all close to where people live, so people get used to living close to them. Seeing them as a reliable amenity rather than a convenience, it becomes something to look for when considering a new dwelling place:
FOR RENT: 2bd/1bth, close to trains, buses, Starbucks, w/d in bldg, must see!
We find the strip mall at Ashland Avenue, but alas no coffee houses with it. “There’s a Dunkin Donuts,” I say.
“No,” she sighs, “that won’t do. I’ll just go without.”
Pressing on, I am confronted by a vague answer as to why I am friends with this girl. Okay, there are the obvious things. She’s smart, and fun, and tends to carry the same schedule of social activities as I do, but on some other level I think she has this same sense of steadfast obligation to seemingly inane yet personally important quasi-rituals.
I won’t eat fruits or vegetables; she only drinks coffee from Starbucks or Caribou. I hang out in any of six shitty bars; she hangs out in any of six different shitty bars. I swear a lot; she swears a lot, but has different favorite choice words. We are both creatures of frivolous habit and of our own bizarre definitions of loyalty, and I now realize why it is she walking across the city with me as opposed to, say, anyone else. Someday I will mention this to her, but not today.
VII: Courier
In 1920, 35-year-old Jacob Yanovitz worked as a bank messenger for the Southwest Trust and Savings Bank. At 3pm, October 29, Yanovitz and patrolman John Leonard were under the railroad viaduct at Ashland Avenue and 15th Street with $54,500 in currency to take back to the bank. Southwest Trust and Savings is at the intersection of Archer, 35th Street, and Hoyne Avenue, a mere 2.4 miles from the train depot. Three men appeared with guns, taking the money but not before fatally wounding Yanovitz with two bullets, one to the chest and one to the right arm.
This is the kind of thing you imagine when you look at an abandoned bank, or really any vacant monstrosity like the one that used to be the Southwest. Chicago is littered with places like this, these theaters and schools and churches and factories that were once the center of so many people’s lives and are now just hollow reminders of what was and what wasn’t. Rather than stop to pontificate on the fleeting nature of civic prominence, we instead find a Walgreens to get something to drink. Valerie is still pretty hung over and I, sadly, still am as well.
VIII: Kitten
Netty’s Furniture, just south of Pershing Road in Brighton Park, is closed Sundays, but for some reason a cat is playing in the front window as we walk past. Valerie, always a sucker for anything even remotely playful or endearing, is immediately in love.
“Hi kitty! Hi kitty!” She puts her hand to the window and the cat reaches back out to her, rolling over and making that face cats make to convince humans they’re not hateful selfish monsters but instead just a harmless lesser species entitled to total dominance of your home.
“It’s so cute! Reilly, come look at it!”
“I see it.” Cats are not my favorite things. I am not sure if she knows this.
“Reilly! Look at it!” The animal has her under its demon feline spell. “Hi! Hi! You are so adorable!”
I don’t have the heart to tell her it probably couldn’t hear her through the window. “Val, let’s go.”
Stepping away from the store and the cat, she makes sure to keep waving and smiling at the animal as we press forward once more. It reaches for her as she left; she reaches back. I still think cats are stupid, but the moment isn’t lost on me.
“Why are all the stores closed today?” she asks.
“What?”
“Why are the stores closed? It’s the weekend, that’s when people go shopping for things like furniture.”
“This really bothers you?”
“I just don’t get it,” she continues. “Wouldn’t you want to be open when people are looking to buy what you’re selling?”
“Okay, let me see if I have this straight. You just bonded with a strange and random housecat through the front window of a closed furniture store. You’re not even remotely thrown off by a cat hanging out in an empty store, but you are bothered by the fact the owners might want Sundays off?”
She pauses for a moment. “Reilly, you don’t get it. That cat was just too cute.”
Of course. How silly of me.
IX: There Can Be Only One
The Polish Highlanders Alliance of America keeps headquarters in a chalet-style hall just south of 48th Street. The group acts as a sort of cultural anchor for immigrants from southern Poland, northern Romania, northern Slovakia, and parts of the Czech Republic, providing news from back home and around the country through The Podhalan Weekly and The Highlander Chronicle newspapers, as well as through the airwaves on WPNA-AM. Constructed in 1929, the headquarters, better known as the “Highlander Home” (and even more well-known as “Dom Podhalan” in Polish) is considered the nexus of Chicago’s Goral community.
As we pass it, Valerie announces “My friend would be so proud of me.”
“For walking ten miles?”
“No, for seeing all this Polish stuff.”
I don’t get it. “Why would that matter?”
“Because she’s Polish,” she explains, “and she goes to a lot of Polish things.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“And she’s been to Poland,” she continues, “and she’s really nice. She’s probably my nicest friend.”
I’ve met a lot of Valerie’s friends, and I sort of remember this Polish girl as being nice, but it strikes me as odd that it’s six miles and the better part of three hours before anything we’re doing or seeing reminds her of anyone else she knows in this world. She has gone that far from anything familiar, recognizable, or even reminiscent of what she calls “normal” or “home,” all so I could say I did something interesting and that I didn’t do it alone. Someday I will tell her how much this means to me.
X: Travel Tips from Andrew
At the intersection of Archer and Cicero Avenues, where Chicago briefly ends before beginning again just a few blocks later, I tell her to stop.
“What is it? Are you okay?”
We’re there, I tell her.
“This is it?” This is it.
“But the road keeps going,” she points out. Yes, but it’s out of city limits for a few blocks. We’re at the first and, for our purposes, last end of the road.
“This is like where a movie just ends without warning,” she says, and I agree.
After all that, standing on this unremarkable street corner seems so anticlimactic. The restaurant at this intersection is closed; the only traffic is in the direction of Midway Airport just down the road.
Valerie points out some neat pictures to take, and I turn to capture the street signs as proof that we’d made it. The first shot of ARCHER AVE 5200 S comes through, flanked on either side by stoplights and an American flag, and no sooner do we bask in all this patriotic Southwest Side splendor than the battery in my camera dies. None of the stores nearby are open, so in a sense we’d come all this way to document the existence of an otherwise nondescript intersection neither of us will likely ever see again.
Under normal circumstances, this should break our hearts, but under normal circumstances we’re not walking ten miles down one road through a major city for no good reason. Under normal circumstances, window displays of empty stores don’t come alive, streets we’ve never heard of don’t all lead to nowhere, and my beautiful non-existent girlfriend isn’t totally psyched to go hang out in strange new places.
We shrug at the irony and head to the ‘L’, its ride away from the sunset showing us the other side of the places and things we had spent the day looking at and looking for. On the train we were just two people heading home from the airport, but on that lifeless street that rolled on towards an endless horizon, I was rich and she was the object of every man’s affection. Really nice people became long-lost friends, banks lived forever without money, pictures were better not taken and coffee was the stuff good homes were made of. For one gray afternoon on the South Side of Chicago, life was entirely strange and strangely wonderful. I went home and slept.
Arc/Her
I: On the Sunday of Life
“Are you taking me to the ghetto?” Valerie won’t stop asking me this.
I try to assure her that no, South Side does not always mean terrifying and no, I wouldn’t even think of making her walk through any area I considered dangerous. In reality this statement is only half-true, as I am only vaguely aware of exactly where we’re going.
The plan was for us to walk the length of Archer Avenue, from State Street at its northeast end to Midway Airport at the southwest. Part of this stemmed from her practical need to train for a 40-mile fundraising walk, but most of it was out of my own simple ingrained desire to see the other parts of this hateful city people like she and I call home, the parts away from the tacky bars I keep going back to and the useless stores that never have anything I need but plenty I’ll buy anyway.
Valerie’s agreement to go along in all of this is inherently a big deal to both of us. For starters, she swears by the North Side and in Chicago, once you swear an allegiance you’re kind of stuck. If you consider yourself a North Sider, then the South Side to you is basically the other city. The one that’s never on the news for any good reason. The one with all the vacant lots and the neighborhoods no one’s ever heard of. The one where the White Sox play.
Of course, this works both ways. To the South Sider, the North Side is nothing more than a playground for vapid yuppies to overexaggerate their non-existent problems, a glorified suburb broken up only by ‘L’ stops whose names the great Stuart Dybek so brilliantly compared to the last names of butlers: Morse, Granville, Belmont. You get the idea.
These assumptions are both patently false and could only take root in the kind of three-block-radius tunnel vision Chicago thrives on. Truth be told, there’s not much difference between the run-down ghettos on the South Side and the run-down ghettos on the North Side, nor does either side of town show any more class, restraint or equality when it’s time for developers to stage a good old-fashioned land grab in hopes of hitting three-flat pay dirt.
The idea was to watch the city evolve over the course of any of its major interior roads, to let the neighborhoods rise and fall and rise again, all under the same umbrella. For better or worse, this is still the city we live in and we might as well see as much of it as we can.
I suspect Valerie had different ideas when I first told her the plan. Perhaps she’d imagined we’d stroll (and shop) the relentless luxury of Sheffield Avenue, or size up a potential new home for her amidst the middle-class usefulness of Addison Street.
“No, I’m thinking of doing Archer.”
“Where’s Archer?”
“South Side. We’re walking to the airport.”
“South Side? Are you taking me to the ghetto?”
After months of mildly confrontational negotiations we finally found a day that would work for both of us. We chose a Sunday, we two ready to face these strange new lands armed with varying degrees of hangover and our own reasons for following this road to the edge of the world.
II: Partially-True Romance on the Near South Side
We were maybe thirty seconds into our little adventure at the corner of Cermak and State when we first found company. He was maybe in his mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell through all the dirt and grime on his face, hands, and sweatshirt.
“Excuse me, sir, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course,” I tell him, leaving out the part where I knew exactly where this was going.
“Let me just say – and I mean no disrespect – that she is a beautiful lady,” he says, motioning to Valerie. “You, sir, you should marry someone with such pretty eyes.”
She smiles at this, and I couldn’t help but chuckle a little to myself as well. Not that he was wrong about Valerie, but if he knows of any girl that wants to walk through that particular stretch of State Street I would die to meet her. But alas I have not and Valerie, as she so often does, has gracefully stood in for this imaginary person. Someday I will thank her for this, but not today. Today I will just tell this stranger in need that I have nothing to give him.
Moving north on State to the head of Archer Avenue, we stop to photograph the beginning of our little trip. One block back, gutted housing projects stared down anyone bold enough to enter the invisible border around the neighborhood, but just these few steps away we’re looking up at brand new banks and boutique shops. Condominiums-to-be announce their arrival on half-empty lots and gorgeous empty buildings.
“Who are they trying to sell these to?” I wonder aloud.
“Us?” Valerie proposes. Of course. And to the casual observer, we probably fit the bill of the young couple looking to invest: matching fleece pullovers, slight north suburban vocal inflections, confused looks at every street corner we came to. Two blocks in and already real estate developers are passively courting us newlyweds. Perhaps this would not be such a bad afternoon.
III: Forget it, Jake
While most immigrants in the late 19th century were moving westward, the Chinese came east from California as race-based discrimination took hold of the tightening railroad construction job market. Most originally settled in the corner of the Loop near Clark and Harrison Streets, but the downtown development priced many residents out of the neighborhood and down to the area near the intersection of Cermak and Wentworth Roads, forming what is now known as Chinatown.
With time, the Chicago Chinese population grew 5,300 percent, from 600 in 1890 to 32,187 in 2000. Chinatown proper claims near 11,000 of these residents, although estimates vary on the “true” population of both the community and the neighborhood. The Nine Dragon Wall outside of Chinatown Square plaza welcomes visitors, and the annual Chinese New Year parade remains one of the city’s most popular cultural events. Celebrants don traditional Chinese attire while fireworks light up the sky and a 100-foot dragon dances through the streets. You can get a hell of a meal here – Szechwan, Cantonese, Hunan, you name it – and you can also get a hell of a deal on bootleg fashions and electronics if you know where to look. Down here in the shadow of the Red Line, the far corner of the world is anyone’s for the taking.
And despite all of this interesting history and only-kind-in-the-world entertainment, Valerie has never been to Chinatown. Ever. I tell her this needs to change, and soon. She agrees.
IV: State Trooper Knocking in the Middle of the Night
If you ever wreck your car near the Stevenson/Dan Ryan interchange, don’t bother pulling off the highway to assess the damage, as the city or state or whoever has rendered the investigation sites all entirely useless by design. For one thing, there’s no off-ramp from either interstate to the lots below on Archer. For another, the lots all have six-inch tall curbs, likely impeding the approach of any newly-crushed vehicle.
“So how are you supposed to check everything out?” Valerie asks.
“I don’t know.”
“What if your tires are flat?” she continues. “What if your ground thingys are hanging down, or your tail end got smashed and is dragging on the pavement?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat.
“Reilly, what the hell is going on down here?”
My answer stays the same.
V: Where the Streets Have No Aim
Farrell. Lock. Broad. Bonfield. She’s never heard of any of these streets, and neither have I, but that’s not why they’ve got our attention. It’s not the potholes, nor the weird graffiti nor the general noisiness of the traffic around us that make us take notice. What we see are streets that begin 50 feet to our left, but then end abruptly 30 feet to our right, all split by a concrete wall in Archer’s middle lane or feeding into a gravel road with no way in besides through a chain-link fence and guarded by signs issuing perilous threats to anyone who would dare enter.
The tiny stretches of navigable road all house one building at best, some totally empty, and quite a few with a small line of cars parked in front of nothing in particular. Never in either of our lives have we been so perplexed by so much of so little. With literally nowhere else to turn, we press on to the south and west.
VI: A Real Fine Place
Valerie says she needs some kind of caffeine. “Do you think we’ll find a Starbucks or a Caribou down here?”
I try to forcibly contain my laughter, ultimately failing. “Are you serious? Do you know where we are?”
“So what?” she asks. “People drink coffee on the South Side too, you know.”
“Not for $5 a cup,” I inform her.
“Well, I would if there was one.”
“But there isn’t one,” I say.
“Well,” she retorts, “maybe I don’t live here because there aren’t any Starbucks or Caribous.”
“Or,” I tell her, “maybe there aren’t any Starbucks or Caribous because you don’t live here.”
She informs me that all three of her apartments have been within an extremely short walking distance of either of those venues. I want to laugh, but the realization sets in that part of the reason chain coffee houses have become so big is exactly what she just described: they’re all close to where people live, so people get used to living close to them. Seeing them as a reliable amenity rather than a convenience, it becomes something to look for when considering a new dwelling place:
FOR RENT: 2bd/1bth, close to trains, buses, Starbucks, w/d in bldg, must see!
We find the strip mall at Ashland Avenue, but alas no coffee houses with it. “There’s a Dunkin Donuts,” I say.
“No,” she sighs, “that won’t do. I’ll just go without.”
Pressing on, I am confronted by a vague answer as to why I am friends with this girl. Okay, there are the obvious things. She’s smart, and fun, and tends to carry the same schedule of social activities as I do, but on some other level I think she has this same sense of steadfast obligation to seemingly inane yet personally important quasi-rituals.
I won’t eat fruits or vegetables; she only drinks coffee from Starbucks or Caribou. I hang out in any of six shitty bars; she hangs out in any of six different shitty bars. I swear a lot; she swears a lot, but has different favorite choice words. We are both creatures of frivolous habit and of our own bizarre definitions of loyalty, and I now realize why it is she walking across the city with me as opposed to, say, anyone else. Someday I will mention this to her, but not today.
VII: Courier
In 1920, 35-year-old Jacob Yanovitz worked as a bank messenger for the Southwest Trust and Savings Bank. At 3pm, October 29, Yanovitz
and patrolman John Leonard were under the railroad viaduct at Ashland Avenue and 15th Street with $54,500 in currency to take back to the bank. Southwest Trust and Savings is at the intersection of Archer, 35th Street, and Hoyne Avenue, a mere 2.4 miles from the train depot. Three men appeared with guns, taking the money but not before fatally wounding Yanovitz with two bullets, one to the chest and one to the right arm.
This is the kind of thing you imagine when you look at an abandoned bank, or really any vacant monstrosity like the one that used to be the Southwest. Chicago is littered with places like this, these theaters and schools and churches and factories that were once the center of so many people’s lives and are now just hollow reminders of what was and what wasn’t. Rather than stop to pontificate on the fleeting nature of civic prominence, we instead find a Walgreens to get something to drink. Valerie is still pretty hung over and I, sadly, still am as well.
VIII: Kitten
Netty’s Furniture, just south of Pershing Road in Brighton Park, is closed Sundays, but for some reason a cat is playing in the front window as we walk past. Valerie, always a sucker for anything even remotely playful or endearing, is immediately in love.
“Hi kitty! Hi kitty!” She puts her hand to the window and the cat reaches back out to her, rolling over and making that face cats make to convince humans they’re not hateful selfish monsters but instead just a harmless lesser species entitled to total dominance of your home.
“It’s so cute! Reilly, come look at it!”
“I see it.” Cats are not my favorite things. I am not sure if she knows this.
“Reilly! Look at it!” The animal has her under its demon feline spell. “Hi! Hi! You are so adorable!”
I don’t have the heart to tell her it probably couldn’t hear her through the window. “Val, let’s go.”
Stepping away from the store and the cat, she makes sure to keep waving and smiling at the animal as we press forward once more. It reaches for her as she left; she reaches back. I still think cats are stupid, but the moment isn’t lost on me.
“Why are all the stores closed today?” she asks.
“What?”
“Why are the stores closed? It’s the weekend, that’s when people go shopping for things like furniture.”
“This really bothers you?”
“I just don’t get it,” she continues. “Wouldn’t you want to be open when people are looking to buy what you’re selling?”
“Okay, let me see if I have this straight. You just bonded with a strange and random housecat through the front window of a closed furniture store. You’re not even remotely thrown off by a cat hanging out in an empty store, but you are bothered by the fact the owners might want Sundays off?”
She pauses for a moment. “Reilly, you don’t get it. That cat was just too cute.”
Of course. How silly of me.
IX: There Can Be Only One
The Polish Highlanders Alliance of America keeps headquarters in a chalet-style hall just south of 48th Street. The group acts as a sort of
cultural anchor for immigrants from southern Poland, northern Romania, northern Slovakia, and parts of the Czech Republic, providing news from back home and around the country through The Podhalan Weekly and The Highlander Chronicle newspapers, as well as through the airwaves on WPNA-AM. Constructed in 1929, the headquarters, better known as the “Highlander Home” (and even more well-known as “Dom Podhalan” in Polish) is considered the nexus of Chicago’s Goral community.
As we pass it, Valerie announces “My friend would be so proud of me.”
“For walking ten miles?”
“No, for seeing all this Polish stuff.”
I don’t get it. “Why would that matter?”
“Because she’s Polish,” she explains, “and she goes to a lot of Polish things.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“And she’s been to Poland,” she continues, “and she’s really nice. She’s probably my nicest friend.”
I’ve met a lot of Valerie’s friends, and I sort of remember this Polish girl as being nice, but it strikes me as odd that it’s six miles and the better part of three hours before anything we’re doing or seeing reminds her of anyone else she knows in this world. She has gone that far from anything familiar, recognizable, or even reminiscent of what she calls “normal” or “home,” all so I could say I did something interesting and that I didn’t do it alone. Someday I will tell her how much this means to me.
X: Travel Tips from Andrew
At the intersection of Archer and Cicero Avenues, where Chicago briefly ends before beginning again just a few blocks later, I tell her to stop.
“What is it? Are you okay?”
We’re there, I tell her.
“This is it?” This is it.
“But the road keeps going,” she points out. Yes, but it’s out of city limits for a few blocks. We’re at the first and, for our purposes, last end of the road.
“This is like where a movie just ends without warning,” she says, and I agree.
After all that, standing on this unremarkable street corner seems so anticlimactic. The restaurant at this intersection is closed; the only traffic is in the direction of Midway Airport just down the road.
Valerie points out some neat pictures to take, and I turn to capture the street signs as proof that we’d made it. The first shot of ARCHER AVE 5200 S comes through, flanked on either side by stoplights and an American flag, and no sooner do we bask in all this patriotic Southwest Side splendor than the battery in my camera dies. None of the stores nearby are open, so in a sense we’d come all this way to document the existence of an otherwise nondescript intersection neither of us will likely ever see again.
Under normal circumstances, this should break our hearts, but under normal circumstances we’re not walking ten miles down one road through a major city for no good reason. Under normal circumstances, window displays of empty stores don’t come alive, streets we’ve never heard of don’t all lead to nowhere, and my beautiful non-existent girlfriend isn’t totally psyched to go hang out in strange new places.
We shrug at the irony and head to the ‘L’, its ride away from the sunset showing us the other side of the places and things we had spent the day looking at and looking for. On the train we were just two people heading home from the airport, but on that lifeless street that rolled on towards an endless horizon, I was rich and she was the object of every man’s affection. Really nice people became long-lost friends, banks lived forever without money, pictures were better not taken and coffee was the stuff good homes were made of. For one gray afternoon on the South Side of Chicago, life was entirely strange and strangely wonderful. I went home and slept.
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- Chicago, IL / April 28, 2008