By Stuart Dybek
This text is excerpted from the book My Town: Writers on American Cities, to be published in fall 2010 by the Bureau of International Information Programs. Read selected contents in our “First Look” preview.
Chicago, a city where the river runs backwards, embraces paradox. Geography ensures that it does. The undeclared capital of the heart of the country, it’s an inland city renowned for the skyscrapers that rise from the flatland of the vast, fertile prairie known as the American Midwest. The smell of salt ocean is 700 miles away, and yet Chicago is a water town. Its horizon is aquamarine. The coast of the city overlooks the largest sweet-water sea on the planet, one that contains 20 percent of Earth’s fresh water. More than prairie, fields, or parks, it is water that serves as Nature’s counterpoint to the girders and concrete of Chicago architecture, and to the grit of its streets. The protection of the public lakefront was the central feature of the Burnham Plan of 1909, a plan responsible for the continued preservation of what is uniquely beautiful about Chicago. The lake mirrors the expansive reflection of the city and gives it back transformed. Water is the city’s mythos. Any kid who grew up in the inner city and made the journey in the sweltering summer to the beach or, better yet, illegally wrenched open a fire pump and let it gush into the street while a neighborhood danced in the spray, can tell you that.
Chicago’s origin is interwoven with water. In 1674, Louis Joliet and Père Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who spoke several Native American languages, paddled birch bark canoes up the Illinois River and became the first Europeans to camp near the site that would become a metropolis. Explorers fascinated me as a child. At night my bed became a canoe I paddled through the wilderness, imagining the wonder the two Frenchmen must have felt upon seeing it for the first time. The night shift of the city was audible from my window, especially the trains that never slept, rumbling over the viaducts. Our neighborhood was laced with train tracks, and the so-called Sanitary Canal — the brown of an open sewer — sludged beneath railroad bridges just blocks away. But I was on a river that flowed through forest; along its banks, buffalo, deer, bear, and fox came to drink. My father, a Polish immigrant, recalled seeing a plaque that marked a place where Marquette had camped in winter along the river on 27th and Damen Avenue, not far from where we lived, and one day, my friend Eddie Boy and I made a bike excursion out of trying to find it, but if there’d been a plaque, it was gone. Scavenging scrap was common in our neighborhood, where one man’s hubcaps might be another man’s scrap, and we figured someone stole it in order to junk the bronze.
We lived in Pilsen, a Southwest Side, port-of-entry neighborhood named after Plzen, the Czech city that also lends its name to a light, golden lager. Chicago is a city divided between the more residential North Side and a working-class, industrial South Side. It is a city of neighborhoods because it is a city of immigrants. The history of immigrations can be read in the way its neighborhoods are divided along racial or ethnic lines — Bronzeville, Chinatown, Greektown, Andersonville, Little Italy, the Barrio ….
Cities, if they’re lucky, produce writers that define them — try imagining London without its Dickens. Chicago is that rare American city with a literary tradition resembling London’s or Moscow’s, and, fittingly, Chicago writers — mostly South Siders — are neighborhood writers: Saul Bellow lays claim to Hyde Park, Nelson Algren to the Polish Triangle along Milwaukee and Division, Gwendolyn Brooks to Bronzeville, James Farrell to what was once the Irish Southeast Side.
Each neighborhood has its own Main Street and 18th Street is Pilsen’s. Walk down 18th through the smoky fragrance of taquerias blaring ranchera, past Spanish shop signs and vibrant murals that bring Diego Rivera to mind, and you might wonder why this place is named after Plzen instead of Guadalajara.
Since the 1960s, the Pilsen neighborhood has been a main port of entry for a Latino immigration that crossed not an ocean but a river to arrive in the USA. Before that, it was a Slavic enclave. Czech immigrants settled there in the mid-19th century, and the neighborhood was one of the few in the city to survive the Chicago Fire of 1877. That same period burned with the fires of labor unrest and social change, and Pilsen, working-class from its inception, figured prominently in the waves of strikes, protests, and brutal retaliations. It was a time when an obscure “melting pot” neighborhood could serve as a cauldron for national events of historic proportion, an era that saw the violence of the Haymarket Riot, social experiments like Jane Adams’ Hull House, John Dewey’s Progressive Education, and protest literature such as Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry in The Jungle. This braid of a Chicago-grown American liberalism would later extend to the work and theories of the community organizer, Saul Alinsky, whose ideas in turn engaged a young lawyer named Barack Obama.
Despite the historic events that occurred within the 3.5 square miles of Pilsen, my friends and I, growing up there generations later, were largely ignorant of its past. Chicago, which Nelson Algren famously dubbed the “city on the make,” can’t be counted on to make time for history. Preservation requires care and money, and a place on the make sees more gain in tearing down, rebuilding, and leaving the past and its inconvenient lessons — though not necessarily its grudges — in the rubble behind. The history of class conflict and labor unrest is seldom taught in schools. Still, I wonder if, growing up, we didn’t sense the past on some subliminal level.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology,” which he defined as “the paradoxical state of the specter which is neither being nor nonbeing.” He’s speaking metaphorically about how economic forces of the past, forgotten though they might be, continue to haunt the present. There was a railroad viaduct in Pilsen that was rumored to be haunted. Viaducts are spooky tunnels anyway, but the one on 16th Street was supposed to be haunted by ghosts. It was a local rite of initiation to run through it at night. We surmised there’d been a gang murder or a vicious rape or that one of the hobos who rode the rails was found hanged there.
Only as an adult, while researching the history of my neighborhood, did I learn that in 1887 that viaduct was the site of the Battle of the Viaduct. The railroad strike of 1887 had produced general labor unrest. When a crowd of unarmed protesters, including women and children, gathered at the viaduct, police and federal troops seasoned fighting the Sioux who had defeated Custer fired on the crowd, killing 30 and wounding at least a hundred. It is possible to purchase “memorial bricks” supposedly from the bullet-riddled wall of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the façade of the Biograph Theater where John Dillinger was shot has been carefully preserved and remains a tourist attraction. Chicago is, after all, known for its adolescent romance with gangsters. But if you visit the viaduct on 16th and Halsted, aside from ghosts, you’ll find no memorial for the Battle of the Viaduct.
Even though, like Saul Bellow’s Augie March, I can claim to be “an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city,” there are times when, returning to my old South Side haunts, I feel like a tourist of my own past. My favorite mode of transport is to paddle my kayak down the South Branch of the Chicago River — the river whose natural flow toward the lake was, in interest of sanitation, reversed in 1900. The South Branch forks into the Ship and Sanitary Canal, which slinks through the Southwest Side. We called it the Insanitary Canal. Legend was that if a toxic drop of it touched bare skin, you’d be plagued with a communicable disease — polio, TB, syphilis — or infested with the bloodworms that thrived on the offal flushed from the stockyards. The canal was known as Bubbly Creek back then when Chicago, to quote Carl Sandburg, was “Hog Butcher for the World,” and gas from the decomposing carcasses dumped in the river bubbled to the surface. Although considerable resources have been invested in improving water quality, I’m careful to minimize contact with it when I launch at Ashland Avenue.
The North Branch of the river flows through downtown’s glass and steel canyon of world-class architecture. It’s a trip worth taking. There’s no better perspective for seeing a city from the ground up — be it Paris, Prague, or Chicago — than from its river. The river seems cleaner on the North Branch. Sculling teams row by, people along shore are actually fishing for the inedible fish, and there was a rumor that Mayor Richard J. Daley had considered a fleet of gondolas to ferry people around downtown.
The Sanitary Canal isn’t quite ready for gondolas. It smells as it did when I was a kid, of oil, creosote, and the pigeons under the railroad bridges. Its rusted banks are piled with junk and trash. Lake Michigan reflects the face of the Gold Coast that the city wants the world to see. But an industrial river like the South Branch reveals the backside where the factory windows are broken and scorched black. In high school, I’d come at night to contemplate the sparking acetylene and bolts of blue-hot flame from the night shift foundries flaring off the dark water. In summer I’d explore the acres behind bankrupt factories that were reverting to prairie and wetlands, where wildlife — rabbits, fox, pheasants, heron, frogs, snakes — survived in sight of downtown’s hazy range of spires. Like railroad tracks, rivers are flyways and beside the ever-present gulls there are dabbling ducks, mallards, golden eyes, mergansers, Canada geese, migrating swans, egrets, kingfishers, swallows, hawks, and peregrine falcons, the official city bird, there to prey on pigeons.
Under the leadership of Daley, Chicago has become prominent in the green city movement. Once, at a literacy event for inner-city students, I described to the mayor my paddles along the river and amazement at the sight of a beaver dam, a clear indication of improved water quality.
“That’s nothing,” the mayor told me in his thick South Side accent. “That river’s getting so clean the predators are back. A marten came up the South Branch at night, got off at Cermak, snuck into Chinatown and killed half the ducks. I get this call from the Police Department saying the Chinese restaurant owners are in an uproar wanting to know what we’re going to do about it. What do they want me to do, arrest a marten?”
Later, I checked with a local wildlife expert, who told me that, as I suspected, the story was unlikely given that martens had been extinct in Illinois since 1859. “But,” he added, considering, “it might have been a mink.”
Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction and two books of poetry. His work is often set in the Pilsen neighborhood, where he was raised on the South Side of Chicago. His fiction and poetry are frequently anthologized and have won numerous awards, including in 2008 a MacArthur Prize. Dybek is distinguished writer in residence at Northwestern University. |
