Even the Skyline
When I get homesick for Chicago, I picture Lake Michigan. More often than not, that body of water is my object of longing. Which, when I think about it, is rather strange. The Lake is not the city at all. It’s the edge of the city, the unrelenting and vast thing that holds the city in place. So what am I really longing for?
I was (as I wrote in the last issue) recently in Chicago, a visit that ended my longest-ever absence from that place. Last Friday morning, thanks to my father, we found ourselves on a Wendella river boat with a class of suburban third grade boys, a sizable collection of tourists, and a born-and-raised local tour guide1. If you’ve ever been on one of these Chicago River boat tours, you’ll have heard the story of the river: over 100 years ago, the river was a (literal) dumping ground, and as it emptied into Lake Michigan, it was polluting the local water supply. Disease spread. And so, a canal was built downstate, and the course of the Chicago River was reversed.2
The story is brought to life all the more clearly if you take one of the boat tours that actually exits the river and pushes out onto the lake itself. In order to do so, you have to/get to spend several minutes in a lock, waiting as your boat rises to meet the level of Lake Michigan. And this boat my father and I rode last week did just that.
Once you’re on the open water, you’re not really in the city anymore: you’re observing it from the outside. The towering maze of metal and glass that you left back on land becomes a jewel box of skyscrapers competing for attention at the skyline. I don’t know what everyone else on that boat saw when they gazed upon the city. But what I saw was…there was so much MORE skyline. I’d been on architecture boat tours countless times — they tell you what year each new addition went up. I know very well that many of them were built in my lifetime. And yet, as I looked in at the city from the lake, it felt so remarkable that something as massive and iconic as a skyline could change at all.
Perhaps this was just the capstone of a long week of being surprised by structural changes. Earlier in the week, I’d been in Hyde Park, where I lived as a little girl and again as a young adult. I walked through Nichols Park (familiar), past the neighborhood center where I once took tumbling classes (familiar), past the copse where I counted local birds for a natural science course over a decade later (familiar). I rounded the bend toward the (familiar) school where I’d attended kindergarten and first grade, and stopped with a gasp. Towering above the blossoming trees was a very UNfamiliar silver building of maybe 20 stories. In my youth, this approximate spot on 53rd Street had held a McDonalds. In my young adulthood, someone had been killed at this McDonalds, and the restaurant was closed, so for a while it was nothing. Now, here was a towering building, its size less shocking than its silvery gleam, setting it apart from the varied shades of brick boasted by all neighboring structures. At the ground level of this building: a Target.
I’d been wandering the neighborhood on my way to visit some friends. These friends happen to live down the street from the building where my family lived during most of the ‘80s. Tall and ivory colored, with neogothic details, the building is still there. It still looks the same from the outside. I counted my way up to the eighth floor and pictured my first bedroom as if it were still on the other side of the windowpane. But across the street, there had been a newspaper stand where my dad would buy me Boston Baked Beans and Lemonheads. It was now a modest condo building.
I was running early, so I headed east down Hyde Park Boulevard to find that what was once a two-story strip mall (housing, most notably, the Original Pancake House) was now a Whole Foods. And a Marshalls. And a multi-story residential building. All of this (and maybe more) was housed in a large, boxy structure covered with a cascade of shiny green bricks. Typically we return to places we lived as kids and find everything looks so much smaller now that we’re grown. But not this corner: it was all so much MORE than I’d ever realized could fit there.
The day after Hyde Park, I took the commuter rail to Chesterton, Indiana, where I lived for a significant decade of my life — ages 8 to 18. I couldn’t even recall the last time I’d visited. When I got off the train, much to my shock, I exited onto a PLATFORM. A platform!
This train, the South Shore Line, was a defining feature of my youth. One or both of my parents took the train to work every day, and it was my teenage passage into the life and light of the city. Like the lakeshore it roughly traces, it was both a boundary line and a gateway. All my life, to get on that train from the Dune Park Station, one had to climb up; the conductors had to lift a flap in each car’s floor to reveal a slim set of metal stairs. But no more. Now there’s a platform.
Much of the rest of the visit to. Chesterton revealed a town unchanged — at least, visibly. But what changes I found were exciting, surprising, and jarring in much the same way as that platform had been, or that shiny tower on 53rd Street. The splash pad beside what used to be the high school; the empty lot that was once a K-Mart and will one day be an ALDI. The Long John Silver’s that is now an Indian Restaurant.
We’re told that the only constant in life is change. At times this paradox hits like a blessing, at times like a curse. But of course things change. Skyscrapers can be built. Pancake houses can be torn down. The course of the river can be remade. But these things take time; if we watch a building get erected, week by week, month by month, the difference does not strike us starkly as if we left for years on end, only return to an unfamiliar skyline. But the change is the change is the change.
Back on that Wendella boat, we cruised up — which is to say, down — the impossible Chicago River. The riverwalk that lines it was bursting with the unbridled joy of a population finally free after having been locked inside for months on end (this is true at the end of every Chicago winter, but all the more so this year).
The riverwalk, such an essential part of downtown, wasn’t there when I was a kid. Or a teenager.
We got to the fork in the river and our guide ignored the stunning new building towering over the river bend and pointed instead to another new skyscraper, an astonishing feat of engineering and science that rests on a base far narrower than the building itself.
“It was always considered impossible to build here,” he told us, “because of the train tracks below. But someone finally figured out a way.” His tone was reverent, not dismayed. He even sighed a bit.
“Isn’t that something, ladies and gentlemen?”
An older white guy with that perfect Chicago accent, unmistakable but not ostentatious, who kept making jokes about pricey high-rise rents.
That’s the highly abridged version of the story.