Love this post and the title. I think that the city that best ‘captures’ a nation is often not its capital - it’s usually its ‘second’ city. In the Netherlands for example, Utrecht always strikes me as the most Dutch place, rather than Amsterdam or The Hague.
What you call the metro is actually the L - sometimes called “el” - for Elevated although it includes the subway, hence the Christmas card showing people stranded on the platform and the caption “No L, No L”. The L trains go through the subway in the Loop.
It is not Chicago’s fault that there are homeless mentally ill people colonizing the L, although it is Chicago’s fault that nothing is being done about. Our mayor seems more interested in solidifying the political power of the Democratic Party and the Chicago Teachers Union (but I repeat myself) than maintaining the order necessary to a functioning city environment.
But the roots of the problem are in the early 70’s, when the Illinois Democrats’ delusional ideas about allowing the mentally ill civil liberties and the “freedom” to roam the streets coincided with the downstate Illinois Republicans’ foolish willingness to save money by shutting down the state funded mental institutions.
That there are petty criminals taking advantage of and magnifying the disorder is perfectly predictable. No reasoning elderly person (I’m 78) takes the L - we do ride the busses which don’t have such problems because most bus drivers can and do maintain control of the environment in their busses, which at this point is not something that can be done on the L without stationing some kind of security person in each car.
What Adam Smith remarked about the nation is true of cities - there is a great deal of ruin in them. Meaning that it takes a lot to completely ruin a city. There are parts of Chicago which are not yet ruined. But there is not an unlimited amount of ruin we can absorb. My wife and I no longer go to the Loop in the evening - it’s just not safe to be there. When we do go to the Loop, it’s during daylight and we take the bus.
Great piece Chris--from the viewpoint of a "Region rat" who has lived in towns straddling the IL/IN line for 58 of my 68 years, the last 37 in St. John. It took me a second to recognize that McD's but then the light went on. For many years back in the 1990s, I would leave the house at 4 AM, drive up to the pier on Lake Michigan to fish for steelhead trout at sunrise, then get breakfast there on the way home. I was up there enough to recognize the regular crowd getting more than a few "senior coffees."
I'm now a retired engineer, son of an engineer born and raised here, and we often lamented the decline of manufacturing in the area before he passed. My dad was incredibly intelligent, invented products for NASA and all the Big Three automakers, held multiple patents--yet his immigrant grandparents kept telling him he was crazy for going to college, that he should have just gotten a "mill job" as soon as he graduated from high school and not wasted four years of his life. That was a prevailing mentality in the 1950s.
If you went in at age 18, you'd probably move from a rotating shift job to days-only by your early 30's, then retire with a great pension and health insurance in your early 50s. To be honest, that was never a sustainable model, and high labor/pension/health coverage costs are much of what killed that job market even before automation arrived to cut even further. My high school classmates who took the union mill job route around 1980 were still working rotating shift jobs in their mid-40s, never having been promoted to a supervisory position or able to see when that might happen.
That being said, I never saw truly blue skies until we took our first vacation to downstate Illinois. The skies here were always greenish from the mill and refinery emissions. One of the big mills in East Chicago always put up a huge Christmas tree in front of the headquarters building, and the one time we drove up to see it, I couldn't believe people could actually live a block away in that much stink and smoke.
The big news item as of late here is the potential proliferation of data centers, which the construction unions want, but the reality is those jobs are temporary, and there are few long-term jobs in data centers. You've likely read stories about the conversion of the former windshield-wiper plant up there. I hope that's where things are going rather than some of the literally greenfield sites in the southern parts of the counties straddling the lake, too far from the shoreline to use lake water and thus would be using groundwater for cooling.
I’ve never been to the US beyond a brief LAX stop, yet Chicago feels familiar to me, mostly learned sideways through music. Wilco, in particular, taught me how the place can hold work, dignity, drift and care without romance or self-pity. I could feel that same sensibility here, in the McDonald’s, in the bar, in the stalled walking forced by the weather.
The tension you sketch between second and third nature resonates, especially where work still exists but no longer answers back in recognisable ways. The urge to make and build doesn’t vanish when the economy shifts. It just gets stranded. That feels less like a loss of belief and more like a broken link between effort, value and reward. Optimism seems like something that follows structure, not something that can replace it.
Spencer’s comment sharpened that thought for me. Wanting to make the third nature more humane feels exactly right, and urgent. The capacity is clearly there. The harder question is whether the systems people live inside are willing to let that capacity count for anything beyond private consolation.
From where you’re sitting, watching rather than extracting, what would it actually take for the third nature to start answering people back again in ways that feel real, local and earned?
Thanks again. It’s hard to shake the desire to work and build instead of accepting the transmission of blips and bleeps as a sufficient substitute. Funny that the crappy weather forced you to adjust your game and you scored heavily and notched a clear W after all. (Wish I could say the same for the Packers. Oh well.) & Btw: channeled ya today. Circumstances took me halfway across LALA land to get my car fixed. Knowing it would be a long wait I set out to explore the streets of El Monte CA. Thought I better take to it while still in 1 piece, just in case prostate surgery goes awry in a month and they saw me in half by accident. So got an up-close-&-personal look at Garvey Ave., a great place to check out old trailer parks, cheap motels, bodegas, etc. A fitting spot for a CA tribute. Good luck, safe travels and vaya con dios.
I like hearing about Chicago - lived there from 1983-1997. I write about it often in my Substack blog - that so far has been devoted to photography I shot - often in Chicago schools - and also one post about kids in the alleys.
Thanks for this great overview of my hometown's history - it is unfortunate that you got stuck in the weather, and that the city is letting homeless guys take over the trains. Same where I am here in Dallas now, as I've written my own post about, and I guess this is a national "solution" to a terrible problem. Happy trails (though Duluth in January ?! 😉)!
Just to make sure you know, Dolly Parton wrote 'I Will Always Love You', and her recording of the song remains the definitive version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKsQR72HY0s
Chris, it never fails to impress me how you can so poignantly convey the humanity of all those you encounter.
I also loved this line: "The best bars, with dive-y qualities (unpretentious, inexpensive, locally owned, familiar) don’t know they are dive bars and don’t curate that image." Took me back to my French Quarter years.
I am thankful to have experienced the Chicago Board of Trade when they actually let civilians in the building. I remember seeing the traders (in their loud, tacky, and funny blazers worn to increase their visibility on the floor) walking the streets during lunchtime.
Don’t forget the reversal of the Chicago River was just as much for public health as for commerce. It’s called the Sanitary and Ship Canal for a reason - gotta keep the city sewage flowing away from the lake which is Chicago’s water source.
Yo Chris! before I even read this, if you are still in Chicago I'd love to buy you a dinner or drink. Big fan of your writing. NW sider of 13 years here.
Great piece. I've read Nature's Metropolis and I think your concept of adding a Third Nature makes a lot of sense. So much of what feels incoherent or out of step in the modern physical world is the direct result of this third nature dictating the order of things.
On 9/9/2001 I rode the train from Midway to downtown to get to McCormick Place for a trade show. It was OK and there were no issues on a Sunday afternoon. So sorry to hear this about the trains. Have you ever been to Lower Wacker Drive? In the 1970s my Chicago-born boss gave me the grand tour of downtown including this subterranean maze of streets.
What a sincere, articulate and sobering essay on an America heading in self-made depression. Or more accurately Trump and his hegemony self-destruction. Out of the epilogue in the works of Atlas Shrugged. When the evil altruists controlled by Russia and Saudi succeed in ruining opportunity for the good.
Love this post and the title. I think that the city that best ‘captures’ a nation is often not its capital - it’s usually its ‘second’ city. In the Netherlands for example, Utrecht always strikes me as the most Dutch place, rather than Amsterdam or The Hague.
What you call the metro is actually the L - sometimes called “el” - for Elevated although it includes the subway, hence the Christmas card showing people stranded on the platform and the caption “No L, No L”. The L trains go through the subway in the Loop.
It is not Chicago’s fault that there are homeless mentally ill people colonizing the L, although it is Chicago’s fault that nothing is being done about. Our mayor seems more interested in solidifying the political power of the Democratic Party and the Chicago Teachers Union (but I repeat myself) than maintaining the order necessary to a functioning city environment.
But the roots of the problem are in the early 70’s, when the Illinois Democrats’ delusional ideas about allowing the mentally ill civil liberties and the “freedom” to roam the streets coincided with the downstate Illinois Republicans’ foolish willingness to save money by shutting down the state funded mental institutions.
That there are petty criminals taking advantage of and magnifying the disorder is perfectly predictable. No reasoning elderly person (I’m 78) takes the L - we do ride the busses which don’t have such problems because most bus drivers can and do maintain control of the environment in their busses, which at this point is not something that can be done on the L without stationing some kind of security person in each car.
What Adam Smith remarked about the nation is true of cities - there is a great deal of ruin in them. Meaning that it takes a lot to completely ruin a city. There are parts of Chicago which are not yet ruined. But there is not an unlimited amount of ruin we can absorb. My wife and I no longer go to the Loop in the evening - it’s just not safe to be there. When we do go to the Loop, it’s during daylight and we take the bus.
Great piece Chris--from the viewpoint of a "Region rat" who has lived in towns straddling the IL/IN line for 58 of my 68 years, the last 37 in St. John. It took me a second to recognize that McD's but then the light went on. For many years back in the 1990s, I would leave the house at 4 AM, drive up to the pier on Lake Michigan to fish for steelhead trout at sunrise, then get breakfast there on the way home. I was up there enough to recognize the regular crowd getting more than a few "senior coffees."
I'm now a retired engineer, son of an engineer born and raised here, and we often lamented the decline of manufacturing in the area before he passed. My dad was incredibly intelligent, invented products for NASA and all the Big Three automakers, held multiple patents--yet his immigrant grandparents kept telling him he was crazy for going to college, that he should have just gotten a "mill job" as soon as he graduated from high school and not wasted four years of his life. That was a prevailing mentality in the 1950s.
If you went in at age 18, you'd probably move from a rotating shift job to days-only by your early 30's, then retire with a great pension and health insurance in your early 50s. To be honest, that was never a sustainable model, and high labor/pension/health coverage costs are much of what killed that job market even before automation arrived to cut even further. My high school classmates who took the union mill job route around 1980 were still working rotating shift jobs in their mid-40s, never having been promoted to a supervisory position or able to see when that might happen.
That being said, I never saw truly blue skies until we took our first vacation to downstate Illinois. The skies here were always greenish from the mill and refinery emissions. One of the big mills in East Chicago always put up a huge Christmas tree in front of the headquarters building, and the one time we drove up to see it, I couldn't believe people could actually live a block away in that much stink and smoke.
The big news item as of late here is the potential proliferation of data centers, which the construction unions want, but the reality is those jobs are temporary, and there are few long-term jobs in data centers. You've likely read stories about the conversion of the former windshield-wiper plant up there. I hope that's where things are going rather than some of the literally greenfield sites in the southern parts of the counties straddling the lake, too far from the shoreline to use lake water and thus would be using groundwater for cooling.
Stay warm.
Chris, an excellent read, as ever!
I’ve never been to the US beyond a brief LAX stop, yet Chicago feels familiar to me, mostly learned sideways through music. Wilco, in particular, taught me how the place can hold work, dignity, drift and care without romance or self-pity. I could feel that same sensibility here, in the McDonald’s, in the bar, in the stalled walking forced by the weather.
The tension you sketch between second and third nature resonates, especially where work still exists but no longer answers back in recognisable ways. The urge to make and build doesn’t vanish when the economy shifts. It just gets stranded. That feels less like a loss of belief and more like a broken link between effort, value and reward. Optimism seems like something that follows structure, not something that can replace it.
Spencer’s comment sharpened that thought for me. Wanting to make the third nature more humane feels exactly right, and urgent. The capacity is clearly there. The harder question is whether the systems people live inside are willing to let that capacity count for anything beyond private consolation.
From where you’re sitting, watching rather than extracting, what would it actually take for the third nature to start answering people back again in ways that feel real, local and earned?
Thanks again. It’s hard to shake the desire to work and build instead of accepting the transmission of blips and bleeps as a sufficient substitute. Funny that the crappy weather forced you to adjust your game and you scored heavily and notched a clear W after all. (Wish I could say the same for the Packers. Oh well.) & Btw: channeled ya today. Circumstances took me halfway across LALA land to get my car fixed. Knowing it would be a long wait I set out to explore the streets of El Monte CA. Thought I better take to it while still in 1 piece, just in case prostate surgery goes awry in a month and they saw me in half by accident. So got an up-close-&-personal look at Garvey Ave., a great place to check out old trailer parks, cheap motels, bodegas, etc. A fitting spot for a CA tribute. Good luck, safe travels and vaya con dios.
I like hearing about Chicago - lived there from 1983-1997. I write about it often in my Substack blog - that so far has been devoted to photography I shot - often in Chicago schools - and also one post about kids in the alleys.
My blog is called howieblogg. e here is a link to the 'Alley' blog post https://open.substack.com/pub/howseth/p/windy-city-in-the-alley?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thanks for this great overview of my hometown's history - it is unfortunate that you got stuck in the weather, and that the city is letting homeless guys take over the trains. Same where I am here in Dallas now, as I've written my own post about, and I guess this is a national "solution" to a terrible problem. Happy trails (though Duluth in January ?! 😉)!
I really enjoy your writing. Your Substack articles inspired me to read your book, which I enjoyed very much.
Just to make sure you know, Dolly Parton wrote 'I Will Always Love You', and her recording of the song remains the definitive version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKsQR72HY0s
Chris, it never fails to impress me how you can so poignantly convey the humanity of all those you encounter.
I also loved this line: "The best bars, with dive-y qualities (unpretentious, inexpensive, locally owned, familiar) don’t know they are dive bars and don’t curate that image." Took me back to my French Quarter years.
I am thankful to have experienced the Chicago Board of Trade when they actually let civilians in the building. I remember seeing the traders (in their loud, tacky, and funny blazers worn to increase their visibility on the floor) walking the streets during lunchtime.
Don’t forget the reversal of the Chicago River was just as much for public health as for commerce. It’s called the Sanitary and Ship Canal for a reason - gotta keep the city sewage flowing away from the lake which is Chicago’s water source.
Yo Chris! before I even read this, if you are still in Chicago I'd love to buy you a dinner or drink. Big fan of your writing. NW sider of 13 years here.
I would go in on that and would split the bill! I really appreciate how you view America and the world.
Even when you can't walk you tell wonderful stories.
Great piece. I've read Nature's Metropolis and I think your concept of adding a Third Nature makes a lot of sense. So much of what feels incoherent or out of step in the modern physical world is the direct result of this third nature dictating the order of things.
On 9/9/2001 I rode the train from Midway to downtown to get to McCormick Place for a trade show. It was OK and there were no issues on a Sunday afternoon. So sorry to hear this about the trains. Have you ever been to Lower Wacker Drive? In the 1970s my Chicago-born boss gave me the grand tour of downtown including this subterranean maze of streets.
What a sincere, articulate and sobering essay on an America heading in self-made depression. Or more accurately Trump and his hegemony self-destruction. Out of the epilogue in the works of Atlas Shrugged. When the evil altruists controlled by Russia and Saudi succeed in ruining opportunity for the good.