This is a late-night ramble I made just now. Its a bit long for Facebook, and it may not be of much interest except to people who are my age and who are from Chicago (if even them). But I figured Id post it anyway. Chicago ought to thank God for me, and people like me. People my age, and maybe a little older. You’d have to be only a little older to still be around. Where the one-per-block franchises infest the Loop, where the suburban-style strip malls line the old neighborhood streets, where the terra-cotta is stripped from the old buildings before they’re knocked down to make way for new health clubs and condos, we were there. We saw, we went into, we ate and drank in the old places. We rode the elevators piloted by the uniformed man who seemed dedicated to making our feet leave the floor when we rocketed up to the 10th story and he slammed on the brakes. We held our mothers’ hands as we went through the wood and glass revolving doors of stores – Fields – the Boston Store – with gleaming glass cases higher than our heads. And our mothers’ hands were in white gloves and there were pearls around their necks (maybe real, maybe not) in honor of a visit to that sort of store and to that Holy of Holies, the tea room. We remember the theatres. The names are still there, some of them, but the soaring ceilings full of projected stars are gone. The genteel movies that were so long and so grand that they needed an intermission are gone. The souvenir programs and the liveried ushers that sold them – yes, at movies – are gone. Restaurants where they fed you real food and you couldn’t get the same sandwich just down the street. Places where – get ready – a man could walk in, sit at the counter, order a bowl of chili, eat it, leave a quarter for the counterman, pay at the door and leave without anyone telling him their name, telling him the specials or smugly explaining that the food was all gluten-free, free range and fair traded. Where, in winter, you entered a place straight off the street to be confronted by a semi-circular curtain which you didn’t open until the door had closed behind you so as to not let the wind and snow in. The German and Irish bars that were German and Irish. Not “–themed”, but real. With German and Irish and Polish and Italian and Serbian people in them. We were in those. We ate there. The older ones of us drank there. The older ones of us went into, and the younger of us (the males anyway) longed to go into the theatres with names like “Gaiety” in the South Loop where they had Burlesque shows. I still dream of the tawdriness and irresistible allure of those marquees and 3-sheet posters there on Van Buren as we drove by, my father taking no notice from behind the wheel. We remember the Heaven at Belmont and Western that was Riverview. The cheapness, the horridness that made it so delicious. The terror of being lifted up on the Parachute Ride, not knowing exactly when we would start to free-fall, although the term hadn’t been invented yet, for a few seconds before the patched, stained parachute (maybe) opened. We saw the old lady in Aladdin’s castle, hired to monitor the goings-on, sitting on her folding chair, reaching for the brown paper bag under her seat and singing “I’m sitting on top of the world…..” to herself. We remember the game the name of which kept changing, but always featured black men sitting on platforms that would collapse if you threw the ball at the right target dunking them into a vat of dirty water. They would always have something to say – some insult that would get them beaten up a few hundred feet away on Belmont Avenue, but they could get away with here in this Alternate Universe. “Hey – that ain’t the girl you was here wit’ las’ night!” We saw the blue streetlights. We were enchanted by the green lights in the Emerald Cave. We gaped in awe at the cityscape stretching away miles below our feet from the top of the Prudential Building. We remember seeing the Lindbergh Beacon shining miles out across Lake Michigan, and hearing our parents reminisce about being on the beach on the Michigan side on a clear night and seeing it flash just over the horizon. We remember driving in and out of the city on Roosevelt Road and Ogden Avenue because there was no expressway yet. Sure, sometime in the future they will tear up a street on the North Side and find, under a few layers of pavement, trolley tracks. Sure, articles will be written about the old electric trains and, later, electric busses that ran there on power supplied by overhead cables that sparked and snapped. But hey! There are still some of us here who rode on those things. Yo! Listen up while I tell you………
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:44:02 +0000
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