Never a City So Real Read Free

a home here. I expected to stay a year, maybe two. It’s been twenty, and counting.
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    The Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo writes, “Chicago expresses the truth about the United States.” Which truths, then, have I chosen to include here? I’m going to admit right up front: This is a skewed and incomplete view of the city. I won’t pretend otherwise. When I told fellow Chicagoans what I was doing, they each had their notions about what should and shouldn’t be included, and they’d grumble and grouse. Inevitably, they’d say, “How can you write a book about Chicago, and not write about . . .?” Fill in the blank. Chicagoans are a possessive sort. They have set notions of how people ought to think of their home. Some feel that if this book is to be considered a source for visitors to Chicago, it ought to include all the obvious sites: Buckingham Fountain, the Magnificent Mile, Wrigley Field, the Garfield Park Conservatory, and the Loop (which is how Chicagoans refer to their downtown because it is encircled by the tracks of the elevated train system, the El). Others believe that it ought to revel in the flowering of the city. In the 1990s, Richard M. Daley, son of the Boss, the late mayor Richard J. Daley, planted three hundred thousand trees—honey locust, hackberry, linden, mountain ash, elm, sycamore, flowering pear, ash, and Norway and silver maples. In 1996, he traveled to Paris, fell in love with it, returned home, and had the city hang hundreds of flower boxes from lampposts and bridges. By the end of the decade, he had the park district each year sowing 544,000 plants, 9,800 perennials, 156,000 bulbs, and 4,600 shrubs. This city of big shoulders is beginning to look more like a city with curves.
    Indeed, despite Chicago’s reputation for grayness and grittiness, it’s a beautiful metropolis, even regal in places, especially along its twenty-nine miles of shoreline, which is as much as San Francisco’s. Lake Michigan allows the city to breathe. The original Mayor Daley, the Boss, once said, “What is Paris next to Chicago? Has Paris got Lake Michigan?” (What to make of the father’s and son’s obsessions with this European center some four thousand miles away?) Those who haven’t been here imagine a body of water that can be easily encompassed by the eye, like a Maine lake or an ocean bay. But Lake Michigan is monstrous. It’s 333 miles from Chicago to the northernmost point, the Mackinac Bridge. It’s 1,100 feet deep in places. It’s shared by four states. Some days, it can be as calm and inviting as a high society hostess; I’ve gone swimming off the rocks at night, and have bodysurfed when the winds are just right. But it can also be as rough and full of trickery as a three-card monte tosser. In an incident that upended my wife’s family, one of her brothers, Johnny, drowned in Lake Michigan at the age of fourteen, knocked off his inflatable raft. The swells were so high, it took three days to recover his body.
    However, this is not a book of lakes or flowers or buildings but rather of flesh and bone, of a place’s people, its lifeblood. In one sense, I suppose, these portraits provide a street-level view of the city—a view from the ground up. On the other hand, none of the people you’ll meet in these pages consider themselves at the bottom of anything. What most of them, including my father-in-law, do have in common, however, is that they look at their city from the vantage point of outsiders, and as a result they have perspective. They see things that you would miss if you were on the inside looking out. My friend Tony Fitzpatrick has a theory. Tony’s an accomplished artist who produces exquisite, boisterous prints inspired by his experiences in the city. A big man, he has also been a Golden Gloves boxer and a character actor in both theater and film (usually tough guy or misfit roles).