Never a City So Real Read Free Page A

“People who don’t fit in anywhere else fit in here,” he says. “It’s a collection of square pegs.” Tony knows. He’s lived in New York, in New Orleans, and in Saronno, Italy. “There was a twenty-year period I tried to leave Chicago,” he explains. “But I kept coming back. I realized for better or worse that Chicago was the center of my compass. I loved it. I hated it. I understood it.” And the city understood him, which is why the others you’ll meet here have stayed as well. These are, in the end, people who give the city what one historian called its “messy vitalities.”

Oil Can Eddie
    Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.
    I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
    This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
    Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.
    I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.
    I put it straight to you,
    After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,
    Have all been remembered with bronze memorials . . .
    Then maybe I will stand here
    And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air . . .
    C ARL S ANDBURG
    (from “Ready to Kill,”
Chicago Poems
)
    Fourteen miles southeast of the Loop, at the base of Lake Michigan, the city’s easternmost corner, one finds a fistful of neighborhoods with hearty names like Irondale, Hegewisch, The Bush, and Slag Valley. This is South Chicago. Apart from Altgeld Gardens—a vast public housing complex virtually hidden from the rest of the world by towering mountains of garbage and often referred to as Chicago’s Soweto—South Chicago is the city’s most isolated community, its most removed. The labor lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan has called it “a secret city.” The vast majority of Chicagoans have never set foot here, and as if to ensure such detachment, above the compact redbrick bungalows with postage-stamp-size yards looms the Chicago Skyway, a highway on stilts, which takes the prosperous to their cottages along the Indiana and Michigan shorelines. The neighborhoods below are modest in appearance, a collection of small homes and small taverns and diners with simple names like Steve’s, Pete’s Hideaway, Who Cares?, Small World Inn, and Maria’s Den. There’s nothing fanciful about this area. As one observer wrote: “Streets named Commercial and Exchange offer testimony that people came here to make a buck, not admire the scenery.”
    And yet the scenery, so to speak, is awe-inspiring, the man-made equivalent of the Rockies. Dark, low-to-the-ground muscular structures, some three times the size of a football field, sprawl across the landscape, sprouting chimneys so tall that they’re equipped with blinking lights to alert wayward aircraft. These chimneys shoot full-bodied flames thirty feet into the sky; at night they appear almost magical, like giant torches heating the moon. Billows of smoke linger in the air like phantom dirges. It used to be, when the steel mills were going strong, that these smokestacks spat out particles of graphite that would dust the streets and cars and rooftops like snow, catching the sun and setting the neighborhood aglitter. Suspended conveyor belts, pipes, and railroad overpasses weave in, out, and over the behemoth buildings. The noise is crushing, the stench of sulfur so powerful that not even a closed car window can keep it at bay. Had Rube Goldberg lost his sense of humor, this is, I imagine, what he would have produced.
    This is the heart of American industrial might, or what’s left of it. The first of the mills was built in the 1850s, and within a hundred years more steel was produced in this stretch of land than anywhere else in the world. The freighters delivered iron ore from Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, and the mills turned the mineral into steel,