NEIGHBORS AS STRANGERS, Halloween 2017 (nan turpin photograph)
Celebrate this season of the doubling, Actual Self joins Implausible Self. With it comes the sense of peace and possibility. Of all the feasts and fetes Halloween is the one that buys us time, brings us the measure of certainty that we are more than we seem. Trick or Treat, dear friends!
Montrose Park path to Montrose Harbor, Lost Keys (nan turpin photograph)
Today we lost three things. One we found in a pocket; the other is not yet found. The third is lost but we don’t know it yet. None were these keys. Whose doors are locked? Now what happens? These and other questions.
Someone stopped to save these keys for a happy ending they would miss. Someone stopped for someone else’s happy ending. That’s a good day in Chicago.
This is the summer we learn to play a new game with nature, leave the house with no umbrella. Whether rain’s forecast or not doesn’t matter. It’s the 2014 summer of sudden sun and sudden dark. Yesterday the sun turned us all to butter. The glare blinded us to each others’ charms. And by the time we crossed a street the sun dissolved into a black sky coming for us out of the west.
Downtown Chicago foreign tourists waited for lights and glanced west down Architecture Canyon to see that dark coming. “Oh la la! We’re in for it!” They laugh which means they have some place to be nearby. The rest of us are, distracted, what are the odds? Run for it or shelter here under this corporate canopy? Is merely staying dry worth squandering one’s precious store of caution? Playing it safe gets boring pretty fast so some of us bolt and out there in the wet you can tell the people who know dry shortcuts and the ones who just want to get inside.
Thing is once you’re entirely wet, might as well enjoy it.
Today, Sunday, it’s so humid in Chicago that all those wet clothes are still hanging damp on their pegs.
HAVE TO GET OUT SOMETIME
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This reporter has had the happy use of the refreshed Damen Brown Line station on the west side of Chicago this summer. The environs thereabout have been, still are gentrifying, fast, like a rapid heartbeat. Just north Lawrence Avenue is getting a new surface and median planters down the street. The “ask” for condos and homes rises with sellers wondering if they’re asking “enough.” We are in the days of Never Enough.
The couple of blocks around this elevated train station are small, local, neighborhood businesses, eating spots that don’t rely on the week-end aggression of high-end brunching, places where you can slide in and still get a malted milk…unless the chocolate malt you’re trying to pull through the straw is actually a retro-malted “like in the day.” Hard to tell what’s real these days when nostalgia stands for history and a higher “ask.”
But this little dot of a neighborhood has the real feel of the real deal in large part because of the way you get in and out of it: by the Brown Line, Damen Station. This 1907 station was the design work of CTA engineers. No frills, a compact, functional station part of moving people through a changing city.
Today we can look on-line at Yelp comments presumably posted by the “users” of this station. They are mixed, from completely alienated (homesick?) to delighted tourist, to wanting more attention to where Chicagoans meet Chicago, on an unsheltered el platform in any kind of weather. And there are the posts by people who simply love the waiting room.
They and we dwell on the finishings, the glazed brick, the wood paneling and the waiting room furnishings made of suitcases. We love to be in this waiting room because it is artful anachronism. The old leather luggage with its brass fittings remind us of the fortitude of travelers whose empty luggage was heavier than anything they could put in it.
We recall a time when a subway station was treated like a train station, with people sitting inside, waiting for their train to pull into the station. Even if the 1907 station was a crowded panicky place with passengers rushing to their trains, this waiting room suggested something more genteel, like a miniature Union Station, the gateway to America.
The most annoyed Yelp commenters are fixed in their own, current time. They know they have no time to “wait” in a sheltered waiting room or sit on an artful bench. They will never use time that way. They “have places to go” in the words of one. They have a device to consult that waits for nothing, even as they bound up the stairs up to the platform and closing doors of the train they are missing because someone back there on the stairs wouldn’t get out of the way. Places to be, places to go, no time, time is money, out of time. Damen Brown Line Station.
DAMEN BROWN LINE EL STATION
nan turpin photographs
Additional Sources:
WE CAN’T FIND THIS…
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…AND WE CAN’T FIND THIS
OR THIS
OR EVEN THIS
UNLESS WE TAKE THIS PATH INSTEAD OF THAT TO GET TO THIS:
BECAUSE WE WANT THIS:
Chicago’s week in sound was a full one. The Air Show made us hit the ground and remember so many places in the world where it’s more than noise. It stopped us talking and moving, waiting for the planes to pass then take up sentences where we left them hanging at altitudes lower than aviation.
And we had the last three concerts of this summer season for the Grant Park Orchestra, the people’s orchestra that performs imaginatively designed programs in the Frank Gehry bandshell of Millennium Park. We are outside, on the lawn, under the city lights that obscure the stars. Within the precincts of this lawn we are allowed to drink, champagne from paper cups or elaborately set camping tables with china and linens and all the free music we can absorb over the warm months.
In this town we are proud of the accoustics of this outdoor music stage. It took a little adjusting after they opened ten years ago but it was Chicago and even when we couldn’t hear in some places of the lawn we knew they were “on it.” And soon enough it was the best place on earth to drink wine, listen to music and release small children into the wild of blankets and baskets and cheap folding chairs.
This week the Air Show reminded us of permanent war, one edge of the human spectrum. The concerts in the park reminded us of the other side of human: peace, solidarity and that the “oceanic feeling” is still possible in the 21st century.
CHICAGO SOUNDS LIKE
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Waiting for Trains: Riverside to Chicago
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More money this year so Chicago hired Blue Angels to tear up the sky in the Air Show. Two days of booming, snarling, dangerously precise aircraft, a full weekend 10a.m. to 3pm Saturday and Sunday, that’s what was scheduled. They’d been rehearsing since Thursday and we knew what to expect: that simulated experience of a civilian population under attack.
And so many of us just left town for the weekend or as many hours as we could manage. Union Station was in a panic Saturday morning as part of Chicago swarmed platforms to get out and hordes of suburbanites, weary of their silence, spilled out of arriving trains.
They wanted our noise and we wanted their quiet.
What we got was an afternoon of waiting for trains at suburban grade crossings and hearing the suburban soundtrack of nearby expressways – muffled by 19th century landscaping – and train bells and horns.
So this is why they only come into town for attack planes not crashing into each other. Like those stunt planes, city and suburb come close but don’t collide and when the show’s over we all take off in our different directions. And between us are the rails and the endless, clanging trains.
Today it’s Sunday, foggy in the morning and still very overcast in the afternoon. Chicago is quiet, no planes, no one ducking at the dining room table as part of the Air Show cuts it close over their building. Have they been grounded? We’ll find out tomorrow. The usual city roar sounds pleasantly muted today. It’s like crickets, if we were out in the country. We live with it.
Trackside tomato patch and Chinese containers all the way home.
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This is Phase II.
Before it was just the garbage cans back here, a couple of beat up parked cars, long-term parking, until someone gets gas money or a new tire kind of parking. That was Phase I.
This is Phase II: Street talent takes the wall; maybe they got paid for this one. They should’ve got paid for this one. Here’s the whole thing:
Phase II is when the functions don’t change: still garbage pick up here, still parking (better cars now). Here’s Phase II Context:
This is a full service lost corner of the Uptown neighborhood. Once and still somewhat a gateway neighborhood in Chicago, American Indians, Appalachian working poor. A lot of life packed into a solid neighborhood not far from the lake.
Come back in 6 months and this little patch might be Phase III. They’ll want to keep it for the “urban grit” that can add an extra $100K to a condo’s asking. But it will be clean grit. There might be planters among the dumpsters to show someone’s in control, don’t cross them. If there are cars parked they’ll cost as much as some of those Phase I-II apartments in the background (see above).
But that’s Phase III and if it wants to happen to Uptown it hasn’t yet. Let’s watch this neighborhood survive. Phase II is plenty good.
PARKING/GALLERY nan turpin photograph
It’s the overcast, the cloudy, the dismal or even gloomy day that brings out the best in our landscapes.
Different near the lake
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Early morning. Some of night time left. A trick of the light.
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