I've learned these things since returning to the city that raised me from her
suburbs.
Chicago is a museum of architecture. The downtown area is an arena where different styles of building conspire, one against the other. It is also a breeding ground, the quintessential postmodern landscape.
Of the myriad beautiful views, I must say that it is from the corner of Ohio and LaSalle that one can most clearly get a picture of why the city is beautiful. Facing toward the John Hancock Building, one sees residential and office skyscrapers crawling, centipedelike, up the sky. Hancock looks haughtily down upon them in the distance, grand even to these giants with the alien enormity of the Sears Tower looming out of view.
Right across the street is the new MacDonald's, big and artsy and sophisticated in a way that such a banal establishment does not deserve. The Rainforest Cafe as well as the Hard Rock Cafe are well within walking distance. Whimsical buildings add perspective, lessen the gray hardness of the massive skyscrapers behind.
Behind you are old buildings, short and stocky and sweaty with history. Their storefronts have changed dozens of times even since I've been alive. Old dogs, new tricks.
The Tao te Ching says that the Tao is like a river. It sustains all without trying and lays in riverbeds, places where no other would find comfort.
I say that today the train is like the Tao. It moves without concern, upon a track that is covered with piss and rat shit and electricity. It brings anybody, rich or poor, black or white, to wherever they need to go.
Speaking of the train, there are two ways to transfer at no cost from the Blue Line to the Red Line; one is on Washington and one on Jackson.
The Jackson Street transfer is much more modern. It's more brightly lit and better tiled and high tech.
It smells, however, just as much like urine and vomit as the Washington transfer.
Chicago is here because the stockyards would hire anyone. Immigrants running from this war or that who needed employment could work in the massive compound that existed only to kill. It took little basic ability to smash a cow's skull with a hammer.
Because of this the vicious Chicago winter is endured by blacks, Hispanics and Asians, cultures who have been ill-prepared by history. But they stay, they endure.
Now, Chicago had a major hand in the development of jazz and blues and can take nearly sole responsibility for house music.
Culture was developed in Chicago while people in San Diego were on the beach. Culture developed because it was something you could do indoors.
The spirit of Chicago is that of a deer with its leg in a trap. Rather than prance through the glade or chew through its leg, it mixes records. Rather than searching for greener forest, it exports steel.
I have learned much from moving back to the city of my birth. I’ve seen the freedom that poverty can grant every day as I walk back from the California Blue Line stop and I see the bondage of wealth every day when I work at Starbucks downtown. Chicago is, without question, THE postmodern city. It is difficult to tell whether it is so cosmopolitan out of confusion or enlightenment, out of a desire to be many things or a fear of being one.