A Valentine for Chicago

Working-class Polish bars on the Northwest Side in the 1950s convinced Nelson Algren's lover Simone de Beauvoir of Chicago's world-class status as much as Burnham's lakefront. But Algren's art was the biggest factor of all.

"Summer on Seventy-First Street, when I was a Southside sprout, was blue as peace," he wrote."The cross above St. Columbanus caught the light of a holier daybreak than ours while the wan gas-flares still wavered. Then the bells of early mass rang out, for our own morning had lightened the alleys at last. And long after the twilight's last lamplighter had passed, ladder across his handlebars and gas-torch against his shoulder, somebody else's twilight burned on behind that cross. The light that lingered, the light that held, belonged to somebody else's night. Somebody else's somebody else, who ran daybreak and evening too.”

Somewhere in back of the frenetic power of Chicago's skyline, there is after all a real lakefront woven of wind, sand, and stars, de Saint-Exupery's elements. That becomes clear when we leave an un-airconditioned Rogers Park flat on a warm autumn evening, sockless sneakers slapping on cracked sidewalks under tree canopies, moving past buzzing front porches, down old sand dunes toward the lake.

Then it seems all around us, even before we reach it. Amid cool breezes and stars and reminders of life's immensities, we feel the phantom of the lakefront as Native Americans experienced it, with its low line of dunes and lonely pines and marshes beyond. Somewhere in such an Indian Summer evening revery, where the North Woods and the Great Lakes and the tallgrass prairie meet, is the real lakefront, far from Soldier Field and the Burnham Plan and City Hall and the virtual cyberspace of the global economy. Somewhere far from all these lie the margins still more powerful than them all.

(adapted from Illinois Issues, 8/01, "Sony Field Anyone?" by Alf Siewers)