Whispers of the Old Loop

The first time I noticed Chicago was at twenty-three, standing under the L tracks at Damen on a January night in 1986, waiting for a train that turned out to be the wrong line. I had been in the city eight months and still walked around it like a guest. There was a smell of cold iron and something faintly sweet — a bakery on 18th Street that opened at three in the morning to make pan dulce for the Pilsen factories. I remember thinking that no one had ever told me a city could smell like bread at four o'clock in the morning. After that I started staying out on purpose.

The shape of an empty street

I worked as a stagehand for twenty-eight years. Mostly the Chicago Theatre, sometimes the Cadillac Palace, a few unhappy summers at a riverboat in Joliet that I would rather not discuss. The work ends late. You finish a strike at one in the morning, you have a beer with the rigging crew, and by two-thirty you are walking south on State Street with that particular kind of fatigue that only theater people and surgeons recognize — too tired to sleep, too awake to stop noticing things.

What I started noticing, around 1991 or 1992, was that Chicago has two cities living inside it. There is the day city, which is loud and obvious and belongs to everyone. And then there is the night city, which belongs to almost no one, a few bartenders in Avondale, the cleaning crews at the Mercantile Exchange, a man named Reggie who used to sell me coffee from a cart at Wabash and Adams until his daughter made him retire. The night city has different rules. Sound carries differently. A pigeon that wakes up under the bridge at Dearborn will make a noise you have never heard a pigeon make in the daytime, because in the day it would be drowned out.

I started carrying a small spiral notebook. The first entries are embarrassing, I was trying to write like Studs Terkel and failing. But after about a year I gave up trying to be literary about it and started writing down things that were actually true. The way the steam from a manhole on Lake Street will pause for a second when a train passes overhead. The fact that the lights inside the lobby of the old Schoenhofen Brewery building sometimes flicker in a pattern that, if you watch it long enough, looks almost intentional. I am not saying it is intentional. I am saying it looks that way at three a.m. in February, which is a different statement.

Pilsen, after the brewery

Pilsen is the neighborhood I know best, and the one I am the most careful talking about, because it has changed three times since I moved into it and I do not want to be one of those old men who pretends his version was the correct one. The version I knew was the one between the bakeries and the murals on 16th Street — a working neighborhood with a Czech name that had become a Mexican neighborhood that was, by the late nineties, beginning to become something else again. The records of those years are not in the official histories. They are in the things people taped to their windows. There is a building on Throop Street where a woman put a small handwritten sign in the front window every Easter for almost fifteen years. The sign said, in Spanish and in English, the names of her three brothers who had died in different decades and different countries. I never met her. I do not know what happened to the building. The sign is gone now.

If you are interested in the history of the neighborhood from a sourced and documented angle, the Wikipedia entry for Pilsen, Chicago is actually quite good, it has the dates and the demographics and the photographs of the brewery before it was renovated. I link to it because it is the kind of careful slow record that the internet was supposed to be made of, and rarely is anymore. The reasons I keep my notebooks are different, I am not a historian, I am a man who liked walking, but the impulse is the same: to write something down before it stops being there.

A page someone sent me

Last winter a friend of mine, a retired French translator who lives in Quebec now, sent me a link to a small French-language site she had been reading, the kind of place where someone takes the time to think about what reflection actually means in the age we have ended up in. I am not going to pretend my French is good enough to follow every sentence. But I sat with a translation app and a cup of bad coffee for an hour and a half one Sunday afternoon and I read most of it, and what struck me was that there are still people, in different countries and different languages, who are doing the same kind of careful slow work I have been doing in my notebooks. The site is called La Cellule Grise. If you read French, or are willing to use a translator, it is the kind of place where something quiet still has a little bit of weight.

And there is another one. A blog out of Belgium that I cannot remember how I found — I think it was through one of the comment threads on a long-defunct French food site. The writer there has been keeping a personal journal for years and years, with photographs and small daily things, and although it is in another language than mine, the practice is recognizable. There is a kind of internationalfreemasonry of people who write down small things. We do not all know each other. But we recognize each other when we see each other.

I am not interested in arguing that the French site, or the Belgian one, are doing anything more important than what is being done in any small town in Indiana by anyone who keeps a careful diary. I am only saying that the practice exists everywhere, and that it is one of the few practices left that has not been captured by the parts of the internet that want to sell you something. It is voices doing similar work, in many different rooms.

What the city remembers

I retired in 2018. I still walk. Most of my old route is unrecognizable now — the bar at Hubbard and LaSalle is a luxury car showroom, the all-night diner on Clark closed during the pandemic and reopened as something with reclaimed wood and small plates, and the freight elevator at the back of the Chicago Theatre that I once spent forty minutes trapped inside has been replaced with something newer and faster and less interesting. But the night city is still there. You just have to walk a little farther to find it.

Two weeks ago I was on Lower Wacker around midnight, going nowhere in particular, and I saw a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a service entrance. Not a city sweeper. A private one. He had on a clean uniform and he was sweeping with the kind of attention you almost never see in public work anymore. I stopped and watched him for maybe two minutes and then I moved on, because I did not want to make him self-conscious. But I wrote it down later, in the same little notebook I have been carrying since 1992. October 14, 2024. Lower Wacker, west of Wabash. A man sweeping with great care a piece of sidewalk that no one would notice was clean.

The city does not remember things by itself. It remembers things because people like that man, and people who write down what people like that man do, decide that something deserves to be remembered. The records do not have to be elaborate. They do not have to be public. They do not have to find an audience. They just have to exist. After that, the city takes care of the rest.

I will leave it at that. The night, after all, prefers its own company.