Lost in Light Pollution
A Field Guide to Chicago’s East Loop
Chicago curls into the shores of Lake Michigan like a cat to a lap. Its purrs echo through the motorways, its blood pumping through each street along the feet of passers-by. It breathes, like any city, and tiredly blinks its eyes awake each morning. There is a certain grace to the comings and goings of people. Buildings, new and old, towering and squat, made up the facade of the city. The street moves people, and should in every sense of the word. Move physically, from one place to another. Move mentally, learning each new surrounding, exposing oneself to new people and experiences. Move spiritually, in the application of those truths and embracement of the beauty of the world. This innate beauty creeps its way into Chicago. It is as natural as blinking. The brick and the concrete and paint and well-kept greenery — it creates a collage of something meaningful. It is a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of thing. It is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. In making this field guide, exploring the East Loop, my goal was to show how this shines through in the streets of Chicago.
The first stop on the field guide is at the corner of W Congress Parkway and S Plymouth Court. Here, there are some aged, painted advertisements on the side of a brick building. Old paint like this is like getting a look back a bit in the history of the building. What was this place before? The base color has faded to an almost-grey, and the red to dark rust. It shows craft and delicate care.
There is more to beauty than just the intentional, however; an example would be an alleyway near Dearborn & Harrison. Here, the lines of the street lead the eye straight down it. The blocky structure of the building to the right sits discordant with its flat neighbor on the left, adding an asymmetry that diversifies the plane of view. Perhaps it had been intentional to juxtapose these two textures together, but there is another element: what is on the street itself. The signs, like power lines, lining the walkway. The hulking figures of the dumpsters, bringing form out into the street. The elements that make the streets human make them beautiful.
My feet led me down and around a few more blocks, looping my thread around signposts and newspaper boxes. I wandered down Wells St, and up Van Buren, and right down Clark again. My mind was wandering, as I walked, as it often does. I thought about the lives of the people around me. I thought of how every moment was a blink of a synapse, of how each minute impression became important over time. How the larger things faded into insignificance, when I focused on the movement of people, when I focused on the tapping of shoes. These thoughts all seemed to collect themselves around my head like a swarm of gnats. There wasn’t any hope of swatting them away. They linger with me still, these questions about people and their places, the curiosity I hold for the lives of the mass. Who is who is who? And most importantly, why?
Where Clark meets Polk, there was a lot of interesting things to see. I liked a sticker, in particular, that said, “QUEERS”. It looked like a Sega font and lined itself neatly with the band of the garbage can. To the left, a woman stood on a ladder as she painted the sign for a restaurant. Her hands were deftly confident, despite the layer of gloves. She waved at me. I gave her a thumbs-up. This reminded me of the first building I took note of, and its faded lettering. Would this, too, become a hidden treasure? Maybe so. I would hope that it would last, that it would remain for a long enough time that another passerby can stop and think a thought.
Trotting along these streets, “…I am surrounded by things moving past me, or stuck — taken together, it is a widening circle of objects that offer enticing points of entry or mere dead ends,” (Schaberg, Moving Bodily Sideways). Across from Dearborn Station is new construction. Dark red beams supply a framework for the building. In a way, it is a snapshot of growth, or regrowth. It is the seeds of something new, the bones of the city laid bare.
Reaching State, I veered left again so as to loop back to a central point. Then, passing by the restaurants I’ve passed by dozens of times before, something caught my eye. On the side of one of the buildings, in a little outcropping of space with peeling walls and stains, sat some graffiti. It wasn’t anything complex, or legible, but the simplicity of its design was immediately appealing. I can only hope that it doesn’t say something offensive, but I assume that if it did, it would have been scrubbed off or painted over. The shapes and curvature of the lines move the eye across the image. It is simple and neat, adding a degree of interest to its grimy wall.
The el passed by overhead. I moved through space and space again, winding myself into all the past paths I had taken. I thought about all of the people winding along with me, like little clocks, like little marching toys. I thought about our space. A theme throughout this course has been taking back public space. With this in mind, I thought about how these people around me all moved in tandem with one another. I thought about the heartbeat of the city, and how it resides within these places that house these people. “The reclamation of civic space does more than change the city: it creates citizens,” (Hollis, Cities belong to us). It is not just a vague “people”, it is a People. It is the interconnectedness between person and place, the linking between citizen and citizen. These spaces that we make create the boundaries of our lives, seeping into every part of our existence.
As the evening began to set in, I found myself wandering further from home. While my original intention had been to map the area around my dorm, a genuine, burning curiosity started to well in me. I wanted to go further. I wanted to move bodily forward, and into the swells of the city. Time, though, bested me. It was getting cold. I was getting hungry. Half-heartedly, I turned back and treaded up State; I had weaved through Balbo and 8th for a while, bobbing between State and Michigan to try to decide where I was going. A breeze seemed to rip right through me, and with it, I drifted back home.
I’ve spent a moderate amount of time trotting about the ley lines of my neighborhood. The streets take me further out, coaxing me into their depths with the promise of people. In this way, “this magician of a street has created the illusion in our heads that there are adventure and romance around us,” (Hecht, A thousand and one afternoons in Chicago). People are what make each place that we see, in their ever-changing and ugly way, beautiful; it is in the imprint that they make on the world. It is in the glow of the street lights and the buzz of the crowd. It is in the artwork on sides of buildings, and the stickers on garbage cans. Throughout the city, there is the evidence of love; carved into these bricks is an astounding declaration of here-ness. Beauty presents itself in an astounding number of ways. The streets of Chicago are built on this idea of people, and that in itself is beautiful. Who is who is who? The questions linger with me still.
