Pumping Straight to My Heart
An afternoon observing Halsted Street in Lincoln Park.
I really like old buildings.
I like the slope of the eras leaning against one another and the colors, though faded over the years, retaining an odd sort of vintage charm. I like seeing bricks stacked neatly atop one another, time eating at the mortar. I like the quiet of old streets, with craggy sidewalks and aged neon signs. My hometown had a lot of these types of places: a lot of empty interspersed with crowds. There was a lot of peeling paint and flowerpots. These sorts of places are ones that you can stretch a bit of your soul out in without feeling like an intruder.
I like walking down Halsted. There’s a smattering of shops and restaurants, some open and some closed, some colorful and some dreary. There’s a lot for the eye to see, if one cares to look. A lot of what I’ve seen on Halsted reminds me of home because it has those beginning roots of gentrification; take, for example, the Home Depot. It seemed smooth and shiny compared to the worn buildings around it, a monolith of consumerism eking its way into the neighborhood. Not that I’m ungrateful to have a place to buy cheap paint thinner, but there’s something that gets lost in translation when a franchise opens up in an area with only local competition. I probably hold the guitar shop nearby with even more contempt, it just for their ridiculous prices on low-quality keyboards and strings.
That’s not the part I wanted to focus on, though. What makes Halsted feel like home is the character that the street holds. There’s the contrast between old and new that resonates a something deep within me. It’s nostalgic. I feel like I’m walking down 4th Ave or Legion in Olympia. It feels old. My only notes for improvement would probably be to add more trees; the streets and buildings wash our and blur, at times, into one big color. They become an amalgam of sameness in which it is hard to differentiate between the interesting and the mundane, if there even is a difference between the two.
I’m a fan of the antiquated. Many a person has wrongly dubbed me a “hipster”, which is pretty unfortunate. There’s a lot of beauty trapped in the past that has to be uncovered and appreciated, instead of labeled as irrelevant. Nothing is truly ever irrelevant. Anything a person expresses upon can be important.
As I made to cross the street again and loop back to explore what I’d missed, two strangers had a meeting. A man stopped a woman to ask if she could check the time of arrival for a bus. It was a meeting that lasted only a few seconds, information exchanged and social niceties followed, and each one of those seconds was as hypnotizing as watching a pendulum swing. Standing on this old street, I wondered how many other tiny interactions I’d passed through and been oblivious to. I could recall passing a small group of men painting the facade of a building blue, remember that they played music on a radio, but for the life of me I could not remember what they had said to one another or what song rang out. A woman sat on the same bench as me. What aspirations did she have? What dreams? There are billions of worlds that exist only in the minds of our peers, and an innumerable amount of worlds that exist only in our perceptions of the past. One in a billion, I thought. One in a billion.
I was, admittedly, a bit stunned. I tend to get very existential very quickly. Thinking about things like that can be very freeing, in all honesty, because it allows me to drift from worrying about my overly-conscious amount of presence and instead focus on much more important matters, like people. The impressions of people are like fingerprints in clay, the world a kiln that fires each piece. Halsted is a patchwork glue job of a few different ceramics projects. It’s a bit empty, a bit lonely, but maybe it was just a Tuesday afternoon.
I think that the best steakhouses are in old buildings because the good restaurants stay open the longest. Sometimes they’re passed down through a family or some type of hierarchy, maybe skill-based. I wouldn’t really know of any good places around, though, because I don’t really eat steak. Focal points are important to an area because they attract people, they attract the blood of the city, new and old. One focal point around the Lincoln Park campus would likely be the statue outside the Student Center; it’s a point of interest and even has benches nearby. According to J. Jacobs, urban planners in the 1950s made the mistake of creating lifeless, sprawling spaces that didn’t actually contribute to the life of the city. This can be found in some areas in Chicago. Some places aren’t very walkable in the sense that the people in a neighborhood don’t have access to services they should. An example of this would be food deserts or gentrified areas that don’t actually provide any real services, just a base level access to needs (to reference a guided walk, Subways and cell phone stores instead of laundromats and public spaces). These spaces could be improved by actually giving them the attention they need, putting in trash cans, etc. The walkability of Chicago, the chance of discovering something old that becomes something new, is something that can change over time. It should eventually become easier to walk the streets and feel like a welcome presence in them.
(Response: 249 words).
(Title from Nirvana — Aneurysm)
