That Voice

On the day after of the passing of the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr, I found myself driving to work after a treatment at the University of Chicago Hospital, just a stone's throw from Rainbow/PUSH headquarters, the organization that Jackson founded in 1971. It dawned on me that morning that we had just lost the last significant figure in American history that has remained a constant, relevant presence on the scene since my childhood.

Rev. Jackson first appeared on my radar in 1968, in the terrible days following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I was not quite ten years old at the time.

Like a figure out of central casting with his athletic 6'4" frame, his charisma, his endless supply of self-confidence, his movie star good looks soon to feature feature an impressive afro, and his preference for casual attire, Jesse Jackson cast a stark contrast to the more conservative, buttoned-down image of Dr. King and most of his other associates who would try to fill the void after the great Civil Rights icon's death. 

In a word, the rough-around-the-edges Jesse Jackson was the personification of cool.

On top of that, while he may have lacked some of his mentor's gravitas, Jackson was an equally gifted orator, whose delivery and rhetoric had the power to move people to tears, to anger and most important, to action.

All of that in time contributed to Jesse Jackson's inheriting the role as the de facto leader of the American Civil Rights movement.

Of course, he wasn't Dr. King, something he no doubt was reminded of endlessly since April 4, 1968. The one thing he happily lacked in abundance was MLK's most distinctive trait, the role of martyr.

That 's clear even in our day as folks you know damned sure would have excoriated Martin Luther King when he was alive, trip over themselves to praise the dead icon today. 

They don't trip over themselves like that for Jesse Jackson and his own successors.

That said, I've had plenty of occasions over the past 58 years to roll my own eyes over some of the antics of Jesse Jackson, especially the tendency he had to never to shy away from attention. I wasn't alone, in a 1972 article in the Chicago Sun Times, columnist Mike Royko dubbed him "Jetstream Jesse." 

Lest you think those are the opinions of two old white guys grumbling about black people "who don't know their place", no less a figure than Martin Luther King himself was skeptical about the effects Jackson's over-the-top personal ambition and arrogance would have on the movement he led.

Was Jackson a self-serving, attention seeking prima donna? Of course he was. And I might add, we are all the better for it.   

Now it's time for you to roll your eyes at me. Reverend Jackson happened to pass away as I was in the middle of writing my last post, looking for insights from William Shakespeare on the political situation we find ourselves in today.

Wouldn't you know it, the Bard has some insight on Jesse Jackson's ambition as well. 

In Act II Scene 1 of the play Julius Caesar, one of the plotters in the plan to assassinate the great Caesar says this: 

I have not known when his affections swayed
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.

Shakespeare uses the word "ambition" sparingly in his plays but when he does, it is always as a negative trait, much like we would use the term "power hungry" today. Here Brutus is expressing his fear that Caesar has the ambition to become king, something the people of Rome during the time of the Republic stood steadfast against. He is offering no evidence of this, but rather points to examples of aspiring tyrants cultivating the trust of the lower classes, in Roman terms the plebeians, only to turn their backs on them once they ascend that ladder of ambition.

After Brutus and his fellow conspirators assassinate Caesar, the crowd at first is drawn to their side when Brutus makes their case. Then Mark Antony, a strong supporter of Caesar's is allowed by Brutus to speak to the crowd. At first he seems to take the conspirators' side:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

But he goes on to brilliantly dismantle their argument piece by piece until by the end of his speech, the crowd demands the heads of the conspirators. First, Antony points out Caesar's commitment to Rome and its people:

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

In other words, Caesar could have pocketed all of the spoils of war for himself, but he didn't.  

One of the most substantial differences between Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, contrary to their relative appearances, is that Dr. King was highly skeptical of capitalism and advocated for the complete redistribution of wealth. Were he alive today he would be branded a radical socialist. 

On the other hand, Jesse Jackson believed that the most practical way to lift people out of poverty, was to reform capitalism, opening it up to provide opportunities for the disadvantaged. In that vein he successfully challenged both Wall Street and Silicon Valley which helped many people of color and women become financially successful. Had he played his cards right, through those connections he made with big business, he could easily have made himself a very wealthy man, but he didn't.

Next in Mark Antony's speech, he testified to Caesar's commitment to the poor: 

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

I don't think I need to add anything here regarding Jesse Jackson's commitment to the poor. That is self evident, especially after he made it to the top of that ladder of ambition. He was fond of saying: "Don't look down on anyone, unless you're trying to lift them up." His commitment extended to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised of all colors, including the LGBT community, back when it was not popular to do so.

Finally Marc Antony addressed the chief concern of the conspirators, Caesar's kingly ambitions:

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Jesse Jackson indeed had lofty ambitions, which in our time we don't necessarily see as a bad thing. He ran twice for the nomination of the Democratic Party to be their candidate for president, in 1984 and 1988. The odds against him winning the presidency however, especially in 1984 against an extremely popular incumbent, Ronald Reagan were enormous. The man who won the Democratic nod that year, former vice president Walter Mondale, lost the general election in a landslide. 

I have little doubt that in his heart of hearts, Jesse Jackson knew he didn't stand a chance to win the presidency those years. And yet, his were two of the most significant presidential campaigns in modern American history as they created a seismic shift in national politics, opening doors for people who before never would have stood a chance for success in American politics. Jackson never got to that promised land, but many successful lawmakers, governors, one Speaker of the House, one Vice President and one President of the United States did, all while standing upon Jesse Jackson's broad shoulders. 

Here is the closing of Jackson's 1988 Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, not far from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. King began his career and where his final resting place is. In this clip you'll find a full display of Jackson's compassion, his empathy, his powerful oratory, his self-confidence, his desire to bring people of all races together..... and yes his audacity and his self-importance, with perhaps a little blarney thrown in for good measure. 

It's all there. 

But I dare you to watch this and not be moved to tears. 

Without Jesse Jackson's passion, his insight, and especially his chutzpah, what would we have left? Most likely the guy who ended up winning the Democratic nomination that year and went on to be trounced in the general election in November, Michael Dukakis.

With all due respect of course.

The tag phrase that comes out at the end of the clip, "Keep hope alive" will more than likely be Jesse Jackson's epitaph. But there is another phrase of his that I will forever associate with him: 

"I am somebody"

Like another truism that was coined much later, in a perfect world, "I am somebody" should never have had to have been said. But our world is far from perfect and for far too long, black people were treated like nobodies in a country where black lives didn't matter.

I don't remember the first time I heard Jesse Jackson deliver that line in call-and-response fashion that is so common in the black church, but it couldn't have been long after I first became aware of him. I realized immediately that he wasn't only speaking to his audience in the room, he was also speaking to me, a white kid who had just moved with his family to a new neighborhood, and to a new school where my new classmates made me feel like an outsider, a nobody.

At a very young age, it was from that moment on I knew that despite all the baggage he may have carried with him, Jesse Jackson was the real deal.

Today, the day of Jesse Jackson's public going home ceremony on the far South Side of Chicago, back at the hospital about a mile from where he will be laid to rest tomorrow, I had the opportunity to ring a bell signifying my completing twenty sessions of radiation therapy. At that moment, Jesse Jackson's voice saying  "Keep Hope Alive" took on an entirely new meaning to me. 

That voice, the voice of my generation and several to follow, is the voice of the conscience of our nation. It is a voice that death will not silence, not as long as people are willing to listen.

The Chicago Convention

The head coach of this year's U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball team and of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr let everyone know last week at the DNC in Chicago how time, like Old Man River, just keeps rolling along. Reminding the crowd of the history of the building they were in, he said:  "You young people, Google Michael Jordan and you can read all about it." 

The nineties were a great time to be alive and living in Chicago, not only because those were relatively calm days for both the city and the world, at least compared to today, but Chicago was also in the midst of a bona fide sports dynasty. Anywhere in the world you went, if you told someone you were from Chicago in those days, you would more than likely be greeted by the response: "Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan!"

Not anymore.

Today we're back to being known as the home of Al "rat-a-tat-tat" Capone, as we had for decades before the arrival of Number 23 from North Carolina, on the Southwest shore of Lake Michigan. 

Boy, those were the days.

Likewise, until last week, the mention these four words: "Chicago Democratic National Convention", inevitably evoked memories of riots in Grant Park, of cops armed with tear gas and billy clubs and more than willing to use them, of the image of young protestors climbing on Alexander Phimster Proctor and Augustus Saint Gaudens' equestrian statue of General John Logan across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, of the chant "The Whole World is Watching", of Hippies, Yippies, Mayor Richard J. Daley and Judge Julius Hoffmann, and of the (in)famous Chicago Seven, sometimes Eight Trial. I have no doubt people today who weren't around back then, remember those things more than they remember the candidates who were picked to represent the Democratic Party in the November election of that year, Hubert H. Humprey, and his running mate Edmund Muskie.

That of course was the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968. *

Never mind that before the 2024 DNC, Chicago had already hosted 25 presidential nominating conventions. the last being in 1996. more than any other city. Hardly anyone including yours truly remembers much about that last one. It could be because there was little drama, as the convention served as a rubber stamp sending the incumbent president, Bill Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore en route to their second term in office. Or maybe it was just because Michael Jordan and the Bulls were still dominating all the headlines in town.  

That convention is most famous for having been the first held in this city since the disastrous '68 convention and for the collective sigh of relief the city fathers (and mothers) breathed after they pulled it off, practically without a hitch.

Hard as it would be to imagine for anyone living in the nineties, almost thirty years later we're living in times that more resemble 1968 than 1996. Which is why trepidation was high that this convention would be remembered more for what went on outside of the United Center than within it.

Fortunately, that didn't happen. Starting with the Democratic Party, normally a fractious group even in quieter times, who came together nearly unanimously in support of their chosen representatives in November, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz. Not only that, but they coalesced in a remarkably short period of time after President Biden announced he would not seek a second term late in July.

By doing so, they seemed to be taking my advice. Is it possible more folks look at this blog than I realize? 

The biggest fear was that the protests, which occur during every presidential nominating convention, would turn violent as opposition to the U.S. support of Israel in the war in Gaza, is understandably running at a fever pitch. I believe kudos must go out to both the protestors, their leaders, AND to the Chicago Police Department and all the other law enforcement officials involved., who took great heed in learning from their mistakes of the past. While there were some scuffles and arrests, this convention will forever be remembered for what took place on the floor rather than in the streets. 

And while we're at it, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also deserve heaps of credit for setting the tone by insisting that we can both grant people their First Amendment right to protest and avoid violence if everyone works together. 

But will the words "Chicago DNC" from this point forward evoke 2024 rather than 1968? 

Who knows, I guess that all depends on what happens this November. 

* It should go without saying that prior to the convention that just ended, there were many remembrances of the 1968 Convention published and broadcast in both the national and local media. I was struck in nearly all of the ones I read and listened to, how the narrative about what happened has been cast to a very selective point of view. The general consensus is that the blame for the violence that occurred in Grant Park and other parts of the city during the convention lies entirely on the shoulders of Mayor Daley and the Chicago Police Department.

What is hardly ever mentioned in the discussion of the '68 Convention is the context in which it took place. In the contentious era of the late to mid-sixties, between the War in Vietnam and the struggle for Civil Rights in this country, riots had taken place all over the country. Two of the most well-known prior to 1968 were the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, and the Detroit Riots of 1967. While not nearly as destructive in terms of lives lost and property damaged, campus unrest took place in major universities all over the country at that time. 

But in 1968, all hell broke loose. The watershed moment of that year took place on April 4 of that year when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The response all over the country was swift and devastating. In the days that followed Dr. King's assassination, much of Chicago was in flames.

It was during these riots that decimated neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side, that Mayor Daley issued his notorious "shoot to kill arsonists, shoot to main looters" order to the Chicago Police and the Illinois National Guard. 

In the shadow of the devastation, the DNC would take place in Chicago barely four months later. and the Daley administration, still reeling from the events of April, was steadfast in the determination that with the eyes of the country focused on this city, law and order would prevail during the convention. 

Meanwhile anti-war groups from all over the country set their sights on being in Chicago and made public their plans to do so. Some expressed their desire to simply to march peacefully while others planned to participate in acts of civil disobedience including spiking the city's water system with LSD. 

The Daley administration rightly or wrongly took all the threats seriously and vowed none of it would happen under their watch. 

The rest as they say, is history. 

There is no question that Daley and the Police grossly over-reacted to the goings on during the convention. But it also should be noted that the hit this city took only months before, certainly colored the officials' response to the chaos during the convention. In none of the accounts of the events of the 1968 convention I encountered, were the riots that took place after Dr. King's assassination even mentioned. One report on the radio which was filled with a number of factual errors that I easily spotted, inexplicably played the recording of Daley's "shoot to kill" order in the context of the convention rather than its proper context of the West Side riots.

Stuff like this is what makes history such an interesting and vibrant subject, especially when you've lived through it. 

Where Are You From?

The name of a mutual friend came up the other day during a conversation with a colleague on the morning ride to work. On an Instagram post, our friend wrote about her new job and added how happy she was to be "back home in Ohio." 

This got me wondering about the places where we come from, the place we identify as our home.

Our friend originates from a fairly small town, so it probably shouldn't be surprising that growing up, her day-to-day world existed beyond her own hamlet. That might be why people from small towns tend to identify at least as much with their home state as their hometown.

But I've noticed that particularly in Ohio, state identity extends beyond small towns and into decent sized cities like Toledo, Akron and Dayton, and even into the three major metropolises, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus.

Consider this post coming from a Cleveland website celebrating the "20 best things about living in Ohio." The same site also published a piece listing the 12 things to hate about living in Ohio.  Interestingly, some of the same things appear on both lists!

It's not as if you wouldn't find a Chicago publication describing the state this city happens to be in. But it would be written in much the same way as if it had it been about Wisconsin, Indiana or Michigan, in other words, close-by places to spend your free time when you want to get out of the big city. In fact, I would venture to guess that Chicagoans spend far more of their free time visiting places in those three states than destinations in their own state.

My family certainly does.

The thing is this, with the exception of writing it on our return address or during tax time, most Chicagoans hardly ever think about Illinois, let alone identify with it.

It turns out, outsiders don't always identify Chicago with Illinois either. In what has become for better or worse, the unofficial anthem of this city, here is where the song's author, the great bluesman Robert Johnson places our fair city:

Oh, Baby don't you want to go...

Oh, Baby don't you want to go...

Back to the land of California

to my sweet home, Chicago.

Don't we wish?  

Contemporary performers change the lyrics to be more geographically correct. Eric Clapton simply changed one word making the line read: "Back from the land of California." 

But the more common contemporary line is this: "back to the same ol' place.." 

How lame is that?

Anyway...

While we here in the Windy City identify more with our city than our state, our provincialism goes beyond that. Chicago is known as a city of neighborhoods and rightfully so. It is not uncommon, although much less so today than it used to be, for people to live in one neighborhood their entire life. And it goes still deeper than that. A great number of people who grew up in this city identify themselves not with the neighborhood in which they grew up, but with the Roman Catholic parish in which they lived, even if they weren't Catholic and never set foot in the parish church. 

So if you grew up on the South Side, you might say you were from St. Sabina's, Little Flower or Christ the King Parish, and folks, (South Siders that is), would immediately know where you were from. On the North Side you might say you were from Queen of Angels or St. Margaret Mary. Or on the West Side, from Our Lady of Sorrows, or Resurrection Parish which no longer exists today except in the hearts and minds of people who grew up there and still call it their place of origin. 

There is no East Side of Chicago, (that would be the lake), although there is a neighborhood called Eastside which happens to be just south of the neighborhood called South Chicago. And if you happen to be from there, you might say you were from St. Michael the Archangel Parish. Just don't confuse that with St. Michael's in Old Town, on the North Side.

That might raise a few eyebrows because Chicagoans if they identify with a parish or not, definitely identify with which side of town they're from, North Side or South Side. Then there's the West Side, a little harder to define, technically the part of the city west of the Chicago River, but in reality, it's the area west of the river that straddles the north/south border of the city, Madison Street by a few miles or so in either direction. West Siders sometimes identify themselves as either North or South Siders, unless of course like me, they don't. 

Perhaps the most tangible symbol of the two sides of Chicago are our two Major League baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox. Their ballparks are virtually equidistant from Madison Street. Home plate of Wrigley Field where the Cubs play, sits 36 blocks north of Madison and its counterpart at "new" Comiskey Park, (I refuse to call it by its corporate sponsor name), home of the White Sox, is 35 blocks south.

One of the first things you learn when you move to Chicago is that you can root for one team or the other, but not for both. I'd have to say White Sox fans hold more of a grudge, which is common for South Siders who often live with a chip on their shoulder. A White Sox fan will proudly tell you that his or her two favorite baseball teams are the Sox, and any team playing the Cubs. 

As I've said before in this space, it's kind of an unrequited hate. There are Cub fans who claim to feel the same about the Sox, but they really don't.

This is something people outside of Chicago just can't comprehend. I remember being in a bar in Savannah, Georgia during the baseball playoffs and quite surprisingly the Cubs were still playing ball. I struck up a conversation with a local at the joint who, knowing I was from Chicago, said I must be excited that the Cubs were in the playoffs. I told him no, not really because I'm a White Sox fan. 

The guy looked at me like I was from Mars. 

On that train ride mentioned above, my colleague theorized that states for which people have a strong affinity, are perhaps the ones with huge state universities with strong athletic programs, usually football. Ohio certainly is such as state, as is Georgia.

I had never thought of that.

Basketball is the sport Indiana University is most famous for, and in that most state-conscious of states, the nickname of their team is also the nickname of the state, and also how its people proudly refer to themselves, Hoosiers. I can't think of any other state that has adopted an official nickname as enduring or widely accepted. Theories abound but like the term Yankee, no one really has a clue exactly what a Hoosier is or where the name came from, but it's been around since the early 19th century.

A group of Hoosier fans exhibiting their state/school pride on the Chicago L.

The most famous sporting event in the state of Indiana takes place in its capital and largest city, Indianapolis. In case you were wondering how much folks in that city relate to their state, the most poignant moment during the annual Indianapolis 500 motor race is the traditional rendition of the song: Back Home Again in Indiana.

Michigan has two major state universities with sports programs to match. While in Detroit several years ago, I was listening to local sports radio and the topic of conversation was "who do you hate more, Ohio State or Michigan State?" Judging by the response, obviously Detroiters, who have teams represented in all the major professional sports leagues, also love their collegiate Wolverines who play an hour down the road in Ann Arbor, but not Michigan teams in general.

Outside of the Motor City though, I've found that Michiganders, yes that's what they're called, are also very attached to their state, even to the big city. The words, "the corner of Trumbull and Michigan in Corktown" or shortened to just "The Corner", have a magic ring to any person from Michigan above a certain age as they evoke memories of the late, great Tiger Stadium which stood at that intersection in that neighborhood of Detroit. 

Ask someone from Michigan where he or she is from in the state, and I'll bet my first born they'll hold out their right palm, fingers closed together, which is roughly the same shape as the state of Michigan, (excluding the Upper Peninsula), and point on their hand where their town is located. 

Where's Kalamazoo you ask? Why it's right on the lifeline, toward the bottom of the hand. 

How about Traverse City? Around the point where the tip of the pinky meets the ring finger. 

Saginaw? Just below the base of the thumb.

And so on. 

Unlike Michiganders, Illinoisans outside of Chicago (known by us as "downstaters"), don't show much interest in their state's only metropolis but rather, return Chicago's indifference to them in spades. You're just as if not more likely to find St. Louis Cardinal fans in places like Springfield and Carbondale, than Cubs fans. Unfortunately, the territory of White Sox fandom doesn't extend far beyond the southern fringes of the Chicago metropolitan area, which could be one of the reasons Sox fans are perpetually crabby. By contrast, rooting for an out-of-state team in Ohio would practically be grounds for excommunication from membership in the state. 

Illinois is a reliably blue state, ONLY because of Chicago and its dominance over the state's population. Divorce the city from the state and a Democrat wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell to get elected to a statewide office in a Chicago-less Illinois. Obviously, the exact opposite is true up here where Republicans don't even bother to run for local offices. 

Sadly, in these days of extreme polarization in the realm of American politics, the rift between Chicago and Downstate Illinois grows by the minute.

Then there are the states that if independent from the U.S., would rate by themselves as sizable countries. I'm talking of course about Texas and California, places that have such a strong identity of their own that you couldn't help identifying with them, even if you're from a megalopolis like LA or Houston.

I won't even attempt to crack that egg.

Perhaps the most familiar image of state identification in popular culture is when Dorothy and her dog Toto travel from their completely black and white world and arrive in the magical Technicolor Land of Oz. As they step out of their time and space travel machine, otherwise known as their house, Dorothy famously says: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." 

It's a great line, one I use all the time to describe any out-of-the ordinary situation.

Frank Baum, the author of the novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which inspired the movie, paints a much bleaker image of Kansas and especially of Dorothy's caretaker aunt and uncle than the movie does, so much so, you wonder why on earth the girl is so anxious to get back home. 

Incidentally at the time he wrote the book, Baum called the neighborhood of Logan Square on the West Side of Chicago, just a stone's throw from Humboldt Park and in the parish of St. Sylvester, home.

Just as I did, sixty years later. 

My original home is where I'll wrap this thing up. The truth is, I identify with all those places just mentioned.

Whether you come from a small town, a big city neighborhood or an entire state, whether it's the local parish or a point on the palm of your hand you most identify with, there's still no place like home, even if you can't go there again.

So, where are you from?

Ghost Signs

I read an article yesterday about the frescoes of Ancient Rome. It turns out that the majority of the extant works of art of this type are to be found in the Campania region of Italy which includes the city of Naples, in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. That should be a clue as if you know anything about the history of that area, it should dawn on you that these frescoes must be in the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and smaller towns that were destroyed by the massive eruption of that famous volcano in the year 79AD (or CE if you prefer). 

What struck me was the somewhat indelicate way in which the writer of the article described the condition of the frescoes. She said rather matter-of-factly: "they were preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius." This  is true, had those cities not been destroyed, buried by 20 feet of volcanic pumice and ash and left untouched for nearly two millennia, the frescoes would certainly have been destroyed over the ages by perhaps the greatest threat to historical preservation there is, both then and now, development. 

So it turns out the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius was very good news for the archaeologists and art historians, not to mention the tourist industry, but still very bad news for the roughly two thousand people who died in that catastrophe.

What made the excavations of the buried cities at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius so important, was that they uncovered a portion of an ancient civilization that had never been seen before. We knew scads about Roman politics, their religion, their art, language and literature (the rarified kind that is), their philosophy, and their rich and famous. But before the excavations which began in earnest in the 18th century, we knew very little about the vernacular, the lives of everyday people. 

This is understandable because in normal situations, civilizations preserve what they deem important enough to leave behind for future generations, and discard the trite, the banal, and the embarrassing. With the 79AD eruption, the poor people of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the surrounding region didn't get the chance to curate their legacy. Rather, time stood still and everything from the humblest graffiti, to the great temples, were preserved for eternity. Even their pornography survived, so much intact that today, minors need a permission form signed by their parents in order to see it.

Archaeology takes on many forms and isn't only applied to distant history. About one month ago there was an archaeological discovery of sorts in the city of Chicago. Granted it was not in any stretch of the imagination as momentous, profound nor dramatic as the discovery of Pompeii and its neighbors. But it did, as these things often do, crack open a window into our city's past.

On the north side of Chicago at the intersection of Addison and Ravenswood Streets to be exact, the siding of a late nineteenth century frame building was removed, revealing several signs painted on the original sides of the building. One of the signs, an ad for a brand of sliced bread, is in remarkable condition, a tad ironic since it is on the south elevation of the building meaning before the siding was installed, it would have been exposed to hours of direct sunlight every day. The signs on the north side of the building are much more faded, suggesting they were painted much earlier than the bread sign, that could have very well been covered up by the new siding shortly after it was painted. 

Partially covered by building in the foreground, an old ad for soft serve, sliced bread recently uncovered and a shout out to the archaeologists, er, masonry company that uncovered them.

The bread ad in all its glory from below. The best view no doubt would be from a drone, trying to convince my wife to let me buy one. 

A little context, the building that has been getting a lot of attention of late around town.

A particularly beautiful old sign for the Shell Oil Company. Judging from the design of the logo and the graphics, I'd guess it was painted in the 1920s.

A more humble treatment for a local concern.

Unlike the ruins of Pompeii, these ghost signs will not be visible for long as they are likely to be covered up again by new siding. The good news is the siding will preserve these relics of the past for the delight of a future generation when that siding in turn will be removed.  

POST SCRIPT

That last sentence is both right and wrong. The signs are today no longer visible but not for the reason mentioned above. Last week I visited the site, as it is blocks from my mother's current residence, and sadly discovered that the signs were gone. Happily, the signs have been saved, the wood paneling having been removed from the building just in the nick of time before demolition of the building.

The gaps where the siding supporting the ghost signs were removed to be preserved. 

The Chicago Line

In terms of pure numbers, there have been more murders in Chicago this year, and in many previous years, than any other any American city. It comes as little relief that because of its large population, Chicago ranks anywhere between #10 and #30 (depending on which day and where you check the stats), in murder rate in this country, in other words the number of homicides in relation to the size of the population.     

One could argue because of that second statistic, Chicago is not the "murder capital" of the nation as it is so often referred. That's hardly a bragging right.

Some would diminish the significance of our increasing murder rate as it is concentrated in certain "bad" neighborhoods and not the entire city. High crime rates have historically been associated with areas of poverty combined with ethnic and racial segregation, unemployment, the breakdown of families, the predominance of street gangs and other factors. As the crime and murder rate in much of the city has remained fairly stable, it stands to reason that the murder rate in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago has skyrocketed, well out of proportion with the overall rate of the city as a whole.

Despite not living in a neighborhood with a particularly high murder rate, I don't find any comfort in that. On the contrary. This is my city and every murder, whether it be in affluent Lincoln Park, the economically challenged Englewood, or my neighborhood somewhere in between, Rogers Park, is an unspeakable tragedy.

There is no way to sugar-coat it, we cannot spin the situation to make it better, we are all affected by the horrific number of murders in our city.

Therefore, I'm not averse to Chicago's murder rate being openly and honestly discussed by those who have a legitimate concern for the wellbeing of this city and its inhabitants, preferably accompanied by some useful thoughts addressing the tragedy.

What I have no tolerance for are politicians and pundits who use violence in Chicago as a distraction from one of the pressing issues of our day, gun control. 

You hear the trope every time there is legitimate outrage after a mass shooting. Defenders of not doing anything to control the obscene availability of guns in this country will predictably drop the Chicago Line in order to "prove" that gun laws do nothing to prevent crime.

This is the Chicago Line: "Despite having the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago also has the highest murder rate."

Strictly speaking, neither of those points are accurate, but that's not a problem for me. If there were a legitimate argument for Chicago being an example of strict gun laws having little or no effect on crime, it would be a valid point.

But it's not a legitimate argument and therefore not valid. The bottom line is that in Chicago's case, the correlation between its relatively strict gun control laws and its high murder rate, is purely anecdotal, much like the tentative correlation many people make between vaccines and autism (a story for another day).

The problem with the correlation between Chicago (more appropriately Illinois) gun laws and the murder rate is quite simple. While Illinois gun laws are fairly strict by US standards (ranked eighth strictest in the nation), the laws in its neighboring states are anything but. Given that, it stands to reason that a state with strict gun laws being an island surrounded by states with lax guns laws is no more effective than a no peeing section in the middle of an open swimming pool. It turns out that well over half of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, the majority of those from Indiana, which is literally across the street from some parts of Chicago. 

The state of Illinois requires all gun purchases to be accompanied a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card on the part of a buyer, issued by the State Police which must be presented to the seller for verification at the time of purchase. That process alone takes a few days so you can't simply walk into a gun shop in this state and leave with a shiny new weapon. This FOID card can be rescinded any time its holder is considered a risk such as having committed a crime or determined to be mentally unstable.

None of this is true in Indiana or Wisconsin where almost anyone with absolutely no business having a gun can make the easy drive across state lines to buy one.

But the real problem with this nation's lax gun laws insofar as crime is concerned, is the that they enable guns to be manufactured at a staggering rate. I looked at one of my previous posts a decade old and recalled that ten years ago, there were as many guns as people in the United States. Today it is estimated that there are about twenty percent more guns than people in this country. That translates to (if my math is correct) roughly 80 million more guns in circulation today in this country than ten years ago.

Sure there are lots of responsible gun owners who take pains to prevent their firearms from getting into the wrong hands. But what happens when they sell those guns which are later re-sold or stolen? That's not to mention all the irresponsible gun owners out there.

Since guns are so plentiful in this city, one needn't bother making the trip to Indiana or Wisconsin, they can be had right here, mostly illegally of course. As the gun crowd rightfully points out, criminals aren't going to let a mere law prevent them from getting a gun. But if there weren't so many guns around in the first place, it wouldn't be so damned easy for criminals to get their hands on them. Sorry gun guys but this one is on you.

Another inconvenient fact debunking the correlation between Chicago's murder rate and gun control is that cities with comparable or higher murder rates than Chicago such as Birmingham, Little Rock, New Orleans and St. Louis are all in states with far more lenient gun restrictions than Illinois. In contrast, cities like Los Angeles and New York, both in states with stricter gun laws than Illinois, have far lower murder rates than Chicago.

Unfortunately there is a segment of our society who seems to be immune to reason and facts. That's why anti gun control politicians and pundits keep getting away with using the Chicago Line as their main line of defense in arguing the failure of gun control.

You may ask why Chicago is singled out as the gold standard of American murder and mayhem. Could it be that all those other cities are in solidly red states that typically oppose gun control? Oh I dunno, just a hunch.

The Chicago Line was a favorite of the exPOTUS who was fond of trashing the blue state of Illinois and especially Chicago, home of his predecessor and favorite target, Barak Obama. 

In a bit of horrendous timing, days after the mass shooting of fourth graders and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas, an NRA convention was scheduled to take place in Houston, 278 miles away. Many folks who planned to attend either as speakers or entertainers, cancelled their appearances out of respect for the dead and their families. Not the exPOTUS who danced a little gig at the end of his address to the crowd, after paying "homage" to the victims of Uvalde by mispronouncing most of their names. Also present at the gun-lovers' orgy in Houston was Texas senator Ted Cancún Cruz who predictably used the old reliable Chicago Line in his speech. Here is what he said: 

Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.

Which is interesting because in 2019, Cruz was excoriated by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot after he dropped the Chicago Line in slightly different words, after a particularly brutal holiday weekend in this city. It's bad enough to extol the virtues of guns by exploiting Chicago violence in reaction to a tragic weekend in the Windy City, but it's a whole other level of bad to use it in the wake of another town's tragedy.

Perhaps the most tasteless use of the Chicago Line to date came from Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference in Uvalde, the day after the shooting. You may remember it was Abbott who famously blamed windmills for the disastrous power grid failure last year after an unusual snap of cold weather in the Lone Star State. Never mind that wind power generates only a minuscule amount of Texas energy. 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this modern-day Don Quixote would bring up Chicago while blocks away, grieving parents were in the process of receiving the remains of their murdered children who had to be identified the night before by DNA samples as the bullets from a high powered military grade weapon ripped apart their bodies and destroyed their faces.

In order to assure his fellow gun toatin' Texans that he wasn't moved by the unspeakable tragedy that befell his constituents in Uvalde enough to keep weapons like the one used at Robb Elementary School out of the hands of people likely to use them against ten year olds, Abbott said this:

I hate to say this, there are more people that are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.

Perhaps he was bemoaning the fact that there aren't enough schools in Texas but I don't think so. Not giving him the benefit of the doubt on that one, his statement is so wrong on so many levels. 

Beyond the errors in logic, by comparing numbers of murder victims in Chicago and Texas, Abbott is treating human lives as if they were commodities. He may as well have been talking about spark plugs or widgets. 

Not only did Abbott receive the wrath of the Mayor of Chicago, but also that of Jay Pritzker, Governor of Illinois for his thoughtless remarks.

As pointed out by Mayor Lightfoot, worst of all, Abbott's statement downplays the tragedy he was on hand to address. Uvalde is a small town where practically everyone has a connection to at least one of the victims of the massacre. I'm guessing that not a soul in Uvalde was comforted by learning that a lot of people are murdered in Chicago too. 

But these gun-loving yahoos press on with their empty rhetoric about good guys with guns, people killing people, not guns, and about that hellhole, Chicago.

You don't hear Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott, both with presidential aspirations of their own calling Indianapolis, Tuscaloosa, Menphis or Baton Rouge murder hell holes, even though those cities have higher murder rates than Chicago. 

For them. Chicago is an easy target as this city's violent reputation as every Chicagoan who has ever traveled abroad knows, precedes it. Besides they have nothing to lose as neither of them have a snowball's chance in hell of winning Chicago or Illinois in a presidential election. 

As I said, if there were any credence to the Chicago Line, it would be fair game. But there is not, it is a simplistic logical fallacy, deliberately cherry picked by unscrupulous politicians and their masters, the gun lobby, to empower and enrich themselves off the blood of innocent children, and to further divide the American people. 

So we can expect to keep hearing the same old bullshit Chicago Line ad nauseam.

Not that it will make a bit of difference but to that I will quote our mayor while adding a few choice embellishments of my own:

If you don't give a rat's ass about this city or its people, keep our name out of your fucking mouth.

With all due respect. 

Those Were the Days

Ah nostalgia. How many of us think back to the good old days of our youth, when life was so much simpler? Yesterday I had the sweet experience of walking with my mother in the neighborhood in which both of us grew up. She and I passed the homes of childhood friends whose names we still could recall. We passed the church where both of us were confirmed and the parish school which both of us attended. That particular walk for me evoked so many memories of my childhood in the sixties, and one song in particular which brings me back every time I hear it to that exact place, Chicago's Palmer Square.

The song for what it's worth, is Get Together as recorded by a band called the Youngbloods. You may know the song from its refrain:

Come on people now, smile on your brother everybody get together, try and love one another right now.

Corny lyrics to be sure when you read them on a computer screen, but if you were around fifty years ago and remember what we were living through at the time, you might get the message it was trying to convey. I came to know the song as it was used in a TV public service announcement put together by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, as a call for brotherhood in a time of war and deep divisions in this nation and around the world. I also vaguely remember, back in the days when the guitar mass was the real thing, that song being sung in the church my mom and I walked past yesterday.

Despite the difficult times that inspired the lyrics of Get Together, the song brings to mind happy times of my life in that neighborhood which we left in the summer of 1968, exactly at the moment of the Democratic National Convention which was taking place only a few miles away. Of all the tumultuous moments of the sixties that I clearly recall, that convention, the anti-war demonstrations that accompanied it, the shameful actions of Mayor Daley on the convention floor, and the riots in part caused by over-zealous police that took place in Grant Park, are a blur to me as we were busy schlepping all our worldly possessions from one part of the city to another as all the mayhem was taking place.

Save for the chance to once again see the people I loved who are now gone, I don't have any particular urge to revisit the sixties. Between the the terrible racial divide, the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the burning cities, including Chicago, the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation, and all the other really bad stuff that was going down, the world really did seem to be spinning out of control, even to someone not even a decade old.

Yet it was the time of my childhood, and triggers such as the song Get Together bring me back to a time and place where I was safe at home with my parents on Humboldt Boulevard where I always felt I belonged, despite all the turbulence that was going on around us.

Such is nostalgia, the longing for a better, happier time, when you were safe and home, even if the reality was quite different.

I think that was the appeal to so many Americans of Donald Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again." It evoked for them a time, somewhere in the distant past, and a place, this country, that was simpler, happier, healthier, and stronger than it is now. The Great America for them was what Humboldt Boulevard and Palmer Square before August of 1968 were for me.

The problem is, those idyllic times and places never really existed, other than in our minds. My mother reminded me yesterday just how bad the neighborhood had become in the late sixties. Despite my parents' urge for unity and brotherhood, a family needs to take care of itself first, when it no longer feels safe in the place it once called home. So we became yet another family who fled the city for the suburbs during that terrible time.

As I mentioned, the sixties was a period that saw tremendous suffering around the world. Things settled down in the seventies to some extent with the end of the Vietnam War and the slow but gradual acceptance, at least in theory, that people of every color deserved their fair share of what this country had to offer. But the seventies also saw economic stagnation due to the energy crisis and other factors. International terrorism was on the upswing.  It was a time of  tremendous cynicism after Watergate and other political scandals. As a result, we didn't seem to believe much in ourselves anymore. The Reagan years of the eighties saw a decline of cynicism and a resurgence of prosperity for some, but the administration's emphasis on big business and its acceptance of making money at whatever cost, jump-started a trend toward the ever growing gap between the haves and the have nots in this country. The nineties saw even more prosperity, if you were in the right line of work. It was a good time to be in the tech industry as computers became an ever increasing part of our lives. The downside is that computers and other technologies did away with countless jobs that disappeared forever. Then came 9-11 and with it, the collapse of the old world order which imperfect as it was, at least enabled us to tell our friends from our enemies. After that came the economic collapse of 2008, from which many of us still have not recovered, despite the slow economic progress of the last eight years.

That in a nutshell is the state of this country during my 58 years on this planet, some good times, some not so good times, and some really shitty times.

Ah but at least we had good jobs, Trump supporters would point out, where you didn't need a college degree in order to raise a family while still maintaining a decent standard of living. That may be true, but if  my condensed Readers Digest view of the history of America since 1960 is any indication, you'll realize that the handwriting had been on the wall for a very long time. The country and the world have been changing at a lightning rate during my lifetime, (I've been around for a long time), and if you're not willing to change with it, you're stuck holding the bag. In fact the country has been changing rapidly ever since it was founded. Good, well paying jobs such as telegraph operator, blacksmith, mule skinner, log driver and lamp lighter were lost to new technology in the early twentieth century just as so many jobs were replaced by newer technology in the late twentieth century. In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Still, millions of Americans bought into Trump's promise of bringing jobs and greatness back America. Who in their right mind could be against that?

Skeptics pointed out that you can't stop progress and turn back the hands of time.

So how's he done so far? Well he's proved the skeptics wrong. Donald Trump has indeed succeeded in turning the clock back, taking us back to yesteryear and bringing back things we never thought we'd see again:

• Despite all we learned from Watergate, I haven't seen so much outright distrust of a president since Richard Nixon, and quite honestly, the potential trouble Trump has gotten himself into, makes Nixon's indiscretions look pale by comparison. 
• Just over a week ago we were talking about the real possibility of using nuclear weapons on another country and that country using them on us. I haven't heard that kind of talk since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 
• Last week, Nazis and Klansmen openly marched and chanted slogans of hatred right in the heart of Thomas Jefferson country. I remember when Nazis wanted to march in the largely Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois in the seventies, but back then they were only a small fringe group who were the objects of scorn and ridicule by virtually everyone. Once they won their legal battle to march, they chose not to, out of fear of the consequences. To find a time when there was so little resistance to this kind of people, going all the way up to the President of the United States, you have to go back to the 1920s. 
• Trump has tried to implement immigration bans that also harken back to the twenties, and through his rhetoric, has inspired fear and hatred of foreigners the likes of which we haven't seen since the Know Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

To be fair, job numbers and the stock market are up since Trump became president, and naturally he is taking all the credit, despite the fact that those numbers have been steadily increasing for the last several years under the previous administration. As we all know, what goes up must come down, and with his focus on de-regulating business and the markets, the chances of a catastrophic collapse harking back to 1929 may very well be looming in our future.

The good news is that maybe we won't have to worry about that because we'll be engaged in a nuclear war and we'll have bigger problems.

I'm not so big on nostalgia but I kind of miss the time, say about a year ago, when we didn't have to worry about this shit.

Man, those were the days.

A Tale of Two Cities

New York City and Chicago are like two siblings born several years apart. The younger sibling, Chicago, is always in its big sibling's shadow, every day trying to prove itself. Meanwhile, the bigger, more successful sibling lives its life as if its pesky younger sibling didn't matter, or even exist. But the two are still family and the fact is, neither would be what they are today without the other.

Civic boosters love to brag about their city's beauty, its architectural gems, great institutions of higher learning, vast cultural amenities, engaging entertainment venues and splendid restaurants. But those things are the fringe benefits of what creates a successful city. Like the snooty character Maris Crane from the sitcom Frazier, who learns that the source of her family fortune is actually the manufacture of urinal cakes, it comes as a bit of a let down for some to learn that what really put their town on the map, are the more mundane items of life, things like fur pelts, metal ingots, bushels of wheat and corn, lumber and pig meat. It's not necessarily the production of these things that makes for a great city, as they are often harvested or manufactured elsewhere; more important are the resources to market and ship those commodities far and wide. The facility to create and nurture industry and commerce, and the transportation conduits to serve them, are the engines that throughout history, have created and sustained great cities.

They say the three most important factors regarding real estate are location, location and location. Perhaps never in the history of human beings creating cities, has there been a natural spot more ideally located to build a great metropolis than the thirteen mile long, hilly, wooded island at the mouth of the Hudson River called Manhattan. The body of water the Hudson empties into, New York Harbor, is one of the great natural harbors of the world, which itself empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Upstream, the Hudson River was a major gateway to the American interior. But that was not all. The port cities of Boston and Baltimore also had great natural harbors that emptied into the Atlantic. Philadelphia, another major port of the Eastern Seaboard, was built upon the banks of the Delaware River, about 50 miles upstream from its mouth, and the great ocean.

The real gold mine that wasn't immediately apparent to the early settlers of New York City, was a gap in the Appalachian Mountains called the Mohawk Pass. That geographic feature, formed by glaciers during the last ice age near the confluence of today's Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, meant there was no mountain barrier between New York City (via Albany, 150 miles upstream on the Hudson), and the midwest. No other major East Coast port could make such a claim. The only break in the great chain of mountains between Canada and the South, provided the opportunity for a canal to be dug in upstate New York between the Hudson River at Albany, and Buffalo, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie. If such a canal could be built, it would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and open up a continent.

Erie Canal locks at Lockport, NY.
The difference in elevation between the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie
at Buffalo is 565 ft, requiring 35 sets of locks along the course of the canal. 

Two hundred years ago this week, politicians and other muckety mucks stuck their gold plated shovels into the dirt of Rome, New York, marking the beginning of construction of the Erie Canal, the 350 mile long ditch that at the time of its completion in 1825, would forever change the landscape of this country, and the destinies of two of its largest cities, New York and Chicago.

According to the 1830 Census, the six largest American cities all were major salt water ports, five of them on the Eastern Seaboard. In descending order they were New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and Charleston, SC. That same year, with a population of about 100, Chicago, not yet a city, was a trading post, populated by a mix of French trappers and Potawatomie Indians. The natural geography of Chicago was not as advantageous as New York's as far as building a city. It too was at the mouth of a river that emptied into a major waterway. But unlike the Hudson, the Chicago River was a sluggish stream that was incapable of properly draining the flat topography on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan. Unlike Manhattan which rises several feet above the water level and seldom floods, the natural Chicago was a swamp much of the year. Even its name, taken from the Potawatomie word for the wild onions that grew there, (which you can still smell along the banks of the river on the outskirts of town), evokes the soggy character of the place. By 1830, New York already had an influence on Chicago as its richest man, John Jacob Astor laid claim to part of the fur trade in the distant outpost of the midwest. After the opening of the Erie Canal, New York money would float into Chicago by the boatload, both figuratively and literally.

While Chicago's pool table flat topography didn't make for a pleasant experience underfoot, it did provide the future city with a tremendous advantage over its competing Great Lakes settlements. It turns out there is an ever so slight continental divide, all of about 15 feet, that runs through Chicago, a few miles west of the lake. All the water east of the divide, drains into Lake Michigan, via the Chicago River, while the water west of the divide, slowly finds its way to the Des Plaines River west of the city. That river in turn, flows into the Illinois River, then the Mississippi, and ultimately into the gulf of Mexico. This very small divide meant that in 1830, if you wanted to travel from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi by canoe, from Lake Michigan you could enter the Chicago River and paddle upstream to its source, then portage, depending on the season, for about seven miles to the Des Plaines. During rainy season in spring, the portage distance was minimal or even non-existent. For centuries, Native Americans knew of the Chicago Portage as the most direct connection between the Great Lakes and the Great River. The first Europeans to cross the portage were French explorers Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette in 1673. The Chicago Portage would prove to be a geological godsend for Chicago, just as the Mohawk Gap was for New York City.

As the first half of the nineteenth century was the era of the great canals, New York investors became interested in building a canal that would connect the Chicago River with the navigable Illinois River which, together with the Erie Canal. would complete a transportation network bisecting the northeastern portion of the United States, spanning from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River.

Wild speculation due to the rumors of the imminent building of the western canal attracted investors from the east who hired surveyors to parcel up Chicago's land, then paid exorbitant prices for it. One of the first tangible results of the opening up of the Erie Canal as far as Chicago was concerned, was the ending of the peaceable existence between settlers of European origin, and the Native American residents of the region. For a century and a half, the Potawatomie could understand the ways of the white man as far as trading for goods and services were concerned. They could even accept European capitalism at its most basic level. The Native American people and the French trappers lived peacefully together in Chicago, intermarried, and respected each other's property, so long as the owner occupied his land. But cultural differences prevented the Potawatomie, as most Native American people, from accepting the European practice of buying and selling land as a commodity. To the Potawatomie, it made no sense that you could claim land you did not occupy, anymore than you could lay claim to the air or to water.

As the land of Chicago was subdivided and the easterners bought it sight unseen, the Potawatomie kept living upon land that was bought out from under them. Something had to give and as was the case one hundred percent of the time in conflicts between the Native American people and the settlers of European descent, the white man won. Land swaps (swindles if you prefer) were arranged, treaties were forged, and the Potawatomie, along with those of mixed Native American and European heritage who once called Chicago home, were displaced to reservations in the hinterland. Almost overnight, Chicago went from being a French (Catholic)/Indian outpost, to an Anglo (Protestant) city.

The first mover and shaker from New York to move here and call Chicago home, was real estate man, William Butler Ogden. Ogden was hardly impressed with the muddy, free-for-all backwater trading post when he first set foot in Chicago in 1835 . But along with the wild onions, Ogden could smell money. He made a tidy sum selling off some of the by then, over-inflated property his family had purchased before his arrival. Ogden stayed on in Chicago buying and selling real estate and making a fortune. The City of Chicago was formally incorporated on March 4, 1837 and William Butler Ogden was elected its first mayor. When the city became broke during a national panic, Ogden paid off the city's bills by issuing an IOU backed up by his own funds.

Both as mayor, which only lasted eight months, and thereafter, Ogden was instrumental in turning Chicago into a dynamic city. Ogden connected Chicago to its outlying farms by means of plank roads. He built bridges, including the first swing bridge spanning the Chicago River, and encouraged the growth of commerce and industry. With help from his New York investment friends, Ogden turned a backwater settlement into a major city that would be connected to the east, and the rest of the world, by means of the Erie Canal.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal flowing through Utica, Illinois

Ogden was a principal supporter and investor in the Illinois and Michigan Canal which upon its completion in 1848, would span 96 miles between the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport, to the towns of La Salle and Peru, Illinois, thereby completing the last link of the waterway system that would connect the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and all points in between.

By the 1850 Census, Chicago's population rose in twenty years from 100 to nearly 30,000. That was only the beginning. By greatly reducing the time it took to ship goods and transport people to and from the East Coast, the new system of waterways began the process of Chicago supplanting the great port city on the Mississippi, St. Louis, as the transportation hub of the midwest. But almost as soon as the I&M Canal was built, a new and far quicker (if not necessarily more efficient) means of transportation came along. St. Louis probably could have stemmed the tide of losing its role as a transportation hub, had it only accepted change and moved along with the times. But that city was in the grips of the steamboat industry who exerted its control over blocking the construction of a railway bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis.  Instead, a bridge was built about 200 miles upstream at Rock Island, Illinois meaning all trains coming from the west headed directly to Chicago. In contrast to the single-minded investors and city fathers of St. Louis, William Ogden, who was already heavily invested in the I&M Canal, made an about face and turned his interests, and those of his city, to the railroad, thereby leaving St. Louis and its moribund economic engine, in the dust.

This image illustrates the motive power of the Erie Canal in the 19th century,
horses, or in this case mules pulling a boat along their towpath.

By the 1850s, railroads had also taken away much of the business from the Erie Canal, yet the impact of that magnificent public works project, had already changed the nation in countless ways. The canal opened up the Midwest to the rest of the country, making places like Chicago possible. It provided a vast network of westward immigration, changing the primary axis of movement of the country from North-South, up the Mississippi River, to East-West, via the canal. Historians believe this had many profound implications for the development of the country, not the least of which being the exacerbation of the division between North and South which led to the American Civil War. The theory goes something like this: Southerners, who were for the most part sympathetic to slavery, moved up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers into southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. That move was countered by the western movement of New Englanders, most of whom were abolitionists, to the upper Midwest via the Erie Canal. Had it not been for the canal, the Union might very well have had to fight the war without the help of the key states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Nowhere was the objection to build the Erie Canal greater than in New York City. Believing the project to be a boondoggle, pork barrel that would only benefit Upstate New York, the city's politicians dubbed the project, "Clinton's Ditch" and "Clinton's folly", after its chief sponsor, New York governor DeWitt Clinton. The canal opponents were wrong. While the completed waterway did greatly benefit both the agricultural and urban areas of Upstate New York,  the canal also made New York City successful beyond its wildest dreams. Because of the Canal, of all the nation's great Atlantic sea ports, only New York had direct access to the Midwest. Lumber harvested in the great forests of Wisconsin and Michigan could be floated down rivers to be rough milled, then sailed down Lake Michigan to Chicago, where it would be cut to size and finished, then sent on to New York, from where it could be sent anywhere in the world. Crops shipped to Chicago via the I&M Canal would be stored in that city's enormous grain elevators, then sent east when it was needed. Pigs rendered into salt-pork in Chicago's packing plants, steel and all other manner of manufactured goods, made in Chicago, found their way east to New York and beyond. This movement of products, commodities, and people only intensified after the railroads were built between the two cities which followed the same route as the Erie Canal, taking advantage of the Mohawk Pass. Consequently New York became unquestionably the most important ocean port in the United States, and Chicago, the most important inland port. New York also became this nation's banking capital, thanks in part to the financing of the massively complicated and expensive construction of the Canal.

The tremendous opposition to the building of the Erie Canal begs the question, what if the Erie Canal had not been built? It's inconceivable that the westward expansion of the United States would not have taken place without the canal, it just would have been delayed a decade or two as railroads would have taken on the role that the canal served. But those decades were pivotal. Had the western migration of New Englanders been delayed for a couple of decades, they would not have tempered the migration of Southerners into the Midwest. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois may have remained slave states with their sympathies pointing in the direction of the Confederacy. It's hard to imagine such an Illinois electing Abraham Lincoln to Congress, let alone to the presidency of the United States. How Lincoln not being on the scene would have played out insofar as the Civil War and the issue of slavery in the United States is anybody's guess.

It's highly likely that had the Erie Canal not been built, Chicago would not exist, at least not as a major city. Without the influx of major investment from the east, a direct result of the Erie Canal, there would have been no capital to convert it from a swampy backwater marsh into a reasonable facsimile of a city. Much less would there have been the funds to build the Illinois and Michigan Canal which put the city on the map as far as being a transportation hub. With no canals and no Chicago money to build railroads that would go through here, it's very unlikely that the outpost swamp that Chicago would have certainly remained had it not been for the canals, would have been more than a whistlestop on the trunk line between Galena and Toledo, two towns that could very easily have been in contention for being the transportation hub of the Midwest.

When the Erie Canal was completed, New York was already a thriving city, the most populous in the United States . While the populations of most of the major U.S. cities increased incrementally during the 19th Century, New York's exploded after the construction of the Canal. The 1860 census showed that in the thirty years since the Canal's opening, the population of New York City (not including Brooklyn which at the time was a separate city) more than quadrupled. By 1880, New York became the first American city whose population topped one million. No other big American city grew as quickly, except that is, Chicago. In those same thirty years since the opening of the canal, Chicago's population went from 100, to 112,000, breaking into the top ten list of American cities. Ten years after New York broke the million mark, Chicago did the same, finishing for the first time as the second largest city in the United States, in the 1890 census.

The Erie Canal carried over the Genesee River in Rochester, NY by means of an aqueduct.
Unlike Chicago, Upstate New York municipalities such as Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse, to name a few,
already existed as cities before the canal, but their fortunes greatly improved when the canal opened.

It is absolutely certain that Chicago's astounding growth was a direct result of the Erie Canal, and almost certain that New York's was as well. It's all conjecture but without the canal, the first railroads headed east may have decided not to turn right at Albany, but head straight for Boston, where the entry of trains was not quite as prohibitive as on the isle of Manhattan. Had it not been for the canal system that went all the way to the Mississippi, the steamboat companies might not have felt as threatened by the competition and consented to the railroads crossing through their town. If that were the case, the trains originating in St. Louis (which certainly would have been the transportation hub of the midwest), might have made the more direct trip to Baltimore or Philadelphia, greatly increasing the profitability of those citys' ports.

No matter how you slice it, The United States would be a vastly different place had the state of New York chosen not to think big and build that 350 mile ditch. To those of us in Chicago who love this city, the next time we have dinner after we take in a game at Wrigley Field, visit the Art Institute, go to the theater, spend an evening at the Symphony, or just walk along the lakefront, let's all make sure to raise a glass to DeWitt Clinton and to all the workers who gave their blood sweat, tears, and some of them their lives, digging the Erie Canal.

Because without them, we'd be nothing.

Catastrophe and Catharsis

During WWII, my father was a forced laborer from Czechoslovakia, working and living in Berlin. Late in his life I talked to him in depth about what certainly had to be a harrowing experience, enduring not only the loss of his freedom, forced exile in the country that brutally occupied his own, and life under a tyrannical dictatorship, but also living in a city under constant bombardment courtesy of the Americans by day, and the British by night. "Oh it wasn't so bad..." he told me with a wry smile, "...I was a young man living in a city where all its male citizens were off at war." He didn't have to fill in the details.

Talk about making the best of a bad situation.

I thought of this the other day as I was doing some reading about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Through all the tremendous devastation and loss of life*, the city not only recovered, but it prospered. Only the hiccup of a nation-wide panic and brief depression in 1873 and 1874, prevented the city from being rebuilt in half a decade. By 1880 there was barely a trace of the fire at all.

"Chicago in Flames" The Great Fire of 1871
Hand colored Lithograph based upon a sketch by John R. Chapin
published by  Currier & Ives

That's not to say there was not great suffering for the survivors, many of whom with little or no resources found their lives would be never return to normal. Many Chicago Fire survivors left the city never to return. But far more came than left. Like my father who saw an opportunity and seized upon it in Berlin, people saw the tremendous opportunity of being part of rebuilding the devastated Chicago. Between the years 1870 and 1880, the population of the city nearly doubled to half a million residents. Ten years later, over one million people called Chicago home.

I've often thought about what Chicago would be like today had it not been for the fire. Mark Twain had the same thought 134 years ago:

New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. 

In 1891, a writer for the journal Industrial Chicago put it more succinctly:

Those fires were fortunate events for the Garden City as a whole, and none profited directly from them, so much as art and architects,  for the flames swept away forever the greater number of monstrous libels on artistic house-building, while only destroying the few noble buildings of which Old Chicago could boast.

Would Chicago really be a much different place today without the Fire? After all, the die was cast for the contemporary city well before October of 1871. By then, all rail lines in the Midwest led to Chicago. At the same time, the Illinois/Michigan Canal was still operating, the only water transportation conduit between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The grain elevators and the commodities exchanges, both invented here, that would forever change the way farmers got their product to market, were well established by the 1870s and would be back up and running in a nick of time. Chicago as the transportation hub of the midwest, was already a major center of manufacturing, and much of that was untouched by the Fire.

By 1871, much of the physical layout of Chicago had already been established. The massive undertaking of raising the street grade was well underway. Chicago's property lots and rigorous street grid had been conceived, if not already established throughout town, and the boulevard greenway system and parks that would ring what were at the time Chicago's city limits had begun to take shape. Thanks to Potter Palmer and his speculative investments, State Street became the main commercial street of Chicago, taking the place of Lake Street, and with that, the major axis of the city turned ninety degrees from east/west to north/south, following the lakefront.

The major obstacle to the practical construction of tall buildings was overcome in 1864 as the first steam driven elevator was installed in Chicago in the Charles B. Farwell Store in Wabash Avenue. That alone did not solve the second obstacle, making elevators safe enough for people to want to ride in them. Great steps were made in that direction in 1870 when the first hydraulic elevator was initialed in the Burley and Company Warehouse on West Lake Street. We know that those contraptions became accepted, albeit hesitantly by the general public from the accounts of people being rescued from stalled lifts in Chicago's posh hotels during the Fire.

Chicago is known around the world for its innovative architecture, especially in regards to the construction of tall, commercial buildings. As the Mark Twain and Industrial Chicago quotes sited above suggest, we have the Great Fire to thank for that. But is that true?

Once the elevator became commonplace, the urge to cram as much rentable space into a single lot became inevitable, especially in the highly valuable property of the central business district. The race to build taller buildings was well underway before that famous blaze began near Mrs. O'Leary's barn after that long hot, dry summer of 1871.

On top of that, most of the architects who would create the new architecture that became known as the Commercial Style or the Chicago School of Architecture, including Dankmar Adler, William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Daniel Burnham already lived in Chicago as young men at the time of the Great Fire. With the exception of Adler, all of these future shapers of Chicago's built environment came through in one capacity or other, the office of William LeBaron Jenney, who before the Fire was responsible for among other things, the original design of the three great West Side parks, Humboldt, Central (later named Garfield) and Douglas, and the boulevards that connected them.

The earlier generation of architects responsible for many of the buildings of the pre-fire city, most notably John van Osdel and William Boyington were still active and quite busy after the Fire. The tallest buildings in Chicago until 1895, were the works of those two architects. In fact Chicago, the Second City which sprung up almost as soon as the ruins from the fire to began cool down, didn't look all that different from the First City. You can see for yourself as a number of 1870s post-fire buildings still exist, many of them concentrated just north of the River on Clark and Wells Streets. There you can still find in tact, buildings graced by Italianate facades that were the fashion of the day, before and after the fire.

So as we've seen, the groundwork for the Chicago we know today was clearly laid well before the Chicago Fire. Would it then be reasonable to say that the Fire was a mere setback, delaying what would have been the inevitable development of the current city?

Author Ross Miller in his book The Great Chicago Fire, argues no, the conflagration was in fact Chicago's seminal moment, a catharsis that allowed the city to wash away all its past mistakes, and start from scratch, enabling Chicago to become much greater city.

Barely four decades old at the  time of the fire, Chicago was already developing bad habits. The insatiable lust for instant profit meant little attention was given toward the future.

The children of the the pioneers who settled this city, the folks whose names you see streets named after, as so often is the case, became used to a comfortable life with little sense of obligation:

Seen from a  distance, pioneers like Butler and Ogden became models of respectability, combining Eastern education with the demands of Western settlement, They became the Chicago establishment. Set up in fine houses and rich enough for philanthropy, Chicago's first generation had time for pieties and church-going. Fortunes already in hand, they looked for ways to spend their money and perpetuate their newly minted good reputations. Their sons and daughters, with the pressure of making money removed, lacked any direction. ... Playboys and dilettantes, especially before the fire, appeared to be Chicago's legacy. 

The fire was a truly democratic catastrophe, it wiped out the homes of the rich and the poor alike. Of course with greater resources at their disposal, the rich had a far easier time to get back on their feet, but the fire created a bond between people living in Chicago in October 1871, those who lived anyway. They had all been tested by fire, and survived. Consequently, the term "Chicagoan" gained currency throughout the world. Quoting from the introduction to Robert Cromie's book of the same title, Miller throws in this tidbit:

You could tell a Chicagoan in any city of the world, for he would not talk a minute, scarcely until he would let you know he was from Chicago.

Before the Fire, outrageous land speculation led to tremendous fortunes won but mostly lost. Shoddy construction, haphazard building techniques, and simple lack of attention to detail, led to a city that was an eight square mile tinderbox, a disaster waiting to happen.

On a strictly economic and political basis, Chicago in the months and years after the fire could be shown to have made a startling correction for four decades of nearly random, unplanned development, ...Real estate speculators who had suffered severe losses might in the future be less reckless; their buildings would be made of better materials. The fire because it "checked the too rapid rebuilding of the city in all directions", would lead to a rebuilding of the city's central business district. In addition, by getting rid of failing or marginal businesses, the fire could be seen as a purifying act.

A fitting metaphor could be the fires that periodically sweep through the Midwestern prairies, ridding the land of dead plants and providing nutrients to the soil to insure strong and healthy new growth. Chicago of course, is built upon those very prairies.

Just as the fire's tremendous devastation was made possible by a great storm of concurrent unfortunate events, the recovery of the city was made possible because it came precisely at the crossroads of 19th century technological innovation and creativity.

Out of necessity, the city was compelled to welcome experimentation. Chicago was burned out of an earlier and relatively primitive form of industrialization into the most modern. In this environment, techniques that might have remained dormant under normal conditions of urban growth were perfected and them rigorously tested. 

Finally, it there is any doubt that the fire inexorably altered the direction of the course of this city, take a good look at the list of Chicago architects who lived in Chicago at the time of the Great Fire. They represent an honor roll of builders who shaped the look of the city in the last half of the 19th Century and beyond. But there are two prominent names missing from that list, both of whom came to Chicago because of the Fire.

They are Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root.

I'll deal with them in my next post in my series on the tall buildings of Chicago.


* Until fairly recent times, city-destroying conflagrations were not uncommon. What is something of a mystery is the very unpredictable death rate caused by such calamities. I've always assumed that the 300 or so who died in the Great Chicago Fire was a remarkably low number, given the ferociousness of the fire and the enormity of damage it left in its wake. That is until I discovered that during the Great London Fire of 1666, all of six people perished. On the other hand, during the earthquake and resulting fires in San Francisco in 1906, nearly 3,000 people died.