U.S. City of the Year: Chicago

By: Alex KotlowitzFri May 9, 2008 at 5:09 PM

Chicago Sun Time: In front of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Millennium Park | photo illustration by Peter Funch

Skyscrapers, green roofs, and house music -- a very American metropolis.

Feast on This: Historian Tim Samuelson lunches at the Carson Pirie Scott building. | photograph by Saverio Truglia

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Once a month, Tony Fitzpatrick and Kelly Hogan lunch together at Hot Doug's, which, if not the best, is certainly the most upscale (upscale being relative) of the city's famed hot-dog joints. The fare ranges from your traditional dog -- in Chicago, that means with mustard, onion, sweet-pickle relish, tomato wedges, peppers, a dash of celery salt, all topped with a pickle -- to a special game sausage (this week, it's elk). On Fridays and Saturdays, you can get fries cooked in duck fat.

Tony, an old friend, is an actor, raconteur, deejay, and artist. His boisterous collages, some of which are in the Art Institute's collection, are on exhibit through July -- "The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City," the show is titled -- at the city's Cultural Center. In these collages, Chicago's lives, moods, and politics collide; he once told me, "This place gets in your bones and ruins you for anywhere else."

Over the years, he has also told me about Hogan, a singer whose voice, Tony says, "makes me see colors." So the three of us spent a lunch hour at Hot Doug's talking music, much of it about a band Hogan sings with, the Struts. It's a collection of musicians who play in at least 20 other bands, including Poi Dog Pondering (alternative, with touches of Polynesian and house) and Wilco (indie rock/alt-country). That's Chicago, a city that pushes boundaries, a city where genres hold little sway. A punk rocker from Wales once declared that he avoided L.A., because there they talked about whom they were going to play with; and he avoided New York, because there they talked about the projects they were going to do. In Chicago, he said, they come to work -- without regard for what others might think.

One recent evening, Hogan met me at the Hideout, where she bartended for more than nine years and still sometimes performs. It's hidden in a small industrial corner on the north side, so when Hogan gave me directions, she instructed me to go over the river, past the railroad tracks, across the street from the city's fleet of garbage trucks. If you get to the old U.S. Steel plant, you've gone too far. She paused. "I guess it's a good place to bump somebody off," she laughed.

The Hideout is a wood-framed house built at the turn of the last century, probably by squatters, when the neighborhood was mostly working-class Irish. After prohibition, the downstairs became a drinking hole for steelworkers. In 1996, it was purchased by four partners who did little to change the look -- photos of the original owners, Angelo and Phil, still hang over the bar -- but brought in musicians. The thinking was that musicians could experiment here, and they have; on any given night you could stumble upon a jazz quartet or a rock band or a folk singer. Neko Case played the Hideout before winning wide acclaim. Fiddler/violinist Andrew Bird worked his way from swing to indie rock here. And when the Frames passed through town, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová used the place to test some songs they were writing for a little movie called Once -- one, "Falling Slowly," won Best Song at this year's Oscars.

One of the Hideout's owners, Tim Tuten, told me, "We're conscious of what made Chicago great. We have a historical reputation to uphold. This is the city of Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Lou Rawls. It's from the ground up." It was past midnight, and Tuten, who speaks with the drive of a Hendrix guitar riff, expounded on the 1893 Columbia Exposition (The Devil in the White City made everyone feel like an expert on it) and the time Wilco played at one of their block parties (kick-ass block parties being a city tradition) and how he recently discovered that in the 1960s Nelson Algren would down a beer at the Hideout. On the drive home, I listened to a CD Hogan had burned for me. She's singing covers -- from Allen Toussaint to the Violent Femmes. Her voice, rich and eclectic as the city's neighborhoods, wanders throughout an exhilarating range. As Tony Fitzpatrick once told me of Chicago, "It's a place that allows you to run."

Calvin Holmes suggested we meet at 10 on a Saturday night at Cuatro, a Latin-Caribbean restaurant owned by a young Chicagoan whose dad, a Mexican immigrant, delivered meat to bodegas around town. We weren't there to eat, but to hear house music. Holmes considers himself a "househead"; he often plans his weekends around finding good house in Chicago.

Holmes -- 43, lanky, open-faced -- came to Chicago from East St. Louis, Illinois, to make something of himself. His grandmother had warned, "If you can't make it in Chicago, you can't make it anywhere." Holmes made it just fine. He arrived shortly before Harold Washington's 1983 mayoral campaign against an opponent whose slogan was "Before it's too late," a not-so-thinly-veiled plea to white voters. "I remember thinking, Where is all this hate coming from?" Holmes told me. He got an internship in the administration of Washington, who, in addition to being one decent man, was an avid reader, so Chicago's main library is named for him. "This is a place where black folks have taken stock of themselves," Holmes said. "They've come through this crucible. And folks felt like we could do stuff now, we could make things happen, that finally there's some equity in this town."

From Issue 126 | June 2008

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Recent Comments | 20 Total

May 21, 2008 at 7:53am by Mark Zorro

What gravitates me today is not delving into what people read, nor no longer trying to simply figure out why I personally write what it is I write, but what I am looking for are those articles that get me traveling and finding based on a writers experience rather than a laundry list of go to sites, this one hit the "bulls-eye" in that regard, which is quite apt if we are talking about Chicago. By the time I finished fishing this article, I found out that the neon-strip tunnel at O'Hare airport was designed by Helmat Jahn and that the BCE building I have often starred at in arched wonder is designed by Santiago Calatrava. This article took me to new sources of music such as Lupe Fiasco, Wilco and Neko Case. I actually loved the melodic tone of HOLD ON HOLD ON, a song featured on Neko Case's website. The most fascinating character mentioned in the piece is Studs Terkel, his site at studsterkel.org, which is chock full of interesting interviews. I found it interesting that Stanley Tigerman opened up an alternative design school called ARCHEWORKS. Beyond the architects and the musicians, I discovered how little I knew about trees and that itself opens up an interesting pathway of inquiry but what this article did most was to open my eyes up to see Chicago in a new light, to go beyond the beef and the politics and begin to notice a city that I have worked in but have never done the justice of taking the time to notice it or even try to "visit it". It is not so much that Hillary Clinton once did a thesis on Saul Alinksy because that takes me back into Chicago politics that I have learned not to trust, but this article connected me to an authenticity and realistic attitude of Chicago that I have utterly failed to connect with. So I am finding that the best stuff in a great article does not come to light until we shift the focus of our own attention makeup. This is more the reason why commentary simply sucks up my time and stops me from the real juice here, which is starting to look at my world in a new way and begin to extract rather than simply accumulate. The way Alex Kowlowitz wrote this up is very helpful in that regard. What Alex did here is open up a Chicago that I have been so lazy minded to see before, yet I know it is city that should command my attention as well as it turns out, my respect, but now thanks to this article, it does.......M.

U.S. City of the Year: Chicago

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