Chicago Haunts

I love Chicago. I love it with an irrational love. I knew when I left at age 18 that I would never actually stay anywhere but Chicago. And yet I hate the corruption, the segregation, the snow in late April, the violence and the messed up school system and the enormous swaths of empty, unused, rotting space on the south side of the city that no one wants to deal with, fix, or utilize. I know my love is flawed. But oh sweet Jesus—he has so much potential!

I have grown weary of defending my love. Usually, trying to explain to someone else why one loves Chicago comes down to talking about shit you don’t really care about that much, like the excellent food, the theaters and museums and other cultural attractions, the access to top-notch universities and hospitals, the insane vibe of the summer, the music fests, the fact that people here still use the word “gala,” the lake, or something else equally inane.

It's hard to argue with those perks. Just look at this view of our gorgeous city from the museum campus on 9/11/12. And no, I don't care if you don't know what the museum campus is, because that's not what I'm trying to talk about today.



Look, I’m going to be honest. Any major city worth its salt has excellent, diverse food, culture, music, universities and health care. They have that stuff in DALLAS, people. That alone does not a love affair with a city make, even if you can just go out to dinner in Greektown and find yourself having a drink amidst one of the most picturesque skylines anywhere.



So what is behind this love? I think it’s this: even after the attempts to make Chicago plastic, even after the gentrification and the hollowing out of once vibrant communities and the fact that basically half of our prior elected officials are in prison, Chicago is an honest to God CITY. A friend from the Bronx once said to me, “Chicago is one of the only real cities I’ve ever visited.” He declared that the other was, in fact, Pittsburgh.

Go figure.

Here are 20 places that I love in Chicago, in no particular order. None of these places are restaurants, bars, jazz or blues clubs, ballparks or museums. Some might be considered tourist attractions, but that is debatable. There are a lot more places that I love in Chicago, but these are the ones that first came to mind. As I said in a poem I wrote when I was 20 (it’s possible that every poem I’ve ever written has actually been about Chicago):

No country landscape could offer such a scene,
could demand the making of a galaxy
of random and created order of
neighborhoods that house many streets that
wake and die and leave us breathless,
and on every street so much love pouring out,
and too many streets to name.

You might disagree with these 20 choices, but remember this: This list comes from a woman who doesn't know how to be a tourist here. When she has tried, she has ended up asking her husband to take a picture of her and the kids in front of the graffiti above the train tracks. So consider the source.



20 Chicago Destinations from the Perspective of LiveChickenonSix

1. The first seat in the first car of any El train on any line as long as it’s not the subway. This is just pure urban bliss. You feel like you’re riding into the edge of the world.

2. The Auburn Park lagoon, which sits in the middle of the neighborhood at 79th street. Many people have lived in this city all of their lives and have no idea what I’m talking about—especially if they live on the north side. So I am here to tell you that there’s a lagoon that cuts through some folks’ front yards, as surely as you have asphalt separating you from your neighbors across the street. Sometimes people fish there. There are bridges.

3. The fountain in Streeterville that shoots an arc of water across the river every hour. I just went to google, and found that it has an actual name: Centennial Fountain and Water Arc, and now I’m feeling vaguely disappointed.

4. The atrium at the Harold Washington library. Go into this odd building covered in gothic owls and figure out how to get to the top floor, and you will not be disappointed. It’s gorgeous, and quiet, and hardly anyone ever goes there. I read many a book there during my lunch hour in my twenties, and I always felt like I had just gone on a mini-vacation.

5. Lake Street, under the El tracks. As teenagers, we referred to it as “Yellow Boulevard,” because of the color of the overhead lights at night, or during the day, for that matter, because it is always—ALWAYS—dark there.

6. On that note, I have to give it up for Augusta—a street that always provides a good alternative route to cut through the city from west to east or vice versa if the traffic on the Ike makes you want to give up on the whole of humanity.

7. The few remaining independent bookstores, like Women and Children First, Myopic (memories from my dating days…extra points to the dudes who came up with that one!), Powell’s, and, my personal favorite, Sandmeyers in the south loop.

8. The Midway Park area of Austin, where the homes are more beautiful than just about anywhere else.

9. The sunny and scenic room in the Chicago Cultural Center where you can get married, just as you would at City Hall, except, well—it’s beautiful. My mom and stepfather got married there. She was wearing pants, but there were women in full bridal getups waiting for their 60 second ceremony to commence, and the photos they took probably rivaled any taken at a much more expensive venue (as in one that isn’t entirely free).

10. The South Shore Cultural Center and Rainbow Beach. I’m angry that the City has turned so liability-averse that you essentially can’t wade into the water past your shins at this point, because this beach is shallow for seemingly miles and is great for families. E-coli? So what? You can turn around and look at that gorgeous building (which houses an excellent restaurant run by student chefs, but I’m not talking about food here, remember), then turn back around and see one of the best views of the city available. If you are going to complain about a little bacteria, you might want to live somewhere else.

11. Bubbly Creek, because it’s disgusting, and there’s really interesting graffiti on the buildings surrounding it, and the bakery factory smell is cloying and acrid at the same time, and it’s right in the middle of Chinatown AND Bridgeport and people fish in that foul water (again with the fishing!), and I learned how to row a long skinny boat there.

12. Lower Wacker Drive. Just stop trying to compare whatever supposedly interesting thoroughfare you have in your city to this. Lower Wacker connects to Lake Shore Drive, and you’ve got nothing in comparison to that either, and the Blues Brothers drove through it and people live there, or at least they used to, before the City cracked down on what had to be one of the more interesting urban subcultures around.

13. State street downtown, not because it is particularly interesting now, but because I remember when it was closed to traffic, and we would take the train down, look in the windows of the department stores, buy churros y chocolate from a street vendor and call it a date. You can open up a Forever 21 store, but you can’t take that memory away from me.

14. The “canyon” in the loop, because for years I worked in one of those historic skyscrapers, and that supposedly touristy view of some of the oldest high-rises in the country was simply what I had to walk through to get to my office. Also, these buildings house amazing treasures such as old-school shoe repair shops, milliners, and barbershops with names like “Frank’s.”

15. Graceland Cemetery. It’s like someone took the word “nostalgia” and turned it into a place.

16. Ball courts in the summer, especially when they're not actually courts, but a pole and a rim with boys or men gathered around playing hard or at least playing HORSE. Sometimes there are girls or women, but not very often; perhaps because girls and women are too busy being equally athletic in double dutch competitions in the middle of the street.

17. The underground tunnel system that can keep you out of the elements as you walk from one end of the central district to the other. It’s even better because it’s practically a secret.

18. Garfield Park Conservatory. The place is just lovely.

19. All of the diagonal streets on the north and northwest sides of the city that have those wonderful blonde brick structures where the edge of the building is maybe 18 inches wide at the corner and you wonder if anyone but Alice from Wonderland could possibly open the door.

20. The wide open porch that sits on top of a hill on Longwood drive, where I can drink a cup of coffee and watch my kids play in the yard before I go inside to the impossibly sunny landing that is as large as the bedroom I had when I was a little girl, in the house where I live right now, where I can watch both the sunrise and the sunset every single day without having to leave.



You might live in a nice city. You might live in a city where it’s easier to get rich or famous, where it’s safer, where there is less chaos and inequity. Your city might be lovely, but our lovely is famously REAL.

Chicago was my first love. I still haven’t gotten over her.