Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Memories of the Midway
My first night in Chicago I stay at a Ramada Inn on the south side, across Lake Shore Drive from Lake Michigan, for a princely sum that is nevertheless the least expensive accommodation I can find in the city. It's a dumpy-looking hotel but has a perfectly nice room with abundant air conditioning. I flip on the TV and watch Big Papi whack one nine million miles against the Clevelands, and then go out to find an antidote to Indiana.
I find it at a place called Roscoe's, which is a bar in the middle of the Chicago neighborhood that's officially called Lakeview - it's still by the lake, but the view has long since been eradicated. Unofficially, everybody calls this part of the city "Boystown."
Roscoe's is an institution and knows it. It was an institution 12 years ago when I went to grad school here and it knew it then. The staff is snobby and self-important and make you want to remind them they work in a bar. But it's karaoke night, so I tough it out and wait my turn. And wait. And wait. Eventually Honey West, who's a lovely drag queen but no Kay Sera, and I'm not just sayin' that, calls my number and I do a passable rendition of "Wicked Game." I'm a bit out of form, it seems. I stick around a while longer, since nothing looks worse than leaving immediately after your performance, but eventually I hightail it back out onto Halstead Street.
I barely recognize Halstead from my old U of C days, when it was a fairly unappealing stretch of street that hadn't quite caught up to the gentrification around it. It's super-spiffed up, sporting new gyms and flower shops and dotted with ugly, rainbow-colored pylons shaped like rocket ships. Or maybe something else.
I make a stop on the way home at the Wiener's Circle, a hotdog stand on Clark, partly cuz I'm starving but mostly because my old friend Carolyn used to double over in hysterics every time someone mentioned the name. I hadn't intended this trip to include a survey of American hotdog stands, but it's starting to shape up like that. No matter. The Vienna Beefs are perfectly grilled and overloaded with relish and onions, and a homless guy and a couple of guys riding bikes at 1:30 a.m. and I sit outside and devour our food while a dozen or so drunk yuppies abuse the staff inside. We're coming closer to the Chicago I remember.
In the morning I go for a bike ride south along the lakeshore. It's about 10 am and it's blistering hot - too hot even to go to the beach, apparently, although there are some kids playing in the fountains at the 63rd Street Bathing Pavilion.
Riding back I swing over to the Midway and the University of Chicago campus. My plan is mostly to head back to the Ramada and clean up, but as I'm passing the University's International House I'm struck by inspiration: they used to rent rooms to visitors in the summertime. I inquire within, and sure enough, I can bunk there for less than half what the Ramada is taking me for. Of course, it's pointed out to me that they don't have air conditioning in the rooms. I decide that $65 a night would be expensive air conditioning indeed. The woman who checks me in at I-House provides my first strong memory of my student days - an older black woman with a slight Southern accent even though, as Brent Staples wrote in Parallel Time, she may never have been south of 95th Street in her life.
I head over to 57th Street and the Medici. At first I can't find it, and it drives me into a small panic - the Med can't have closed! - but it hasn't, it's just not where I remember it being. The Medici is Chicago's answer to UCLA's Tommy's, Ohio State's Dube - pick your campus and its hangout. In the 70s it was where the anti-war protesters gathered to strategize, and in the 90s it was somewhat less significantly where I retreated from the suffocating atmosphere of the U. The booths are dark stained wood and the brick walls are scrawled with occasionally inspired graffiti (the best in my booth today reads "Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, Judas Gets Paid!") The pizza is still the best I've ever had.
I spend the afternoon walking around the campus, and it's as if I'm carrying around a bag of madeleines and popping one in my mouth every few steps. The spot where Steve told me he'd gotten a C in his lit class, and I pathetically tried to cheer him up by lying that a C wasn't that bad. Ida Noyes Hall, where I used to staff the front desk, and inform the Capoeira group, every week, that it wasn't acceptable for them to bring actual swords into a University building. Rockefeller Chapel, where I didn't attend graduation ceremonies, and have forever since been a little unsure the diploma they sent me is real.
Weirdest is walking into Judd Hall, which used to be the home of the Education Department. There's nothing at all in the building to indicate that Chicago ever had an education department - no picture of John Dewey on the wall, no bulletin board, no Melinda in the department office to bully irritating students back into line. No Hillocks. It's like we were a band of Trotskyites that had to be airbrushed away.
I spend a couple of hours at the Oriental Institute to do research for a story or play I've benn thinking about. I never went in during my 12 months as a student. My classmate Joe Flanagan once referred to it as "Dr. Hutchins' Chamber of Oddities," and in some respects that's pretty close - the place holds case after case of Middle-eastern stuff: dishes, coins, religious artifacts, jewelry, tablets, what have you. It does have a couple of impressive objects, notably a statue of Tut that's about 18 feet tall (and, I'm told, better than anything they've got over at the Field Museum's big and expensive Tut show, which is the hottest ticket in town).
It's also got impressive air conditioning, even better than the Ramada.
I walk over to the Classics Cafe to get a cold drink, but summer hours are in effect. On the way, I note several examples of - I don't know, art? graffiti? a class project? - on the walls. They're a sort of index. I don't know what they mean; some of them make more sense than others. Here's one of my favorites:
I find it at a place called Roscoe's, which is a bar in the middle of the Chicago neighborhood that's officially called Lakeview - it's still by the lake, but the view has long since been eradicated. Unofficially, everybody calls this part of the city "Boystown."
Roscoe's is an institution and knows it. It was an institution 12 years ago when I went to grad school here and it knew it then. The staff is snobby and self-important and make you want to remind them they work in a bar. But it's karaoke night, so I tough it out and wait my turn. And wait. And wait. Eventually Honey West, who's a lovely drag queen but no Kay Sera, and I'm not just sayin' that, calls my number and I do a passable rendition of "Wicked Game." I'm a bit out of form, it seems. I stick around a while longer, since nothing looks worse than leaving immediately after your performance, but eventually I hightail it back out onto Halstead Street.
I barely recognize Halstead from my old U of C days, when it was a fairly unappealing stretch of street that hadn't quite caught up to the gentrification around it. It's super-spiffed up, sporting new gyms and flower shops and dotted with ugly, rainbow-colored pylons shaped like rocket ships. Or maybe something else.
I make a stop on the way home at the Wiener's Circle, a hotdog stand on Clark, partly cuz I'm starving but mostly because my old friend Carolyn used to double over in hysterics every time someone mentioned the name. I hadn't intended this trip to include a survey of American hotdog stands, but it's starting to shape up like that. No matter. The Vienna Beefs are perfectly grilled and overloaded with relish and onions, and a homless guy and a couple of guys riding bikes at 1:30 a.m. and I sit outside and devour our food while a dozen or so drunk yuppies abuse the staff inside. We're coming closer to the Chicago I remember.
In the morning I go for a bike ride south along the lakeshore. It's about 10 am and it's blistering hot - too hot even to go to the beach, apparently, although there are some kids playing in the fountains at the 63rd Street Bathing Pavilion.
Riding back I swing over to the Midway and the University of Chicago campus. My plan is mostly to head back to the Ramada and clean up, but as I'm passing the University's International House I'm struck by inspiration: they used to rent rooms to visitors in the summertime. I inquire within, and sure enough, I can bunk there for less than half what the Ramada is taking me for. Of course, it's pointed out to me that they don't have air conditioning in the rooms. I decide that $65 a night would be expensive air conditioning indeed. The woman who checks me in at I-House provides my first strong memory of my student days - an older black woman with a slight Southern accent even though, as Brent Staples wrote in Parallel Time, she may never have been south of 95th Street in her life.
I head over to 57th Street and the Medici. At first I can't find it, and it drives me into a small panic - the Med can't have closed! - but it hasn't, it's just not where I remember it being. The Medici is Chicago's answer to UCLA's Tommy's, Ohio State's Dube - pick your campus and its hangout. In the 70s it was where the anti-war protesters gathered to strategize, and in the 90s it was somewhat less significantly where I retreated from the suffocating atmosphere of the U. The booths are dark stained wood and the brick walls are scrawled with occasionally inspired graffiti (the best in my booth today reads "Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, Judas Gets Paid!") The pizza is still the best I've ever had.
I spend the afternoon walking around the campus, and it's as if I'm carrying around a bag of madeleines and popping one in my mouth every few steps. The spot where Steve told me he'd gotten a C in his lit class, and I pathetically tried to cheer him up by lying that a C wasn't that bad. Ida Noyes Hall, where I used to staff the front desk, and inform the Capoeira group, every week, that it wasn't acceptable for them to bring actual swords into a University building. Rockefeller Chapel, where I didn't attend graduation ceremonies, and have forever since been a little unsure the diploma they sent me is real.
Weirdest is walking into Judd Hall, which used to be the home of the Education Department. There's nothing at all in the building to indicate that Chicago ever had an education department - no picture of John Dewey on the wall, no bulletin board, no Melinda in the department office to bully irritating students back into line. No Hillocks. It's like we were a band of Trotskyites that had to be airbrushed away.I spend a couple of hours at the Oriental Institute to do research for a story or play I've benn thinking about. I never went in during my 12 months as a student. My classmate Joe Flanagan once referred to it as "Dr. Hutchins' Chamber of Oddities," and in some respects that's pretty close - the place holds case after case of Middle-eastern stuff: dishes, coins, religious artifacts, jewelry, tablets, what have you. It does have a couple of impressive objects, notably a statue of Tut that's about 18 feet tall (and, I'm told, better than anything they've got over at the Field Museum's big and expensive Tut show, which is the hottest ticket in town).
It's also got impressive air conditioning, even better than the Ramada.
I walk over to the Classics Cafe to get a cold drink, but summer hours are in effect. On the way, I note several examples of - I don't know, art? graffiti? a class project? - on the walls. They're a sort of index. I don't know what they mean; some of them make more sense than others. Here's one of my favorites:
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The reason the Medici isn't where you remember it being is that it moved a few blocks up. Caffe Florian has its old spot, complete with odorous bathrooms
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# posted by 
: 10:28 PM
: 10:28 PM << Home
