Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology (Belt City Anthologies) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997774371 ISBN 13: 9780997774375

Verlag: Belt Publishing, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Chicago is built on a foundation of meat and railroads and steel, on opportunity and exploitation – but its identity long ago stretched past manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization. But the problems that plague the region don’t disappear once you pass the Indiana border. In fact, they’re often amplified. A city defined by movement that’s the anchor of the Midwest, bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy, Chicago’s complicated – both of the Rust Belt and beyond it.

 

Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, journalism, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak both directly and elliptically to the concerns the city shares with the region at large, and the elements that set it apart. With affection and curiosity, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers sing to each other like the bird on the cover. At times the song sings in harmony and at others sounds in notes of strategic dissonance. But taken as a whole, this book sings one song, responding to one cacophonous city.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martha Bayne is a Chicago writer and a senior editor with Belt Publishing. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Baffler, Chicago Reader, Latterly, The Rumpus, and Belt Magazine.

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Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology

By Martha Bayne

Belt Publishing

Copyright © 2017 Belt Publishing
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9977743-7-5

Contents

CITY OF MOVEMENT, 
THE BUILT CITY, 
THE DIVIDED CITY, 
Elaine Hegwood Bowen, 1964, 
SPORTS BREAK, 
THE CONFLICTED CITY, 
THE LIVING CITY, 
CITY OF MIGRANTS, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 

CHAPTER 1

Chicagoland

SONYA HUBER

Chicago is a dark jewel on the lake, an implacable garnet, a bristle of quartz towering next to a turquoise expanse. These stones are set in a bezel of grey highway. A rough backdrop highlights their sparkle as further rings of grey asphalt reach outward, framing a semi-industrial backdrop called Chicagoland.

To an outsider, the word "Chicagoland" might evoke a theme park where you can ride the Capone-a-con or the Checker-Club Blues Experience, where you'd line up to buy eight dollar hot dogs on a poppyseed roll with relish and a pickle and then hug a plush-costumed figure dressed like Jane Addams. If Chicagoland were a theme park, I would pay to visit, and then I would feel empty, wanting the ineffable that would be absent.

I grew up in New Lenox, Illinois — twenty-four miles from the nearest edge of the city limits. To explain and locate New Lenox, I say, "It's far southwest of the city, right next to Joliet. You know: Blues Brothers, the prison," and people all around the world nod and say, "I've driven through there on I-80."

Am I a suburban kid claiming affiliation with a city I only drove into for grade-school museum trips and supervised parental expeditions to buy Christmas chocolate at the old evergreen-colored Marshall Field's? Yes. Kind of. I am also someone who took high-school drives to see bands at the Cabaret Metro on Clark Street, who drove up to play indoor soccer and drove home on the cold highways alone, listening to Paul Butterfield on the radio and absorbing the blues, taking for granted that the night in every city would be soaked in such wailing and ache. My friends and I drove downtown aimlessly, not having money to actually do anything and not knowing what to do, then driving home. I am someone who later took the train in to work, then still later moved into the city, crossing a divide and falling in love with the neighborhoods knit together by the L.

I am not from Chicago, but I am from Chicagoland.

At first, I couldn't explain what I meant — I just knew.

Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he overheard me tell a stranger I was from Chicago. He scoffed at me in that gentle mocking I seem to invite from the world at large. "You're from corn, not Chicago," he might have said.

"No," I replied, insistent, maybe rising from my seat to express something with a finger upheld, putting something into words that up until now might never have needed to be uttered: "No, I am actually from a place that is called ... Chicagoland."

He joked with me: "I'm from about two hours west of Pittsburgh. Is that Far East Chicago?"

"No!" I said. There is no East Chicago in Chicago. It's just the lake. Though just across the border is East Chicago, Indiana — which is somehow, inchoate in my mind, also Chicagoland. He drew a rough map on a scrap piece of paper. I tried to sketch the boundaries and he reached in with a pen to circle the entire Midwest.

It turns out we were both right.

The friendly round-faced man with glasses and a work shirt who appeared on our Zenith television told me as a child that Empire Carpet served greater Chicagoland. Invisible ladies' voices sang a number — "588-2300: EMPIRE!" — that I remember even when I cannot remember the phone number of either of the homes where I grew up.

Chicagoland was built by advertising, tentacles of transit, and waves of immigration lapping on the prairie's shore. Colonel Robert R. McCormick, Chicago Tribune editor and publisher, is said to have put the term "Chicagoland" into common usage in 1926 on the paper's front page: "Chicagoland's Shrines: A Tour of Discoveries." He gave this gritty kingdom a name and claimed that his land reached out 200 miles in every direction to include parts of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa.

Today the Tribune defines Chicagoland as the city itself plus all of Cook County, eight Illinois counties including Will, and two counties across the line in Indiana. The Illinois Department of Tourism plucks Chicago out and describes Chicagoland as the remaining portion of Cook County plus Lake, DuPage, Kane, and Will. The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce is inclusive: the city plus its ring of six counties.

Today in Chicago, the term "Chicagoland" is a practical and unselfconscious term of internal reference. Businesses use it to denote their locations, phone companies and government agencies and transit authorities use it to describe their coverage and service areas.

I don't know whether the north suburbs call themselves Chicagoland, or whether they need to. I know they have distinct and glowing identities all on their own. You can say "Evanston" and people know well enough: Northwestern University and a "beautiful town."

New Lenox, while beautiful in its own humble way, is not "beautiful." It is a former farm town in Will County that has aged in mildly horrific ways like a cheap facelift. We are an affordable bedroom community, and our face has frozen lumps of botox McMansions studded in between the wrinkles of vinyl-sided older neighborhoods that used to be the only places to live. We are the intersection of I-80 and the third beltway of I375, the economical alternative.

To me, Chicagoland is the unclaimed and unnotable spaces like these, where waves of immigrants settle as they move out of downtown but somehow never escape the city's grasp. Chicago is not present without the liminal space you must cross to get to Chicago, and Chicago is not one of those snooty places that cares whether you are "in" or "out" of a dividing line. Chicago is a bristling dominion that looks out across the corn and goofily, cheekily wants it all.

Chicagoland is a ruined beauty, the roadside that glitters with grit that edges the corn. It is the kingdom bounded by highways that have names instead of numbers: the Edens, Kingery, Lake Shore Drive, the Dan Ryan, the Stevenson. We are the ends to all those roads. Chicagoland is Chicago's garage. We are the long, low, rusted warehouses where Chicago parks its snowplows and stores its extra couches. When Chicago takes off its coat, we hold it. We park its car.

Sometimes I say I am "from Illinois," but that feels as disingenuous as saying I am from "Chicago." I am not a rural kid by nature, nor am I urban. Nor am I suburban, with its connotations of safe, contained experience. Chicagoland anchors the city like a rivet on the Rust Belt. Joliet East High School's mascot was the Steelman. When Chicago turns fitfully in its sleep and remembers steel and the stockyards, Chicagoland nods its head and holds those stories in its contaminated chain-link squares of earth.

Chicagoland is Svengoolie, the weird zombie-clown host on 1980s local Chicago network television who introduced old horror movies and whose signature joke was to simply intone, "Berwyn!" Berwyn is a non-remarkable town due west of the city: take Cermak out past Cicero between the spokes of I-290 to the north and I-55 to the south. If you are from Chicagoland, you know that the drive out will be a stretch of strip malls and a mix of Mexican and Polish delis, Irish bars, fast food joints, nail salons, and auto...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Belt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0997774371
• ISBN 13: 9780997774375
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Herausgeber: Bayne Martha
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar