Old Town Chicago Part 2 (May 2023)

In this series of blog posts, I am exploring the sights and scenes of Old Town, a Chicago neighborhood where I have my second home.

The first post of the series, described the Wells Street stretch of Old Town. This post continues with the North South streets of Old Town. This post describes Clark street, which forms one of the outer boundaries of Old Town.

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N-S Street 2: Clark Street

I began walking on Clark Street, starting from Division towards Armitage (see below):

Source: adapted from Google Maps

I have always thought of Clark Street as the type of boring street you drive through rather than stroll on. I once heard a Buddhist teacher say that boredom is an outcome of not paying attention. Now that I was paying attention, I can confidently say that the Clark Street stretch of Old Town is not boring at all.

At the intersection of Clark and Division is a station on the Red Line of Chicago's train system. Below, you can see the tunnel entrance points on each side of the street. The Clark and Division station actually has four entry/exit points, one on each corner of the intersection. I’ve developed an obsession with selecting the most efficient exit point from a train station. While it doesn’t ultimately matter—since you can always cross over to your destination street after exiting—getting it right on the first try always gives me a little dopamine boost!

The transit system maps of the three major cities I have lived in (Delhi, Chicago, London) hang as artwork in my condo:

The Chicago train system is referred to as the L, which is short for elevated. When the train system started in 1892, the lines were elevated above the ground level. However, now a large part of the train system is a subway (underground).

Today Chicagoans do not think of the L as a state of the art transportation system. However, in 1892, this was a big step forward. 10 years prior to the introduction of the L, Chicago had introduced a cable car system. A cable underneath the ground kept continuously moving powered by a coal fired steam engine and the railcar wheels just gripped on the cable. The cable kept moving but the drivers could brake the car for boarding and alighting passengers (a courtesy that is not consistently extended by the drivers of the Delhi Transport Corporation buses!). Almost a billion tickets were sold over the period these cable cars lasted (till 1906)!

Amazingly, one of the buildings that acted as a powerhouse to one of the old cable car lines still survives at the intersection of Lasalle and Illinois streets (not within the boundaries of Old Town as Illinois Street is south of Division Street):

The image of workers hauling in large quantities of coal into this building seems surreal given the gentrified nature of this neighborhood today. It’s easy to wonder how people in the past managed with such primitive technology. A hundred years from now, our descendants will likely marvel at how human drivers caused accidents, rather than using autonomous cars. They may also be astonished that we once killed animals for meat instead of consuming lab-grown alternatives, as they might view it from a more "civilized" perspective.

Below is a letter to the editor written by a Chicago resident to The Sun, a New York based paper, which lasted between 1833 and 1950. The letter was published on January 24, 1897, five years after the L started operating. The writer alludes to the L as an extensive system of elevated roads propelled wholly by electricity, giving peerless service-free from smoke, dust and noise, and withal, rapid and urges New York City not to go for tunnels!

The intersection of Clark and Division, in addition to the Red Line station, also features a large chain grocery store called Jewel-Osco. On the rear wall of the store, you can find portraits of five authors:

The authors (from left to right) are Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Upton Sinclair, Betty Smith and Ayn Rand. I was surprised to learn that Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago! He left Illinois after high school and hence, his connection with the city is not very deep.

Upton Sinclair is famous for his book The Jungle, which was published in 1906 and became a bestseller. He was sent to Chicago by a socialist newspaper to expose how workers in the meatpacking industry were mistreated. The outrage caused by the novel resulted in the passage of a law relating to meat inspections that till then had stalled in Congress. Interestingly, the central characters in the book are a Lithuanian couple. Chicago is a big hub of the Lithuanian community and the Economist referred to it as the second biggest Lithuanian city (after Lithuania's capital Vilnus) in 2018. Incidentally, Upton Sinclair's book is so important that it has merited an exhibit in the Chicago History Museum (see below):

It is ironical that Ayn Rand, who was Miss Capitalism herself, was sharing mural space with avowed socialists like Hemingway and Sinclair! Ayn Rand's connection with Chicago lies in her book Fountainhead, which is believed to be based on the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed many buildings in the construction boom that occurred after the Great Fire of 1871.

A little further ahead on Clark, I came across a set of condominium buildings and townhomes, which form the Sandburg Village:

The Sandburg Village was built in the 1960s. The city government displaced the low income Puerto Rican immigrants who inhabited this area, sold the land to developers, who in turn built residential space for young upwardly mobile professionals. Gentrification is a controversial issue today but it is an inexorable force in Chicago, with one neighborhood after another, becoming unaffordable for working class people.

Chicago today is racially segregated, with distinct black, Latinx, and white neighborhoods. This segregation is largely driven by economics, as income and race are often closely correlated. However, I also believe that people tend to feel more comfortable among those who look and speak like them. The Dunbar Number, proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, suggests that humans can maintain a maximum of about 150 social relationships at a time. When combined with the concepts from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which explores how we make quick judgments based on shortcuts like race or appearance (thinking fast), it seems that we might filter people in ways that help us stay within our Dunbar Number. This is a depressing thought, and I hope I am mistaken.

Moving along Clark, just a short walk away from the Sandburg Village is a condominium building with a striking facade:

The old building at this site was demolished in 2018, but its facade was preserved. Originally home to the Germania Theater, which opened in 1916, the site later housed the Village Art Theater, known for showing arthouse films until it closed in 2007. I’m grateful that theaters like The Music Box Theater and the Gene Siskel Film Center are still operating in the city. Remarkably, they’ve survived COVID, though their future remains uncertain.

Buildings and neighborhoods in Chicago are constantly evolving, just like our lives. In 2022, I experienced a major transition myself, quitting my job and returning to India. As I write this, it has been a year since that change, and I still don’t know where life is headed. But I find comfort in J.R.R. Tolkien's words: "Not all those who wander are lost."

Talking of change and transitions, I would recommend Bruce Feiler's book Life is in the Transitions. The author draws life lessons by interviewing 225 people who went through experiences ranging from common setbacks (passed over for a promotion) to the unfathomable (loss of a child). The author identifies 52 disruptors-some voluntary (quitting a job) and some involuntary (caring for a sick parent). He terms a subset of these disruptors lifequakes ( e.g. a difficult diagnosis).

The author says that we will experience a disruptor once every two years. Hence, the central message of his book is that we should not think of life as something that occurs within the punctuation marks of these disruptors. Rather life happens within these life transitions (disruptors). Disruptors are a feature, not a bug.

The author goes on to say that in the face of these disruptors people find meaning in ABC dimensions :

• A for agency (control personal life outcomes through action-e.g. working hard for a promotion)

• B stands for belonging (building connections-e.g. being a good parent) and

• C stands for cause (e.g. volunteering).

The weight of A, B and C changes in people's lives. When I reflect on my own life in the last year, quitting my corporate job was a quest for Agency as it gave me control over what I do with my time. The return to India was a quest for Belonging, the desire to be close to family and friends.

Getting back to my ambulations, right opposite the closed theater is the Latin School, which is a highly selective private school:

The kids in the school, being kids, are probably unaware of their privileges. But when they grow up, they will listen to NPR, become aware of their blind spots, vote for progressive politicians and pay high taxes. Ha!

On a more serious note, when I reflect on my own education, the one thing I wish the pedagogic method had inculcated was wonder. For instance, it never struck me that the laws of physics are applicable across the universe and there is no known designer (for e.g., God) of these laws. When we think of anything that is rule based, we always presume an architect, whether a human being or increasingly, artificial intelligence. But the fact that laws of physics or Darwinian evolution exists without a known architect is awe inspiring.

By now, I was almost half way on the stretch of Clark that falls within Old Town. Right in front of me was the Chicago History Museum:

The museum offers two free days to Illinois residents. Since I don't live in Illinois full time anymore, I wondered whether it would be ethical to take advantage of this benefit. But I do pay extortionate property taxes on my condo and hence, if I am a tax resident of Illinois, then I am a resident of Chicago. We are not born if we don't have a birth certificate and we don't die unless we have a death certificate. Similarly, we don't have a residence unless there is a document attesting to that fact. I noted that this was one of those happy circumstances where ethics and financial gain were perfectly aligned! Hence, I came back the following week on the free day.

My favorite exhibit of the museum was the one on the Pullman Porters:

George Pullman was an engineer who built a huge plant in a suburb outside Chicago. Prior to 1860s, there was no concept of a sleeper car. Pullman's sleeper cars became famous when in 1864, President Lincoln's body was brought from Washington DC to Springfield (the capital of Illinois) on a Pullman Car. The Pullman porters were all former slaves.

Another fun fact I learnt at the museum was that Hugh Heffner launched Playboy magazine in Chicago. He was a Chicago native and when he launched his famous magazine in 1953, he was merely 27 (though older than Mark Zuckerberg, who launched Facebook at 19)! There was a picture of the first ever Playboy Club, which was launched in Chicago in 1960:

The museum also has a cafe which displays some of the pictures from the archives of the Chicago Sun Times:

Just behind the museum is the beginning of the Jaffee History Trail, which opened in the fall of 2021. Each stop on the walking trail has an exhibit which sheds light on some aspect of Chicago's history. Right on Clark street, where the trail begins, is a large piece of metal:

This artifact was created accidentally, when in the Great Fire of 1871, a bar of iron in a hardware store melted into that store's brick and stone structure.

Directly opposite the Chicago History Museum is The Moody Church:

All religions seek to explain this random thing called life. It is too unnerving to think that there is only being and nothingness, with the interlude consisting of a series of random events. Writer Anika Harris has proposed that consciousness might be a fundamental property of matter, akin to mass and volume. My understanding of her argument is that consciousness could be expressed through a biological brain rather than being a direct product of it. In other words, the mind may not originate from the brain but rather be conveyed through it.

This idea is analogous to vision. Humans can only see within the visible spectrum, while many animals can perceive ultraviolet light as well. Similarly, consciousness might be fundamentally the same across different species but expressed in more complex ways in humans. A physicist friend of mine once suggested that there could be alien intelligences with such advanced brains that even a newborn could intuitively understand all the laws of physics without formal education!

However, this perspective still doesn't address whether the expression of consciousness through biological life serves any purpose. Even the Buddha, who skillfully outlined a path to attain nirvana by keeping consciousness from being born, does not explain why the initial birth occurs in the first place.

Clark Street also provides an entry point to the famous Lincoln Park:

I have spent many a summer afternoon reading in Lincoln Park but it would be wrong to appropriate it for Old Town. Technically, since Clark Street is the eastern boundary of Old Town, only the part immediately flanking Clark should be included. I certainly don't want my reckless words to convert Lincoln Park into a territorial hotspot like the West Bank or Kashmir! In fact, Lincoln Park, apart from being a park, is also the name of the neighborhood adjacent to Old Town. And some people would even refer to this stretch of Clark Street as being part of the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Somewhat strangely, given the residential nature of this stretch of Clark Street, Old Town also hosts a hotel here called Hotel Lincoln:

As of now (May 2023), the Lincoln Hotel is part of the Hyatt group. Not many people outside the US know this but the Hyatt group of hotels is owned by a prominent Chicago based family called the Pritzkers and is headquartered in Chicago.

Finally, I was at the intersection of Clark and Armitage, beyond which Old Town ends. I will sign off with a picture of the Chicago Academy of Sciences that stands right at the intersection. You can click the attached link for the next installment of this narrative.