- at night, the sky over the city has a perpetual and vaguely malevolent orange glow
- the churches move in when the money moves out, and the south side is dotted with them, boarded-up windows and fading signs for every shade of pentecostal and baptist
- ………….something else about factories and warehouses sitting empty, great cavernous hollow spaces on the edges of the city
- everything is grey, in Chicago, everything is bigger than you and grey, sidewalks and buildings that loom like Babel—people everywhere, washed out beneath the lights of the bus, the train
- the way the sound of Metra trains and planes from O’Hare or Midway, cars whisking down the street, the wind through the buildings, never goes away; you just stop noticing it. Which raises the question as to what else you’ve stopped noticing
- icy waves beating against the rocky shore of Lake Michigan? seagulls watching you as you walk through the parking lot to a shuttered Dominics?
- deep dark parking garages that take you down into the earth. They’re mechanized now, so you can basically wander around a huge empty gravesite, with doors marked “employee entrance only” for hours on end
- once I rode the L in a car with broken lights, and all you could see was the occasional flash of brightness as we passed a work tunnel, or the eerie glow of people’s ipods and kindles on their faces
- toll booths. Fucking tollbooths at 2am are the most liminal space you’ll ever find.
- below the CTA tunnels are shifting marshlands, and bones
- Before the CTA there were many little transit companies, each with their own competing elevated tracks. You can still see the bridges and tunnels of the lines they left behind scattered across the city.
- At the very bottom of Chicago, down below Millennium Park, below the roads and below the level of the lake, there is a police impound lot. There is never anyone there.
- There are the little old street-corner factories, the ones with “iron” or “cast” in their name. They were once the strength of the nation. Now they are empty and silent in the middle of a prosperous neighborhood. Sometimes a light is on.
- In winter the potholes come. They are not just in the roads. Winter leaves, but the holes do not. They wait for the next winter. There will always be another winter.
- There is always a dry cleaners. Sometimes there are two. No one ever goes in.
mar 31 2015 ∞
mar 31 2015 +