All faces, coins, and questions have two sides, there is concave and convex, and what man isn’t a Janushead? This being topology it holds good of all things: so also of cities with their inside and out. I was born well inside Chicago, four miles from the Lake. Public transportation being what it was—I might just as well say is, but in those days no poor man had a car—and since the only practical measure of distance from the Lake was distance from a beach, all residents of the Jewish West Side, around Roosevelt and Kedzie, were dry-docked. To see water, you had to stand long, sweaty streetcar rides (the red and buff streetcars, reeking of ozone, with their clanging bells and screeching wheels, the wire-mesh window guards and the air compressors going diga-diga-diga-diga at each stop, the dust, the confetti of transfer punches, mashed cigarette butts and soiled newspapers, hot rattan seats on the sunny side, green shades)—how long those rides were! You might have been living in the heart of some central land mass, for all the difference it made, your proximity to water. Herewith, a theory on the matter.
All cities hug water, but it’s available, accessible, visible, sensible water that counts. You wouldn’t have known it, living inland in Chicago—and you won’t, I am sure, to this day—that the city sprawls for miles along a great lake that is capable of oceanic moods when the right weather takes it, of biologic odors when its meadows bloom and its fauna spawn and crawl; you wouldn’t have known that this lake makes sea-waves, and in winter, ice cliffs, under a wild-flying spray. Thales never walked these streets, or he would have held earth to be the source of all creation, the peculiar, cracked, ashy, mineral-gray Chicago earth with its derivative dust, grit, and grime that rise swirling when the wind blows. We had sun-pictures in those days: you held a glass negative to the light, backed by a piece of photo-sensitive paper—images of Tom Mix, Jack Holt, Hoot Gibson straddling their lover-horses, or Rin-Tin-Tin in an earlier incarnation, but never of ships, not even a tub or a barge, let alone ocean liners. Locomotives there were aplenty—the Twentieth Century, which runs to New York.
So we were land-looked, and the mind was parched for moisture. Call it Gobi Desert, we were in Central Asia, and even when the rain poured, as it did, from hoses, the sewers would gurgle, the baked earth would crack open again, and only a little mud remained in the depressions we had pocked out with our heels to play killer-in-the-hole. Such is the source of isolationism in the Midwest: it is an ignorance and fear of water.
It took estrangement to make this clear to me. I had to move away and come back a visitor, and at last, as I am now, a residential stranger, to discover the Lake front and its implications. I had to approach the city from the outside, to throw off the heavy, bitter birth-burden and the natural piety by which I held this place dear, to see it under an aspect external to both my love and hate: to peer down its streets and not see myself at the end of them.
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The visitor who approaches Chicago by plane from the East gets the preferential view: granite and white marble skyscrapers and museums, bordered by park, bordered by water. Then more of the same by car for some twenty miles along the lake, over the Outer Drive. Lake, lake, lake, but not really lake, for there is no opposite shore, only water-cribs, tankers, lighthouses, sails—and on the land side, tall apartment buildings, a continuous façade. One way, look as far as you like and let the horizon float you into space. The other way, blind and abrupt, no peeking. Chicago is trying to hide something. Walk about and you will see what—not north and south along the Lake—east, let us say, of Broadway, Clark, and State, for there you will see only that which Chicago wants seen, its Gold Coast and Magnificent Mile of Fifth Avenue and occasionally then-some shop windows, stores, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, cocktail lounges, and fashion centers which furnish the home and the mind. Go west, cross State, proceed out on North Avenue or Division, where the hog-butcher lives. Architecture is frozen music, but this is cut-throat screaming. Here are the hidden poor in outhouses with inside plumbing—what did the Great Chicago Fire burn that these hutches and coops should still stand? Not picturesque South Halsted Street with strings of garlic and garlands of fig, an atmosphere burning bright of Mediterranean ports and Polish ghettos, but Stashu-plain West Division Street with the blond, brutal, crew-cut hair, or Germantown North Avenue with the saloons and Deutsches Kino, the hardware stores, bakeries, the shiny furniture stores, the railroad yards, the factories, smokestacks, gas tanks. Mile after mile of vanished Nile culture reconstructed out of archaeological debris, but no people, the crowds in the street rendered invisible through incongruity: an inhuman landscape (does anyone live here?)—hence, no inhabitants. These are some species of nomad on the move, fellaheen taking off after the Israelities, they, too, fleeing a smitten Egypt. The pyramids are plainly labeled, Butcher Shop, Auto Parts, Wrecking. It goes on forever, the hidden Chicago, not to be seen from the outside. The point of it all is its pointlessness.
Let me say it by birthright. Natural piety revolts, I would not have it spoken by an outsider, to bray it aloud like A. J. Liebling and publish it in Gath. But if Chicago is one of the Seven Wonders, then the eighth is that a city should be so pointlessly huge. You can take down the statement in a mile or two, you get the drift soon enough, of landscape burdened by industry, but it goes on and on, over and over and over, a Walt Whitman storehouse of democracy come alive, a Sears catalogue of people and occupations endlessly varied in repetitive similitudes cracking Leibniz on the numskull conk, identity of indiscernibles, indeed! Why so much, so many, so indiscernibly all-alike-and-different, who needs all these dry goods stores, groceries, factories, railroad yards, sidings, lamp posts, funeral parlors? Would the world collapse if there were just one less?
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No fiery riddles, this is all very plain. I mean to say, Chicago produces practically nothing that it does not manufacture. Between the work of hand and mind a balance must be kept. This balance was never established in the wonder days when Chicago rose from nothing to the nation’s fourth largest city in the first generation of its incorporated existence, and our schools, churches, museums, libraries, universities, art galleries, theaters, and concert halls have not yet righted the balance, though we are second in the land.
Come back to the Lake. We have a saying in Chicago; when we want to dispose of someone we tell him to walk east—till his hat floats. The Lake is the city’s eastern boundary, and all along this boundary for some twenty miles but seldom more than a mile deep, the East has, you might say, established a beach’head. Chicago can’t keep its eye off New York; not only LaSalle vs. Wall Street, the whole city is shot through and has been over most of its history, with rivalrous attitudes. State and Madison is “the world’s busiest comer,” the Chicago Tribune is “the world’s greatest newspaper,” the Merchandise Mart is “the world’s largest office building,” Midway Airport is “the world’s busiest,” etc, etc.
Some of these boasts are well founded, Chicago does rank first in shipping, packing, railroading, its commercial traffic is second to none; but consider for a moment, not the truth but the direction of our claims—they are aimed at New York. One by one Chicago has overtaken its earlier rivals, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco; we are ahead of them in size, productivity, and importance (whatever we mean by that). But New York stays stubbornly in first place. All sorts of happy statements float about town; now that the St. Lawrence seaway is opening up and Chicago is building port facilities at Lake Calumet (at the southeastern extremity of the city), it will outstrip New York and become the country’s number one port. It is so many miles nearer Liverpool than New York is, it has so many natural advantages, not the least considerable of which is the fact that the city is farther from the peak of its climb than New York. Now we are going to make it!
In five years the Port of Chicago may well become what the city’s optimists predict, but it will take more than five years, at least a generation, more likely fifty, for the real issue in Chicago’s rivalry with New York to be settled. This will require an elemental transformation. Chicago must move from earth to water. Such are the implications of the narrow strip along the Lake.
Such are the implications of the long narrow strip of Lake-culture, and its three points of concentration, off the North Shore at Evanston, where Northwestern stands (not properly in Chicago, but its culture necessarily bound fast to it), off the Near North Side and the Loop in the middle, and to the south, off the Midway which is spanned by the University of Chicago. The water-culture as opposed to the land means internationalism, an openness to interchange, a hospitality to ideas. The massive land-culture means heavy production, but no city can be truly great that does not reach out to water. It need not be nearby. Paris is no sea-coast town, neither is Rome, but the Seine and the Tiber are revered, and there men have at least built lovely embankments. The Chicago River, in the heart of town, runs dirty and neglected. It was a great engineering feat to make it reverse its course (in 1900, to draw sewage and foul odors away), but having done that, we were for years unable to think what else to do. Only in the last two years has a strip of embankment off Randolph Street been planted to grass, but so much remains to be done, this hardly counts as a beginning.
There is the matter of bridges, for one. A bridge must be a beautiful thing to symbolize intercourse, joining, but the Chicago River is spanned by no graceful rise of arch. Heavy, girdered, bridges flat as a Dutchman’s foot join the Loop to its northern and western environs, and the union between the shores is not even a permanent thing, for the bridges must split open in the middle, stalling the land traffic, when a ship sails by. You can imagine how this will snarl an already congested traffic when enlarged port facilities bring an even greater amount of activity to the Chicago River, as they will inevitably do. Not until stairways, benches, and walks sprout among the still unplanted trees and gardens at the river banks will the Chicago become a proper place for loafing and dreaming, as are the Seine and the Tiber, even the commercial Thames and Hudson (where you dream of different things, all, however, touched by water). Not until then will water become a property of the city as a whole.
Look to fishing for our true progress. It is easy enough to sit and fish along the Lake, and hundreds of fishermen do so daily. But the heart of the city must find a place for them, they must not be required to sit at the edge. Only then will commerce once more come to mean intercourse—When one need not turn his back upon it, but can lean back, at ease among busy things, resting against stone and brick, activity wedded to inactivity, action to contemplation, and natural piety blessing all things—bird call and policeman’s whistle—as it has done in Paris for centuries.
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The beachhead is in a perilous position: it is so narrow, so precious and précieux; and it makes up such a small proportion of the total land mass of Chicago. When there has been a particularly violent crime, or when the chronic racial tension in Chicago flares up, I am sometimes taken with fear and I see this vulnerable area, in which the city’s cultural life is concentrated, invaded by the land forces, come to smash the records and the art objects and trample the Swedish-blond or Danish walnut furniture of the style centers under hobnail boots.
Violence, not precisely of this kind, has been going on in Hyde Park for years, where the streets are rude by day and unsafe by night, with robberies, burglaries, and assault quite common. To grasp the full meaning of these events, you must know that Hyde Park, for more than fifty years, has been the city’s chief seat of culture—a South Side neighborhood of about two square miles in which the famous Midway, left over from the Exposition of 1893, the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, the homes and apartments of University personnel, and fine parks, bathing beaches, shops, and hotels are located.
Hyde Park is bordered, on the west, by the terribly overcrowded Black Belt, which slipped its buckle during the war years; the resulting spill-over, plus migrations, still going on, of Puerto Ricans and of poor whites and Negroes from the South, converted the area into one of the city’s worst trouble spots, full of crimes, juvenile and adult, and racial incidents. Some of the violence has been checked by arc lights and increased police patrols, which were granted by the city administration, rather belatedly, after the residents of the area held many protest meetings and circulated endless petitions. Conditions are much better now, but the meaning of these incidents persists; at work here are not racial tension, poverty, the maladjustments of uprooted populations, and resentment of the underprivileged alone, but the revolt of the masses, in Ortega’s sense, the execration of quality and of things of the mind. It is hard to say how much damage has been done along these lines to the neighborhood and its institutions, and to what extent a recovery can be marked; but in the nature of the case, such blows to the security and ease of a city’s cultural life may cause considerable and even permanent harm.
The University of Chicago, faced by the prospect of complete isolation in a roughneck slum, is at last “doing something about it”—together with the Southeast Chicago Commission, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, it is sponsoring conversion of its immediate environs into a high-cost rental and shopping area, which should eliminate “undesirables” regardless of racial lines and enable the “better class of people” to live at ease. But this is hardly a fundamental solution, and it does not affect all of Hyde Park. Tenements, traps, and slums between the Midway and the south side of 55th Street will be torn down, but the area immediately north of 55th Street and within striking distance of the University and its precincts will only become more congested, and deteriorate all the more rapidly; the same may be expected across the southern boundary line, and one cannot suppose that forced removals will turn the gangs and hoods toward benevolence.
But the psychological aspects of this solution stand a somewhat better chance of working out. The strain on liberal conscience (Hyde Park is highly liberal) of opposing racial prejudice while complaining about “the neighborhood” and supporting block organizations to “keep up the standards,” may shortly be removed, if the redevelopment of Hyde Park produces an interracial area of relatively equal economic, social, and cultural standards. The way one white liberal put it, “We don’t care what color our neighbors are, but when they play their radios too loud, we’d rather hear Vivaldi than pops.” But a conversation between two Negroes of the upper class, reported to me by Rolf Meyersohn, a University of Chicago sociologist, and his wife Mary Lea, puts the entire redevelopment project under a different light. “What self-respecting Negro would want to live in Hyde Park!” I don’t know to what extent this sentiment is general among the colored; but the first may be taken to be universal among liberal whites.
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Community life in Hyde Park is dominated by the University, its students, faculty, and administrative personnel. I am willing to risk a few generalizations on the University culture—as anthropologists use the word—with the understanding, of course, that no generalizations are as sound as they are attractive.
Not so long ago, under the chancellorship of Robert M. Hutchins, the students at the University—I shall restrict myself throughout to undergraduates—made up a fairly uniform body. Football was out, and with it went t. usual rah-rah accessories of collegiate and fraternity life. Raccoon coat, pennants, beanies, megaphones, and sloganized flivvers may have flourished in the 20’s; but the 30’s and 40’s, under Hutchins, were lean and studious years, with the students forming a self-conscious intellectual elite, newly introduced to Aristotle, Aquinas, and a revolutionary college program which gave great advantages to the bright and more industrious. In the postwar years, when enrollment dropped and the University found itself with a critical shortage of funds, a n umber of changes began to take place, the influence of which is still being felt. Chief among the changes was the succession to the chancellorship of Lawrence A. Kimpton, who views the return of football as a prime educational necessity, and who, a few years ago, shocked the campus by declaring that the University was no place for “queer” students. By queer, Chancellor Kimpton meant intellectuals—a position there is no reason to suspect him of having abandoned.
Kimpton’s policies have gone over with the trustees, improved the University’s financial position, and attracted a larger and more apple-cheeked student body. The “queers” to be sure, still persist, and always will, so long as the University retains its present scholastic standards, but among the students may now be found a considerable number of the “yaks”—as they are called in derision—more or less healthy and well-adjusted young men and women of rather inflexible mind, who regard life not as an adventure but an investment. In an argument with one of them—we were debating the relative merits of the Hutchins and Kimpton administrations—I found myself routed by my interlocutor, an Ivy Leaguish graduate in law, who declared, “Do you realize that until I came to the University I did not know how to play golf!” As we say, “Darf men gehn tsu college?”
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Indirectly and by default, the intellectuals are also promoting the return of football. (I trust that the term “intellectuals” may be applied, without too much stretch, to students who are not “yaks” and who may, conceivably, leave the university without learning how to play golf—in Short the “queers.” These equivocations are made in good faith, and are necessitated by an extraordinary shift in perspective among the students, which I hope to make clear in a moment. Let us call them the “serious” students, with the understanding that here, too, the term requires qualification.)
The outstanding change in student life, over the last decade or so, is the disappearance of politics as an active interest. Chicago, which was once considered a “hot bed of radicalism” by the Tribune and the local Hearst press and is still held in suspicion by the state legislature, has gone the way of all other American universities, with revolutionary groups passing into desuetude. In the old days (I would call them good; it is my own conviction that politics furnishes the best of all bases for secular culture) the political interest colored practically every student activity on campus, with the major division drawn between Stalinists (who dominated the American Student Union) and Trotskyites (who worked through the local chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League.)1 The two Marxist groups, with their symps and associates, spoke bitterly about, but never to, each other and avoided all contact, except to heckle, and occasionally strong-arm, each other’s meetings. Politics was everywhere, in a measure, one ate and drank it; and sleep gave no escape, for it furnished terror to our dreams: Hitler, Mussolini, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Civil War, the plaguey bill of Stalinism, the stop-gaps of NRA, WPA, and the New Deal, and the approach of inevitable war. We lived in the shadow of annihilation, drawing on the pattern of Guernica and Ethiopia, to imagine what bombings would be like. Liaisons, marriages and divorces, let alone friendships, were sometimes contracted on no other basis than these issues, and dominated, in a way that might seem incomprehensible to the present generation, by events of the world order. Even students who were hors de combat were involved, for everyone called upon them to justify their disinterest, and they had hard work convincing even themselves. Politics was form and substance, accident and modification, the metaphor of all things.
Now this has vanished like Villon’s snows. The metaphor is no longer political; it is not even social, but anti-social, and antisocial in a special sense, for the word, as older generations understand it, carries connotations that have become obsolete. Insofar as there is a metaphor governing the attitudes of life, it seems to be derived from the world of jazz, with the avant-garde leading the way in speech, manners, and dress. A few alliances exist with the pipestem, narrow-shouldered Ivy League tradition, and there is a sprouting of striped and buckled caps, but the University, as a whole, has not plunged. This is due to the fact that the University of Chicago is still dominated by intellectual tradition, and no definite tradition comes along with the suit and extra slacks.
But the dominant intellectual tradition is hardly recognizable as one. Tag ends of Aristotelianism and of Hutchins still stick to it, but they axe as confused as they are confusing to the undergraduates, who take quite a rocking in the College, while new administrative policies are under hot debate. For the last several years everyone has been predicting the complete disappearance of the College, as Hutchins organized it, in a year or two; the predictions have not yet come true, but slow changes are in process, hard to make out on the surface, which, everyone supposes, are preparing the way for the University with a strapping enrollment and buzzing with the wholesome athletic activities that Kimpton desires. Meanwhile the students have retreated from the more pressing local issues as they have from international ones, and have taken to calling one another “man.” This key-word of bop talk is highly significant, expressing, as it does, the least common biological denominator, to which all things are reduced by the universal solvent of jazz.
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The South Side is dominated by the University, but the University, in turn, is dominated by the South Side. The neighborhood life of the students, their favorite bars and hangouts (Jimmie’s, the Compass Tavern, the University Tavern, Stineway’s on 57th Street) have developed an interracial clientele of mixed types. Besides the recognizable students (many are no longer so), there are bohemians, workers, white-collar men, hangers-on, moochers, delinquents, and near-delinquents. From the last four groups, some require a new category for proper classification; I would call them retired students—young men, and some women, who need not actually have attended the University; they are no longer active as students, but still follow the student pattern, by habit or imitation, maintain contact with the students, and have a considerable following and reputation among them as “characters.” The retired student, a sort of recently discovered missing link, is but one of the many new forces blurring the distinction between town and gown. One meets types in the varied off-campus dives whom one would mistakenly warrant as students, and students on campus who would seem, by nature, to belong on a motorcycle or behind a counter, tending bar. The shrinking of the distance between extremes has produced a student culture typical, as a particular, and lower, social level, of the amalgamations taking place all over society in our conservative time.
Phenomenologically, the student-complex consists in bop-talk (with its basic expressions, such as crazy, cool, gas, stoned, etc., etc., deriving from insanity, narcosis, and death; very often the vocabulary is dated as, in a larger sense, the practice is—the avant-garde leadership in New York, for example, has begun to drop bop), narcotics-mythology (marijuana and main-line drugs, as part of the folkways of jazz musicians; very little indulgence, however), rudeness (“man,” “cat,” and “chick” being the major human designations, they call for none of the amenities that accompany the recognition of human beings as individual souls), Hi-Fi, short haircuts, jeans, cotton-twill slacks, zipper-jackets, and occasionally fashionable but always dirty or neglected clothes, and sports cars parked along the curb.
The ideal is to lead a passionless, “cool” life, exposed, but uncommitted, to many worlds and to be au courant in them all: to be able to chatter—actually, drone—of drama, books, art, jazz, Hi-Fi, recordings, liquors, mixed drinks, Aristotle and other philosophers, events about town, the underworld and its leading characters, as well as the leading personalities in the entertainment worlds; to avoid extremes of romanticism in sexuality or love, and all extremes of feeling, which extremes (actually normal emotion) are held in bad taste and called “frantic.” (It is of course obvious that this anti-romanticism is one of the most romantic of all cults.) One undergraduate I know calls the composite formo-frigidist, an excellent description, as it unifies the standards of taste over the entire range, including furniture and literary criticism. The whole is a masquerade. Intellectuality is cultivated as mindlessness, is required to confine itself to the crippling, limited vocabulary noted above, and to endorse guitars, Calypso, and other folk music; the rich students act and dress poor, and the poor students, within their means, rich; racial equality, though often genuinely believed in, sometimes seeks hostile expression, the whites calling their colored friends spooks, and the colored (who often refer to themselves by the same term) returning the favor through the use of the word ofay, so that it is more than a little puzzling, at times, to tell the dancer from the dance. The dead-pan Afro-Cuban mask, though optional, is worn on all occasions.
The foregoing is not, of course, true of all students, nor does the entire complex necessarily occur in students who do fit the pattern, but to a degree almost all of them are growing on this compost. There remain, of course, purer types, now as at all times, students without nonsense whose culture heroes might be some great poet, novelist, painter, philosopher, or composer, rather than the jazz musician. Their fate is inseparable from that of the series throughout Chicago’s beachhead—and similar beachheads all over the world.
I don’t know to what extent the phenomena of student life, and the Hyde Park crime rate, may be attributable to the invasion of the beachhead by land forces. Surely, some such process is involved, but the process must be an extremely complex one, since very often the predator upon the cultural, as well as the material, wealth of the beachhead is himself of the beachhead. (Nor do I mean to imply that all land forces are vicious; most of them, on the contrary, are associated with the prime middle-class virtues of stability, security, and respect for law and order. But the distinction between the lake and the land still holds true in terms of culture.)
I should judge that we are dealing, in Hyde Park, not so much with an invasion of the beachhead, as with the absence, on the beachhead, of an adequate idea of what the cultural life in and around a university should be. In part, the University is also to blame for this; in recent years it has begun to show that it, too, lacks a clear idea of itself.2 Its own unclarity is reflected among the students, not only yaks, but non-yaks. In time, the latter may well become a subspecies of yak, also capable of attributing their “education” to the University—e.g., “Man, do you realize that until I came to the U, I didn’t dig folk songs!” It is in this way that they support their opposite numbers from the frats and football claques: by letting their “queerness” become something other than conspicuous intellectuality.
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An entirely different culture is exhibited by the faculty, administrative personnel, and older graduate students—but here, too, the distinction between academic and non-academic life cannot always be clearly drawn; many professional men, strangers to the University, inhabit the area, and in its broader features life in Hyde Park follows a neighborhood pattern rather than a strictly academic one.
This pattern, which my sociologist friend Meyersohn calls the Hyde Park syndrome, shows some remarkable uniformities. First of all, the members of this group are married; and while marriage and family life predominate in nearly all neighborhoods, in Hyde Park people marry, furnish apartments, and raise children in a unique way. The children are all out of Spock and Gesell, with an assist from Bruno Bettelheim of the University’s Orthogenic School. The furniture is from Bordelon’s or aspires to be (Bordelon’s is a modern furnishings center; it has recently closed out its Hyde Park store and moved to the wealthier Near North Side) and a few modern objets, such as chairs or tables with wire legs, ace sure to be found in every house. Marriage has a youthful, cheerful, share-and-share-alike tone to it, with the young couples doing their shopping together at the Co-op, drawing on the services of the same (or the same kinds of) baby-sitters and pediatricians, encountering the same kinds of problems, and solving them in similar ways. Infidelities are rare—such, at least, is The impression; this is my riskiest generalization—and one of the few differentiae between Hyde Park’s academic and non-academic professionals may be drawn along this line, with the incidence of infidelity and divorce higher among the latter. (I suspect that nearly all differentiae between these highly similar groups are reducible to income, and that the differences in culture-pattern become greater, the higher one climbs the income-gradient.)
Other things being equal, one sure way of telling whether you are visiting an academic or non-academic household is by the behavior of the children, and the extent to which you can make yourself heard above their clatter. If it is still possible to conduct a conversation, you are in a non-academic household. The men and women form groups of their own for tennis, handball, gymnasium workouts, or buggy-pushing, shopping in the neighborhood or downtown, but by and large the couples are always together; pub-crawling and other single-handed pursuits are rare (at least when it comes to conducting them in the neighborhood).
The Goths may be sacking this Rome, but many of the Romans go on leading the established life, making the big time in their middle-class villas. I call Romans the ones whom it will take fire or other catastrophe to push out of Hyde Park; they are entrenched in their love of place and firm in their liberal convictions; an interracial atmosphere, if not entirely congenial to them, is still a cheerful price. It is not hard to see what they find lovable in Hyde Park. Nowhere else in a city of comparable size is there quite the same “small town” feeling as in this community. It has a relatively rooted, peaceful look, and in some sections, an aged dignity far beyond its years. The residential streets are all planted to lawns and trees (mostly cottonwoods, elms, and catalpas) with hedges, shrubs, and flowers not uncommon. The University’s bell tower booms out quarter-hour intervals in shivery tones and sends the strokes of the hour floating over the neighborhood, never on time; the red-tile roofs and crew-cut Gothic of the University buildings shine through the trees like the City of Oz, and when in the right frame of mind you can convince yourself that the outlying houses and streets are a village snuggling up to a castle. (In its administrative complexities, the castle, I might add, is much like Kafka’s, but let’s not spoil a pretty picture.)
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But the key to the small-townishness of Hyde Park is provided by bulletin boards. These, of course, are all over the University, and it was but a short step to carry them off campus, yet the bulletin-board culture began on a tree trunk outside a bookstore on 57th Street. Hundreds of signs, slips, chits, and notices hang pinned to this tree, all around the trunk, sometimes overlapping, several layers deep, from as high as a man can reach to sidewalk level, advertising rooms and apartments to rent and sublet, baby buggies and cars for sale, beds, armchairs, scrabble sets, English bicycles for both sexes, baby-sitters, potted plants, tropical fish, Hi-Fi apparatus and repairs, rides to points east and west, recorders from sopranino to bass—and the corresponding notices of goods and services wanted. (Recently the tree offered for sale a pair of ladies’ straw sandals, worn, only once, and a hermaphroditic hamster.)
Similar notices are to be found on the bulletin board of the Hyde Park Co-op, and lost and found signs are posted on tree trunks all over the neighborhood. Telephone numbers and addresses are freely stated, in spite of the degeneration of the neighborhood, on a patent assumption of cultural homogeneity, as though it were inconceivable for burglars to consult the tree for leads. And yet, in all likelihood, they may never do so; at any rate, the assumption of homogeneity is fully justified, for the notices are often worded in such a way as to be unintelligible to outsiders.
There is a compact, solid, middle-class “what-I-shall-assume-you-shall-assume” feeling about these signs, a sense of shared life and values, we are all friends. I don’t know of any studies of the subject, but I am sure they would reveal a striking uniformity in outlook and habits among the people who post and read these advertisements, and I venture to say it would go somewhat as follows. For some reason I imagine that they are solidly for Stevenson (I can’t imagine a Republican rubber-necking the tree trunk) and yet for Stevenson in a special sense, by way of Independent Voters of Illinois (a special chapter of the ADA), or out of conviction that he is intellectual and not, say, as the hill-billies in the neighborhood are for him. (Hill-billies are also unimaginable at the tree trunk.) Many of our tree-trunkers (let’s call them Druids for convenience) work for the IVI and IVI-endorsed candidates, and give of their time to ring doorbells, circulate petitions, and relieve the watch at headquarters during election campaigns. They read the New Yorker and the Reporter, and buy the New York Sunday Times for the Book Review. On element days in summer they go out to the Point, a recreation area and rocky projection into the lake off 55th Street; there some of them go skin-diving. Though the rocks are slippery, sharp, and often slammed by strong waves, our types prefer them to the sand beach at 57th Street; the Point is town pump and tabernacle, for all Hyde Park, and if faculty is not as well represented there as are the students this is not for cultural reasons. (Many of them have children, for whom the rocks and deep water are unsafe; and besides, as many of them as are able to, go to the country in the summer. Besides, the tree is one of the chief points where the faculty and student cultures intersect, and the typology I am developing round the tree is meant to hold good for the University culture as a whole, and not for faculty alone.)
There is a complex pattern here, somewhat mystifying in its principle of cohesion. It is easy enough to see why there should be a division among the faculty, student, and bohemian aspects of the University culture, but not why or how each group acquires its own particular pattern, or why the culture as a whole should be composed of such various elements as sports cars, bop-talk, gin-and-tonic, Station WFMT, cottage-cheese-and-garlic, paper-bound books, short haircuts, IVI, foreign movies, Bordelon’s furniture, copper jewelry and earrings, a painfully ambiguous attitude toward the color question, guitars, folk music, skin-diving, Dr. Spock, recorder-playing, Hi-Fi, open sandals, and hamsters as standard zoological equipment for introducing the children to the facts of life. Just what is the secret affinity between Hi-Fi and short haircuts, for example, that they should so often be found together, or between Bela Bartok and the IVI, or wall-to-wall carpeting and a subscription to Harper’s? This, to be sure, is not a question for Hyde Park alone to answer; one might very well ask it of urban culture as a whole. The cohesiveness seems to lie in the cohesion; essence lags scandalously far behind existence—and yet, I am sure it is no hodgepodge, some principle must be present.
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There is more of the same on the Near North Side. This is Chicago’s “New York” neighborhood—but much cleaner, more concentrated, and in some respects more like New York than the original. It combines Fifth Avenue ( a number of Fifth Avenue shops, such as Bonwit’s and Saks, have branches on North Michigan) with Central Park West and Riverside Drive, but this is only a manner of speaking. Oddly enough, it is the manner spoken here. Actually, this section has a quality and beauty all its own, with the Lake providing the distinctive atmosphere. Again, there is a complex in evidence, a mixture of elements and types, not so oddly assorted as in Hyde Park, but still of considerable range.
One immediately apparent difference is the concentration of homosexuals, and their attendant culture. Some of the shops and night spots have an exclusively homosexual clientele; others are mixed. Even some of the corner drug stores, whose fountains and lunch counters are patronized by cab drivers and local merchants, give preference, in the magazine racks, to jock-strap and body-beautiful cheesecake; the girlie magazines are often hidden behind several layers of brightly oiled young men.
This neighborhood also has its contrasts, the tracks on North State Street distinguishing the right from the wrong side. East of State, there is considerable elegance; west of State, decline sets in, running rapidly to the squalor that begins at Clark. (The lake culture also begins to peter out at State.) The sharp division between east and west moderates the clash somewhat, and you don’t encounter the startling juxtapositions of hotels and hovels so frequently as you do in New York, but the neighborhood is still preeminent in contrast. There are mean pigeon-fouled rooming houses, and flops, missions, employment agencies, pigeon-fouled on the outside and cluttered with lithos and bric-a-brac within, and skyscraper apartments with liveried doormen and snipped hedges, barber shops that serve coffee and barber shops where you can place a bet, dinky Spanish groceries for the Puerto Rican colony and greasy-spoons, second-hand automobile lots and second-hand clothing stores, and some of the better known night dubs, key clubs, and restaurants that play progressive jazz—all within a few blocks of one another.
Rush Street, the cabaret center, is brightly lit and fairly crowded all hours of the night. (Night crowds are a rarity in Chicago; of the downtown streets, only Randolph, the amusement center, stays awake after the shops close, and then mostly on week-ends.) Coffee houses, that double as art galleries, and serve atmosphere and espresso (which most of them spell expresso), abound in the neighborhood, and put some three or four ice cream tables out of doors, if space permits, for that continental touch (Ricardo’s, one of the largest restaurants, even surrounds you with travel posters). There is a rash of key clubs, with sedate or moderne façades, where you may enjoy the dubious privilege of entree by card or key only. These are unknown on the South Side.
The people round about are of several kinds. In addition to the obvious homosexuals, there are office workers and stenos from the nearby Loop, advertising executives and publicity men, students, painters, musicians, con men, chorus girls, call girls, entertainers, wirrglers, peelers, transients, bohemians, creeps, and hardy old ladies who carry shopping bags. The conspicuous difference between the Near North Side and Hyde Park is the absence of faculty. The University facilities in or near the neighborhood are mostly for evening students, and the staff of the University of Illinois College at Navy Pier either live on the South Side or the Far North or the North suburbs. At any rate, professors and their wives are not in evidence, the young-liberal complex is quite diluted, and bulletin boards and notices on trees are virtually unknown.
The Near North Side is not as homogeneous as Hyde Park; it does not have a large, homogeneous middle-class group that lends its character to the streets and gathering places. It is an anonymous neighborhood, transient and big town. Puerto Ricans and Negroes inhabit the outskirts, but racial tensions are insignificant or very well concealed. Crime in the area a few blocks off the Lake is confined to burglary and traffic violations, and street incidents are uncommon. Bug House Square in Washington Park, facing the Newberry Library, does not draw the crowds of the 30’s, and there are fewer nudniks and spielers.
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Nevertheless the syndrome, with a few modifications, is similar to Hyde Park, and a purer formation of upper-class taste and life patterns is in evidence. Bordelon’s has a huge furniture and fashion center on Walton Street, and next door Max Siegel, the bookseller, manages to achieve the same effects with birthday cards and books that Bordelon’s does in the slip covers—he carries a fair number of books, but they are so carefully loaded on light, airy shelves, as to appear purely decorative. The concentrated, foxed, browsy, and intellectually-brown atmosphere of traditional bookstores is gone; with a few minor changes the place would do well as a first-class airline waiting room. All is glass and steel, doors that open electronically, and pastel colorcombos.
There are plenty of sports cars here, but their significance as indices of wealth is much more frankly admitted, and since the drivers are seldom students, they can afford to go all the way in accessories of costume, or feel under no pressure to pretend that they can’t. Hi-Fi also flourishes more openly in the money-culture. There are more dogs on the Near North Side than in Hyde Park, but they cannot as yet touch the pigeons for making a mess. The syndrome, then, is Hi-Fi, modern furniture, Ivy League fashions, exclusive women’s shops, and millineries, with politics, faculty life, and bulletin boards significantly absent.
The bohemians are much like their counterparts to the south, and also lisp of the drug and jazz mythology in dated bop-talk, but there are fewer or none of the retired-student types among them, and the quasi-criminal and delinquent motorcycle characters are scarce. The only pure bohemian hangout is the College of Complexes (the sign is misspelled, perhaps not deliberately) at the site of the old Dill Pickle Club. It offers a variety of lectures and debates on topics in the news, and on off nights the clientele can pursue edification by reading the slogans scrawled in chalk on the blackboard that makes up one wall: “Bed wetters of the world unite,” “2+2=4,” etc., etc. Other hangouts, such as the Gate of Horn feature folk songs, American and foreign.
Many of these streets are a joy for their cleanliness, which persists in spite of choked traffic and a great variety of life and activity, and for the harmony between the rooming houses—once highly fashionable houses—and the apartment buildings and hotels. Bellevue Place, at the foot of which stands the former Mrs. Adlai Stevenson’s famous 1020 Club, is downright beautiful: quiet, reserved—it seems miles away from everything—big town, modest, harmonious, with well-kept lawns, hedges, and trees.
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The quiet life—pace it as you please—is still possible in Chicago. You can live in neighborhoods which have retained a distinctive character, and among middle-class types who have moved with the time into outer space, acquiring tastes and habits unknown a decade ago, but have retained their traditional integrity. Among some of them, in their homes, say, on East Fullerton of the mid-North Side, or on Hyde Park Boulevard, you encounter an attractive mixture of respectable vocation and artistic avocation (mostly painting and writing), with a laudable bourgeois sense of responsibility toward civic and national issues, and a well-cultivated middlebrow obligation to keep up with the right books and magazines.
Among some of these good people you get the sense that discord and neurosis are mild afflictions, that homes are permanent and children a tie which is not resented. These, to be sure, are land virtues, but they are borne without too much incongruity by people of the Lake front. Perhaps they live in the strip for the sake of the breeze—I am not speaking meteorologically—but it is a sure thing they will not be blown away by it. An evening in their homes—they often form “drama circles,” in which plays, but more often magazine articles, are read aloud, and followed by cake and coffee—gives one assurance of the abiding virtues, of group solidarity, and the abundance of the good, quiet, effortless things of life. These are the people who are relatively free of the syndrome. The appearance of well-being is fully developed. The principle of cohesion is the traditional one, the home.
My proposition, then, is this. The culture strip along the Lake is not strong or rich enough to defend itself against invasion or internal corruption. There are too few plays for one—theater has long been dead in Chicago—and the recent attempts to found a local repertory group, outstanding among which were the excellent Chicago Playwrights Theater Club, died for lack of support. Another such attempt is being launched in October (1956) in the long-de-funct Studebaker Theater, by Bernard Sahlins and Co. (good luck!).3 Opera came alive with the Lyric Theater but—good old Chicago!—administrative squabbles are now threatening the whole enterprise.4 The press is disgraceful—not because the individual newspapers are so bad; some of them compare quite favorably with their counterparts in New York, e.g., the Sun-Times with the Post, but because none is excellent.
Criticism is atrocious, and a worse blight than any slum. Music, dance, and drama get by, considering what small call there is for discrimination and close judgment; but books are butchered like pig meat in the Tribune and Sun-Times—the only papers which run reviews (on Sundays). Anyone who wants to read competent reviewing must consult the New Yorker or the New York Times Book Review. The other magazines, with the exception of mass circulators and the middle-class standbys such as Harper’s and the Atlantic, make little impression. No one seems to read Partisan Review any more, and few of the bookshops carry it. (COMMENTARY is virtually by subscription only.) There has been some talk of starting a quality review, fortnightly or monthly, but nothing has as yet come of it. (Interested parties please get in touch with me.) Poetry Magazine continues to come out, leaning heavily on local endowment, but it makes rather small difference in the city’s life.
The art world is kicking up a stir, locally, with the All-Chicago show at the Act Institute (recently concluded) drawing the usual derision from the press, and housewives, patrons, and collectors putting in their tuppence: it ran, for some surprising reason, almost exclusively to abstract expressionism.5 Considerable quantity, mediocre quality.
In addition to the Institute shows, Chicago has two annual spring outdoor shows, one for the South Side painters, and one for the North Side. Here the styles are various, and run the whole range of modern painting but usually by way of clichés. Both shows are vastly superior to the Greenwich Village outdoor exhibit, but only because the better painters do not shun outdoor exhibits as they do in New York. The best painters, however, do; most of them are affiliated with Momentum, which runs its own exhibit. This is better than the outdoor stuff, but not by terribly much and my own feeling is that the paintings benefit from being hung indoors, away from the pitiless sun. The only painter of genuine merit with this group is, I think, Edith Smith.
In the last few years the feeling has been running high in Chicago that the town is waking up and beginning to produce. The clearest evidence, for the city as a whole, is in building. New office buildings and apartment houses are going up, and the newly completed skyscraper of the Prudential Insurance Company, at Randolph off the Lake, whatever its merits as architecture, stands in commitment on this score. It will take a lot more building, cleaning, sweeping, and improving to shake off the lethargy that has dogged Chicago for the last two decades. Chicago’s new Mayor, Richard J. Daley, a Democratic machine man, has surprised everyone, and pleased most, by seeming to be wholeheartedly devoted to this task. Plans are being made to rescue the Near North and South Sides from blight and indignity by erecting administrative, civic, and art centers in these areas.
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But the big job is not, of course, a work for mayors and city officials to accomplish. It is for the Chicagoans who do not run off, and for the small-towners who are drawn here to stay, to accomplish of their own volition and capacity. Above all, it is a matter of defending, preserving, and extending the precious crust of culture along the Lake; of overcoming its terrible disproportion to the rest of the city, and of watering the desert reaches of our industrial moon. We are forever at rivalry with New York, but our laudable ambition to outstrip New York (I suppose it is laudable) will get nowhere until we discover the principle of New York and of all great cities.
As I see it, this principle is very simple (but then, I am a luftmensch: with a thirst for water). It is to give the city something to lose. And this is done by producing without manufacturing, consuming without eating (or wearing or using), enjoying without belching, and finding the everlasting in the ephemeral things: not in iron, stone, brick, concrete, steel, and chrome, but in paper, ink, pigment, sound, voice, gesture, and graceful leaping, for it is of such things that the ultimate realities, of the mind and the heart, are made.
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1 I am speaking of an avant-garde, the pacesetters and conscious students, and also the ones who were out of it in a special way.
2 In one small part, the University has passed undamaged through its own turmoil. I am speaking of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. Classes are held, most of them, off campus, downtown, at the University’s Downtown Center; they are devoted to a four-year seminar and tutorial course in reading the great books from Plato and Aristotle through Dostoevsky and Freud—the original Hutchins-Adler idea, somewhat modified and elaborated, and absolutely proof against the educational imperatives of football, folk music, and golf. Sports cars, if any, are parked inconspicuously in the welter of downtown traffic, and steel-bon and Calypso do not penetrate to the ears of the adult students. We tie ourselves nightly to the mast (there are also forenoon and early afternoon classes, attended mostly by housewives, and 7:30 A.M. “early-bird” classes, attended, I should imagine, by grackles) and have thus far resisted destruction, though enrollment is sometimes precarious. Staff meetings, which occur almost weekly during the academic year, and several times a week during the summer, take on a salutary violence, and the interchange of ideas and criticism reaches an intensity unequaled since the old political days on questions of curriculum, policy, and interpretation of the various readings. For a reason I have not yet discovered, this program, which is quite severe in its demands of both faculty and students, is unbeatable for sheer serious fun. Everybody loves it, and there is nothing quite like it in Chicago or any other city.
3 “This group is still in existence today, but attendance at its productions has been very poor, we are told.—ED.
4 The threat was overcome.—ED.
5 This was true of the 1956 show. The current art show is still on, and is not exclusively expressionist.—ED.
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