Starry Skies, Pine Needles, and Chicago, My Stinky Love

(An appropriate title for a rambling post.)

Spending last weekend in Toledo, the little city felt oddly defamiliarized for me, for the first time in my life. As a writer, I challenge myself to defamiliarize the familiar on a regular basis, but you don’t expect the place where you grew up to ever really feel that way. When I went home, I was reminded that the recession is still on. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an economic bubble in Chicago. I know that many jobs have died in Chicago, that the city is hugely in debt, and that people living here have seen hard times, too. But the rate of decline feels much slower here than in so many areas of the country, and the rate of recovery seems quicker here as well. Toledo isn’t a back-water town. It’s a small city, but it’s blue-collar, and a lot of those jobs are gone. It’s only a matter of the ripple effect from there. Many shops in my parents’ part of town sit empty. Toledoans have talked for years about the depressing facades of empty buildings filling the downtown after all the fortune 500 companies that once propped up the city moved out for cheaper lodgings in the suburbs and other Midwestern towns. But, as if tentacles had reached out from downtown Toledo, the little places on the edges of town are emptying out, too, and most of those businesses aren’t fortunate enough to relocate.

Hotels along Reynolds have been abandoned, leaving only their dated 70s construction and bland window treatments behind (yes, the curtains are still hanging in the windows). Restaurateurs have moved out of their buildings, with no new tenants to take over their abandoned kitchens. Some areas of the city look on the verge of ghost town.

Riding around Toledo, I was struck by how low everything was, and I don’t just mean depressed economically (don’t get me wrong, the city isn’t dying—I refuse to believe that—though certain limbs are faring worse than others), but physically low to the ground. I have become acclimated to high-rises and skyscrapers, and that was the single most conspicuous detail I noted about my hometown that I had never considered before. So many one- or two-story buildings! I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but some parts of the city started to feel like a toy town.

I enjoy visiting Toledo. In addition to spending time with my family, it’s a nice break to take a leisurely drive through streets that feel practically empty; I don't feel rushed there. And it’s nice to walk down quiet neighborhood roads where stars can be seen at night, and you can hear crickets and falling acorns.

And, honestly, my nose appreciates the break. I mean, I have to admit that one of the first things I recognize when I’m back on the streets of Chicago is the foul smell. It’s that waft of sewage that drifts up from the manholes in the streets, or the sweet perfume of fresh urine, or that odd, stale McDonald’s scent that drapes certain intersections downtown. I’m reading Devil in the White City right now (fantastic!) and when I was reading about the dead cats and the sewage and the muddy streets I thought of that Swift poem, “A Description of a City Shower,” and felt like 19th-century Chicago and 18th-century London weren’t all that different. But then, today, when I was walking downtown and my nose was assaulted by a urine-and-moldy-Big-Mac odor, I thought, “Well, we may not be wading through shit, but you can never get away from the smell of it in a city with so many people, whether its 1889 or 2009.” Anyway, that’s the long way of saying that I appreciate the scent of pine needles and fresh grass in my parents’ neighborhood.

But after a short while away, the rumble of the city starts to call me back. The activity, the people, the events, the architecture—they all contribute to the overall seduction of Chicago. Chicago, you are a stinky city, and you’ve got lots of crime and homelessness and corrupt politics and frigid winters, but somehow I just keep coming home to you.