Riding the Chicago “L”
“My mother gave birth to me right here in this hospital. I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life. I ain’t leavin’ this city ‘til God calls me to go.”
If you walk the street in Chicago’s Downtown or Northside neighborhoods, chances are you won’t hear many voices like this Bronzeville man’s among the myriad accents and languages spoken around you. But hop on the Red Line or one of Chicago’s other L trains that service the South and Westside neighborhoods, and you’ll find a different Chicago, an older Chicago, a Chicago that will remain despite the successes or failures of the newest political or economic schemes.
On the Red Line, meet Chicago’s hidden anatomy. The Chicago that will remain.
And it’s not all sunshine.
Built by steel mills, meat packing, and consecutive waves of immigration from the Southern US, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and more, Chicago is the most segregated city in the United States. Immigrants settled with others who were like them, creating Ukrainian Village, Chinatown, Devon Street’s little India, Bronzeville, Pilsen, formerly a Czech neighborhood and now the city’s largest Mexican community, and more.
Chicago Vocational Career Academy, one of the high schools I worked in, featured a student body that was 97% Black, 3% Hispanic, and 93% low income. This level of racial and socioeconomic segregation is no anomaly.
But in this city of extreme wealth and severe poverty which barely interact, those with money come and go while those without stay through fair weather and foul, for generations. Like it or not, this is the real Chicago.
And a rugged city this is.
Along the Red Line
The soccer field of a public elementary school came alive while schools remained remote. Young men from the neighborhood cleared a foot of snow from the field one morning just to play soccer
Graffiti: A story of the people
The City closed beaches for Covid. People took to the water when lifeguards left for the day, encouraged in their presence on the beach because “no one is illegal on stolen land”
City of Immigrants
Walking to the corner grocery market, the beach or the Red Line, I heard almost as many conversations in languages I didn’t recognize as in those I did. Chicago was built by immigrants, and it is being built by them today