Up 4 percent? Or down ¼ of 1 percent? Both are true of Chicago these days

Call it a battle of dueling perceptions, if you will.

Fewer residents, but many more visitors?!?

For it was all over just about every publication Thursday that Chicago’s overall population is, once again, on the decline

TO BE EXACT, Chicago’s population dropped by 0.23 percent. In fact, just about every place in Illinois was on the decline, with the percentages being larger in other places. Which means that the losses hurt those places more, since Chicago has so many more residents it can spare.

Credit, or blame, for Rahm?

So how exactly does Chicago choose to combat this factoid – which can be used as ammunition by those people of ideological leanings that make them want to lambast the city for everything they see as wrong with the state of Illinois as a whole?

We got city officials to release their official study of tourism to Chicago.

Which officials said was at a record-high of 57.7 million people during 2018.

Made front page of World's Greatest Newspaper

ALL OF WHOM stayed at hotels, ate at restaurants and shopped at stores buying all kinds of the tacky trinkets most of us wouldn’t even think of buying. Too touristy!

The increase continues a trend dating back to 2013, which means this is something that soon-to-be former Mayor Rahm Emanuel will boast about when discussing the legacy of his eight years as the head of Chicago city government.

Which might make him like the almighty Wizard of Oz, telling us to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” every time someone brings up the fact that Chicago’s population has declined ever so slightly every year since 2015.

Placing us even closer to that day likely to come some time by 2030 when Houston manages to surpass Chicago as the nation’s third largest city – we’re Number Four will be the chant we’ll have to take up. Even though as far as anyone who lives here already knows, our city is really Number One. Something that all those millions of tourists have figured out for themselves.

  -30-

How fancy is too fancy for a hot dog?

I couldn’t help but be amused to learn of a new study that proclaims Portillo’s, the Chicago-area-based joint specializing in hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches, to be the nation’s favorite restaurant.

Would this 'stand' have been worthy of honor?

As in TripAdviser, a website catering to tourists who wouldn’t have a clue where to go outside of their home communities, said the chain of Portillo’s restaurants are the best in the country when it comes to Fast Casual – as in food nice enough to be more than fast food, but not so elite you have to get all dressed up in order to eat there.

IT SEEMS SOMEBODY is trying to push the idea that Portillo’s is the ultimate experience in hot dogs, and that one has to have their take on a sausage dragged through the garden before they can truly know what the Chicago hot dog experience is.

This amuses me because I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find that just about everybody with any experience in consuming a “Chicago-style” hot dog could rattle off a whole slew of places that they would prefer, rather than making the trip to whatever Portillo’s franchise happens to be closest to their particular neighborhood or suburb.

While there’s nothing wrong with Portillo’s, I just think there are many other places that are better.

Particularly when one considers the cost of a Portillo’s dog ($2.65 each, fries and drink extra). It ain’t cheap. In fact, I definitely feel like we’re being asked to pay premium prices for the Portillo’s décor – which is meant to display various memorabilia with a Chicago atmosphere.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE we’re visiting a Chicago-inspired theme park. Whereas I’d argue that a true Chicago experience would include a visit to an actual neighborhood hot dog stand – which likely would be so tiny that these tourism-based websites would never find it.

Not that it would be a bad thing. If anything, it’s the obscure neighborhood joints that offer up the best experiences, and the larger places somehow manage to lose something in the process of business growth.

It makes me wonder if Portillo’s itself, which originated in suburban Villa Park and displays a photograph of the original “dog house” motif hot dog stand in every one of their stores, may have actually deserved the accolades way back when.

Proclaims Portillo's the best 'fast casual' restaurant

Now, it’s just a generic chain restaurant. And a highly-priced one, at that.

I STILL RECALL the last time I went to a Portillo’s. I had the barbecue ribs meal – and paid close to $25 for it. Not exactly eating on a budget.

As for a hot dog, I don’t feel compelled to seek out my local Portillo’s joint whenever I feel the need for one. Because for me, the whole concept of a hot dog and fries is that it’s supposed to be a cheap meal.

A couple of “dogs,” fries and a coke for about $5 sounds about right (I'm sure people of my parents' generation could remember a time when the cost would have been closer to $1) – with the understanding that eating too many meals like that isn’t doing my overall health any benefits.

Anyway, my own personal favorite of hog dog stands is actually the Boz’ Hot Dogs scattered throughout the southern end of Chicago metro. I particularly like the way they use cucumber slices, rather than pickle spears – a personal quirk that some may not enjoy as much as I do.

I’M ALSO ONE whose memory still salivates at the notion of Gold Coast Dogs. I’d probably eat hot dogs more often if I could still get a char dog or two with everything (and everything does NOT include ketchup, which they had enough sense to realize).

Would Boz ever make the list?

So the idea of Portillo’s as the best Fast Casual restaurant in the country? I doubt it. Because any place serving a hot dog of any quality whatsoever would probably never be deemed worthy of any type of “best” list.

Now if you really want to talk off-beat foodstuffs, consider the “chocolate cake shake” that Portillo’s offers up.

At 850 calories in their small-sized shake, it most definitely is not something to eat if one wants to be in good standing with “Weight Watchers,” but is something unique-enough to make the occasional trip to Portillo’s worth one’s while.

  -30-

It’s gonna be a long, long, long strike

It never fails to amaze me the degree to which some people have no respect for those individuals amongst us who actually have to work for a living. 

Picketers could be in for a long-drawn-out dispute over insurance benefits for hotel workers. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

As in doing forms of labor that are tiring, grueling and are the kind of jobs that nobody really willingly takes on for themselves.

I’M REFERRING TO the people who are part of the UNITE HERE Local 1, the union the represents hotel workers at various establishments around Chicago.

They’re the ones who have been picketing for the past 10 days outside all of the upper-crust hotels, trying to make a nuisance of themselves in hopes that they’ll shame the hotel owners into meeting their demands.

Yet I get a sense from the complaints I have been reading in recent days that most people who stay at those hotels are going to be merely appalled by whatever amenities are being tampered with as a result of the striking workers.

Heaven forbid that some hotel patron who was too lazy to go outside missed a meal because they couldn’t get room service. Or that someone had to wait a little while longer while checking in to their hotel because the short-staffed businesses are behind on having their rooms ready for them.

YOU’D THINK HOTEL management would see the activity of the past week-and-a-half and come to the realization that their staffs are essential parts of being able to provide the quality of service they think they offer – and ought to be offering for the absurd rates they often charge for a room there.

Instead, they’re more than willing to try to shift blame to those workers for not doing work.

Did any of these people care at all about the picketing taking place just blocks away?

Which may be appropriate since we’re now in an Age of Trump, with a president who made his personal fortune by building all those allegedly-upscale hotels that egotistically bear his name.

I don't doubt that Donald Trump himself views the staffs of all his Trump Hotels as being totally-replaceable minions who ought to be grateful to wear work uniforms bearing the “T” (for Trump) and think their affiliation (no matter how superficial) with his name is compensation enough for their grueling labor.

I FULLY EXPECT it’s just a matter of time before the public turns on those hotel workers who are now making a racket outside the so-called elite hotels.

Just as how whenever the issue of the minimum wage and the notion of raising it to $15 per hour comes up, some people are quick to go on rants about the unmitigated gall those people have thinking their labor ought to be compensated appropriately.

We’ll also hear arguments made about how keeping employee wages and other compensation is absolutely essential to maintaining the current status of the economy. Almost as though they think underpaying the hired help is essential to preserving the “American Way” of life.

Personally, I’ve always felt companies that manage to keep their employees satisfied are the ones that have the most productive workforces – and often have people wanting to work for them.

NO COMPANY THAT thinks its workers ought to be thankful anybody bothers to employ them in any capacity is going to achieve much in the way of success. Of course, their management later will “blame the workers” for not properly producing.

What if Trump workers tried striking?

Part of the reason I can sympathize with these hotel workers is because this particular strike isn’t about salaries (although I’m sure they wouldn’t object to a raise). It’s about health insurance – as in many of these hotel companies like to lay off staff during the winter months, which results in them losing health coverage.

You’d think that management would want to have a healthy workforce. At the very least, they wouldn’t want to encourage concepts that their workers could be carrying something that could be passed on to their customers.

And in the end, it’s the notion of serving those customers properly that is the reason those hotels are in business to begin with. Particularly at a place like the Palmer House hotel downtown – where the absolute cheapest room one can get there is $169 per night. Because if one is just looking for a night’s sleep that isn’t on a park bench, there’s always Motel 6.

  -30-

No more carriage rides by Christmas?

There are times when I think elected officials have way too much free time on their hands, which causes them to come up with cockamamie concepts that don’t benefit the citizenry of Chicago in the least.

Will this soon be an obsolete Chicago site? Photos by Gregory Tejeda

Take, for example, the discussion currently being contemplated around City Hall to abolish the notion of horse-drawn carriages that operate in certain parts of the city – mostly the upscale neighborhoods that draw a lot of tourist traffic.

THERE ARE THOSE people who think it’s downright adorable to ride around the city while being pulled by a horse, most likely with a driver wearing a quaint costume.

Personally, I think there’s something off about riding around while watching a horse’s tail swish about back and forth in front of me, while having to smell the aroma of the beast – and quite possibly also see it defecate on the streets of Chicago while we ride.

In short, taking such a ride is not something I have ever done, or have had a desire to do. But I also think the people who are getting all worked up over this are grossly exaggerating things.

I think that a ban on an aspect of Chicago that some people find intriguing is overkill. I don’t see the harm.

I KIND OF view it as being similar to the game of golf – something I personally have no interest in playing, but I certainly don’t think it would be appropriate to go out of my way to restrict those people who do enjoy it.

Will aldermen someday feel compelled to abolish remaining payphones?

For the record, the Chicago Tribune reported how a City Council committee is scheduled to take up the issue on Wednesday. An ordinance now pending would do a sudden-phaseout of the licenses that carriage operators have to obtain from the city in order to offer such carriage rides.

Since the current round of licenses expire in November, it would make the people who get a carriage ride in coming months to be among the final who enjoy such an experience.

Should tourists spend money at Water Tower Place instead of  horse rides?

If the political people, many of whom seem to be the aldermen representing the wards of the Near North Side that actually have such rides as a regular neighborhood feature, get their way, such carriage rides would become as obsolete as the idea of street cars clanging down city streets.

SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T seen in over a half century.

Personally, I think someone somewhere in a floofy neighborhood is getting too worked up over the aroma of a horse. Which I’ll admit isn’t the most pleasant to experience. But it’s something one usually catches a whiff of for a second or two before it goes away.

I just can’t see it as something worthy of creating a new law to abolish. In fact, this may be one of the few times I’m inclined to agree with those right-wing ideologues who think that any time a government enacts a new regulation they’re somehow impinging on our personal freedoms.

I can’t see how a carriage ride is somehow a threat to Chicago – unless you’re somehow careless enough to step in a pile of horse-dung. In which case, it’s more a case of your own carelessness, rather than some sort of threat to the public safety.

BESIDES, IT MAKES me wonder what would be the next target of people who want to see carriage rides as somehow corrupting the character of Chicago. Will they see those Chicago Police officers who are part of mounted patrol units as some sort of threat to the public safety of the citizenry?

Will we be calling for those cops to be put out of commission? Or will we just try assigning those officers to units of cops riding bicycles around the city?

I bring this up because the most disgusting thing I ever saw that involved a horse in Chicago involved a mounted patrol officer. He was on his horse in the streets that are part of Grant Park when the horse decided to relieve itself.

Keeping 'the Loop' safe?

The flow of urine hit the asphalt pavement, flowed downstream and wound up heading straight for a spot where three teenagers were sitting on the sidewalk. Three teens whose Chicago memories now include the time they got peed upon by the police.

  -30-

I’m better off with culture jolt to avoid thinking about the new president-elect

Friday was the day that the U.S. Senate formally confirmed the results of the Electoral College – which upheld the results of the general elections held back in November throughout the nation.

One of the centerpieces of the Art Institute collection. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

It doesn’t matter now what flaws or quirks or screw-ups are uncovered in the future – Donald J. Trump really will be our president for the next four years.

I’M SURE THERE are some people who contrived all sorts of schemes they would have figured would deny the presidency to the one-time New York real estate developer. Others probably fretted away a day of their lives on Friday.

Personally, I didn’t bother.

I took advantage of the fact that my work load for the day was fairly slow. I wound up catching a commuter train into the Loop, taking a walk along that Great Street (a.k.a., State Street), then spent a good chunk of the day at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Which is a place I must confess I haven’t visited in many years. It may well be a decade or so since I last set foot inside that building.

TO THE POINT where I must admit it felt like a new experience to me – even though many of the paintings and sculptures I saw were ones that I knew were there. They were parts of the collection that make the museum world-renowned.

Does image move you? Or mention of Bill Murray?

And made for an afternoon I’m not likely to forget – particularly since it meant I didn’t have to get obsessed about the thought that we’re soon going to have the same nitwit who actually managed to come up with an architectural structure ugly enough that it makes the old Sun-Times Building that it replaced look interesting by comparison.

In fact, I only gave the presidential circumstances two bits of thought during the day. Once was when I saw a calendar that provides the next four years in full – giving us a literal countdown to the day in January 2021 that Trump (we hope) will no longer be president.

The other was the nitwit government official in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who admitted Friday afternoon that he made no effort to reach out to the president when it came to the airport incident involving a gunman on the loose.

Chicago the "most beautiful great city?"

INSTEAD, THAT OFFICIAL went out of his way to contact Donald Trump and Mike Pence. They won’t be executives-in-chief for another two weeks., but is seems some people are just waaaaaay too eager to have them take the oaths of office.

To the point where they probably are eager to act as though Barack Obama was never in public office to begin with. A thought that probably would bother me much more significantly than it does Friday night – except that I have my cultural jolt now.

Perhaps what it takes for all of us to be lightened up politically is a dose of Jules-Adolphe Brezon and his painting, “The Song of the Lark.”

Which, the museum made a point of telling us, was a work of art that both former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and actor Bill Murray felt some affection for.

IF ANYTHING, I wonder how much better off we’d be as a people in Chicago if we all managed to take an occasional jolt of the cultural amenities in our midst – but which many of us just take for granted.

Would the people in that painting have any interest in watching us?

If it isn’t a ballgame that serves up overpriced beers (seriously, $9?), some of us just won’t care.

At the very least, it would help us put aside the more miserable aspects of our existence.

Although I still have to admit one gripe -- $37 for a souvenir t-shirt?!? It almost has me eager for springtime and a ballgame, where I can likely get a cheap seat for less than that.

  -30-

Navy Pier losing its carnival-like atmosphere to become a luxury hotel

I enjoy Chicago, take a certain amount of pride in being able to say I was born here and have lived the bulk of my life here. I also think this city is a wonderful place that everybody in the world ought to come to enjoy at least once in their lifetime.
 

The carnival-like atmosphere at Navy Pier could become a part of the past. Image provided by Chicago Postcard Museum

Yet I have to confess to always feeling a little tinge of embarrassment whenever I read something reminding me that Navy Pier is the Number One tourist attraction not only for Chicago, but for the state of Illinois.

IT JUST SEEMS a little silly, to me, that people who have taken the time and effort to make the journey to Chicago wind up wasting their time checking out the pier, or at least what has become of the pier in the past three decades.

The giant Ferris wheel gave the place a carnival-like atmosphere. And I realize the historic implication of a Ferris wheel in Chicago being reminiscent of the worlds’ fairs that were held in our city.

But if you think about it, you can ride a Ferris wheel anywhere. Admittedly, you won’t get a great view of Lake Michigan at the top of a wheel at some rural county carnival. But a wheel is a wheel.

Even more silly, to me, was that Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant located at the pier. Created to feed off the popularity of the 1994 film “Forrest Gump, it also is something that seems so absurd. With all the quality dining one could find in Chicago, people would be expected to choose a brand that has 43 locations across the United States, along with Mexico, Great Britain, Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Navy Pier a long ways from when it was purely a boat-docking facility

IT COMES ACROSS as being a real-life take on the gag from that episode of “The Simpsons” where the family goes to Japan and winds up eating at the “Americatown” restaurant, where mom Marge gets excited about seeing the Japanese take on the club sandwich!

In short, Navy Pier isn’t a place I go to very often (and not just because I’m a cheap grouch!). So I have to admit to feeling a jolt of excitement when I learned this week of the City Council contemplating an overhaul of the place that was erected a century ago as a pier for those ships sailing into Chicago off Lake Michigan.

Which makes the pier’s incarnation of recent years seem so ridiculously absurd. I doubt that those sailors who arrived in Chicago at the pier some 90 years ago, or those people who came to the pier to fish a half-century ago, ever would have envisioned a place that had lots of shops where one could buy various incarnations of a “I (heart) Chicago” coffee mug.

The council’s zoning committee gave its approval this week to a plan calling for a seven-story hotel to be built on the pier, along with amenities such as a winter ice-skating rink, a sloped-roof welcome pavilion (which likely would continue to have all those gift shops selling tacky trinkets) and some short-term boat docking facilities.

The days of academia are long-gone from the pier. Photograph provided by Chuckman Chicago Nostalgia

IT IS, AFTER all, a pier. Which means boats. The people who conceived of the need for a pier sticking out one mile into Lake Michigan didn’t do so because they wanted a unique site for a carnival ride.

Although I also realize that ships transporting goods don’t arrive at Navy Pier anymore. What little shipping still arrives in Chicago sails into the piers down around Lake Calumet.

So I realize that the pier has to evolve, or else become pointless and rot away. Which is the fate it nearly suffered by the late 1970s.

I can remember the days just before the remodeling of the 1990s when the structure was largely vacant and it was obvious that the facility had a very practical purpose for briefly storing goods brought in from ships.

I CAN REMEMBER making the walk to the pier offices at the far east end of the facility, having to go through all the vacant space and feeling like it was such a waste. The ghosts of college students past from the pier’s UI-Chicago days and those from the days when World War I-era draft dodgers were incarcerated there were all over the place.

Plus, I’m also old enough to remember the “Chicagofest” festivities held at the pier that then-Mayor Jane Byrne always liked to think were the biggest part of her legacy to the city. Closing my eyes could bring to mind memories of seeing Muddy Waters perform there, along with the Turtles (remember “Happy Together?!?”).

Losing some of the sillier touristy aspects of what has become Navy Pier will be a plus – particularly if it provides a facility that can enhance Chicago as a whole.

That used to be a long walk, particularly when made on a cold December day. Photograph provided by Chuckman Chicago Nostalgia

Although I suspect I still won’t become a Navy Pier regular, because I think that whatever hotel winds up being built at the site will be one I won’t stay at because it will wind up far beyond my own income level.

  -30-

We really are lagging behind Indiana – when it comes to Bicentennial events

I have to admit to being somewhat impressed by the amount of activity that is taking place across Indiana this year with regards to celebrating that state’s Bicentennial – as in 200 years since it became a part of the United States.

 

There doesn't seem to be much of an Illinois counterpart

Taking a look at the state’s official travel guide, I see lengthy lists of places and events all across the Hoosier state that are of interest and worthy of being checked out – particularly by our local people in search of a cheap vacation trip.

IT SEEMS THAT Indiana is taking seriously the idea that 2016 is a significant event in their state’s history – one worthy of celebration.

I particularly get a kick out of the idea of the Bicentennial torch relay – which will be taken on a 3,200-mile trip passing through all 92 counties across the state. A running countdown on the VisitIndiana.com website even tells us it’s 50 days and counting until this trek begins.

Personally, I’d like to think all of this activity will be put to shame come 2018 – which is the year that Illinois celebrates its Bicentennial of admission to the United States (Indiana is state number 18 in the order of admission, with Illinois right behind it at 19).

Yet shamefully enough, it seems like we’re going to get skunked by our neighbors to the east; and not just because some Illinois long-based ice cream stand chose to move to a town on the Indiana side of State Line Road. It seems that any efforts for preparation for our big event have been lagging behind for so long it’s a wonder if anything will get done in time for the big event.

AND YES, THESE things usually take some time to plan if they’re to be done properly.

 

RAUNER: Is he slacking off?

I couldn’t help but notice the Capitol Fax newsletter, which on Tuesday pointed out a Peoria Journal-Star news story about how our state’s Bicentennial Commission hasn’t planned a thing. In fact, it hasn’t even met since it was created back in 2014.

Part of the problem is that it was created by former Gov. Pat Quinn, and I can see where current Gov. Bruce Rauner has been preoccupied with other problems and issues (mostly of his own making) to be too concerned about the celebration.

The Capitol Fax newsletter also points out the amount of activity that has gone into the renovation of the Executive Mansion in Springfield, which admittedly is desperately in need of repair. Could this be a distraction?

 

QUINN: Did he not give a big-enough head start?

THE BUILDING THAT serves as the state’s official residence and home of the governor when he’s in the capital city had been allowed to deteriorate significantly during Quinn’s time in office, and perhaps he deserves some blame for that.

But if it turns out that our state’s Bicentennial comes and goes without much of anything to acknowledge it, then that will be something that will be put to blame on the current governor.

After all, it will occur on his watch as governor. In fact, it could be his chance to show off the things he’d like to have remembered as accomplishments. Unless he’s satisfied with having a historic legacy of being yet another guy who quarreled with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago – and lost!

You’d think this would be a time we’d want to show off our many assets. Heck, it could be the moment when Illinois’ parts outside of Chicago get to display themselves proudly.

THE STATE COULD let people know there really are assets in the rest of the state – and perhaps that old “A million miles from Monday” slogan the state used to use to promote downstate tourism wasn’t a total crock.

Instead, we seem content to let Indiana show us up; which really is a sad display.

 

Would Lincoln still claim Illinois as his 'land?'

It makes me wonder if the spirit of Abraham Lincoln truly is gone from our state. What would Honest Abe be doing since that roll over he allegedly did in his grave in response to Rod Blagojevich?

Would it be enough to make him reclaim his Hoosier roots and want to abandon the state that considers itself to be his land?

  -30-

Is it really history? Or just the past’s trivial garbage cluttering our present?

As a person who spent his college years studying history, I am familiar with the arguments made about what exactly is appropriate for academic study.

'Wisconsin Steel' kept many Chicagoans employed

Did we focus way too much of the past study on the antics of now-dead white guys? Did we miss out on the stories of regular people of the past – particularly those of a more-intense melanin content level in their skin complexions?

My grandfather cleaned up well after week in steel mill

OR ARE THOSE people who make such an argument going so far to try to legitimize their own stories that they’re bringing up trivial points – rather than letting us know what was truly significant in our past.

Now I don’t doubt that some people use historic study not so much to comprehend who we as a society were, but to try to legitimize what they want to believe – and downplay people whom they’d prefer not to have to acknowledge at all.

My own thoughts about history are to say that none of my elementary or high school history courses taught me a thing of significance. And the sad part is that many allegedly-educated people don’t take much in the way of history courses beyond that academic level.

History? Or not?

All of this came to my mind this weekend because of my touristy-type behavior. I spent part of Saturday wandering about Chicago with camera in hand, collecting stock photos I can use to illustrate my writings here about various aspects of the Second City.

 

I EVEN MADE a stop at a museum – the Chicago History Museum up in Lincoln Park.

I have been there many times before, and have my memories of grade school field trips burned into my brain. Those dioramas of old Chicago scenes and the various artifacts that survived the Chicago Fire of 1871 – I will never forget the sight of those charred cookies found in the rubble that somehow were preserved.

But I couldn’t help but notice many new exhibits and artifacts on display that I suspect would never have made the cut at the museum of the past.

I never wrote on a typewriter that nice!

 

My own favorite was the sight of letters from the old Wisconsin Steel Works sign on the factory that used to exist at 106^th Street and Torrence Avenue in the South Deering neighborhood.

A PLANT I heard about many times growing up because it is where my maternal grandfather, Michael Vargas, got a job upon coming to this country from Mexico as a young man and wound up working there until he hit retirement age.

Somehow, I doubt the museum of old would have been too obsessed telling me about Fort Dearborn and the “massacre” to have spent much time telling me about the Southeast Side steel mills that were a significant part of my family’s lives (both of my grandfathers worked in them) and many other Chicagoans.

And as for that exhibit about the ’68 Democratic Convention and the protesters – hippie posters next to a light-blue police helmet? It would have been ignored in the past, unless someone felt compelled to try to write history to erase the phrase “police riot” from its description.

Would modern-day reporter-types 'get it'

Personally, I was intrigued by the exhibit the museum now has about ordinary objects and how even they tell stories about who we once were.

WHY ELSE WOULD I have had the chance to see a telephone booth (no sign of Clark Kent approaching needing to change his clothes) or a typewriter put prominently on display?

Although I can already hear the rants and rages of the alleged historic purists saying there’s nothing important about a phone booth – although I’ll admit to still finding myself engaging in an old reporter-type habit of looking for a public payphone anywhere I go.

Just in case news breaks out and I have to call my editor – while first calling the receptionist “sweetheart” – to report the details.

 

I also have to wonder what they thought of the sight of the exhibit about food and "Chicago-style" hot dogs -- allowing people to turn a giant wiener into their own personal favorite concoction.

Let's really upset the history 'purists'

BEING IN SUCH a touristy mood perhaps made it all the more appropriate that I also included a walk to, and through, Millennium Park – which I have to confess that until Saturday, I had never actually visited.

I got to see those pictures of people who periodically spit fountains of water, while also checking out the new ice rink that appears too clean and pristine for Chicago, lacking the grit and makeshift nature of the old ice rink that occupied the Block 37 space by the Daley Center all those years.

Then, I did the ultimate geek tourist move – I took a photograph of myself off the reflection of the Cloud Gate sculpture. More commonly referred to as “the Bean.” At this rate, it will be soon that I’ll be espousing the merits of the Chicago Cubbies like all the other touristy-types who don’t have the nerve to set foot on the Sout’ Side.

 

Historic artifact? Or moment of silliness

I was far from alone in having such a picture taken. People from all parts of the world who happened to be in Chicago on Saturday were doing the same.

WHICH MAKES ME wonder. Will that photographic image itself become a historical artifact that will show future generations what people would do upon visiting Chicago?

Or is it just trivial evidence that I had nothing better to do Saturday afternoon?

  -30-

Was Chicago ever really that white?

There’s a new piece of video now publicly available for those people who want to rant and rage about Chicago race relations and just how segregated a city we really are.

The Chicago Film Archives took a nearly 15-minute promotional film and put it on YouTube – so we can now see how the city’s establishment wanted to view itself back in 1977.

NOW I WAS 12 years old back in that year – notable because it gave us Michael Bilandic as mayor (whose reputation hadn’t been whacked by snow yet) and actually had a “July 31” with both the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs in first place and many fantasizing about an all-Chicago World Series.

Richard J. signature, even though he was gone

Of course, that didn’t happen. Now, the Internet is filled with assorted people complaining about the distorted image that film gave of the city as a whole.

After watching the film myself (the DNAInfo.com website for Chicago published a feature Friday about it), I have to admit my initial reaction was to wonder how a city that was roughly split equally between white and black people (and not quite as many Latinos as there are now) could appear to be so white?

Then again, I think back to the mentality of the era and remember how little attention official Chicago paid to the South Side neighborhoods that had in the mid-to-late 1960s developed majority African-American neighborhoods.

Despite all the South Side Hit Men homers ...

ALMOST AS THOUGH they had sunk into a black hole when all the white people left places like South Shore or Gresham to live in suburbs like Oak Lawn or South Holland.

So the idea that the people who shot the video for the film sponsored by the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau and the Illinois Tourism Bureau naturally looked for images of white people is predictable.

The part of the film where then-WBBM-TV news anchor Bill Kurtis narrates copy talking about Chicago’s diversity gave us footage of all kinds of people in ethnic garb – and several intense seconds of a Greek belly dancer in a particularly-skimpy costume.

There were shots that look like they came from Chinatown, and also some footage of Asian ethnics who appear to be a part of a tourist group – as though these “foreigners” were checking us out (and also spending their money in Chicago).

... '77 was just a 3rd place finish

WHICH WAS KIND of the point of this whole exercise.

In fact, the only signs of black people I saw was one quick glimpse of a taxi driver, and an extended sequence of a parade with black people as spectators and participants.

Which makes me think it was from a Bud Billiken Parade from the early 1970s – check out all the afros (the hairstyle) amongst the male participants.

Then again, that wasn’t the only sign that this was the era following the Age of Aquarius, but prior to the Reagan Years.

MANY PEOPLE WILL laugh about the presence of “discotheques” and the sight of so many white people trying to “get down and boogie.”

Although what I noticed was the idea that few of those people had any real dance moves. They were just sort of waving their hands about and trying to writhe and wriggle in time to the music.

The film “Saturday Night Fever” really was a fantasy in terms of the idea that anyone looked like John Travolta’s “Tony Manero” character. At least as far as Chicago was concerned.

As far as those people who were ranting on Friday that the film was “too white,” I’d have to say that this is the image of Chicago that Richard J. Daley would have wanted the world to see.

Then the latest models, now most likely scrap metal

IT WAS ALSO the image many white Chicagoans had of their city – which is why there were so many people who were thoroughly, and utterly, shocked on that day in the spring of 1983 when Harold Washington actually won a Democratic primary election for mayor.

We are better off for acknowledging the larger Chicago; a city where white, black and Latino are headed toward parity, with a sizable Asian population as well.

Although I can’t help but think that whenever I hear people complain about Chicago being too dominant (Gov. Bruce Rauner made such comments earlier this week) over the rest of Illinois, I wonder if they’d have less of a problem with that concept if the city were more truly like this decades-old PR image in the video.

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