"You Were Never In Chicago:" Neil Steinberg's Soul Of the City

With the exception of my year and a half in Seattle, I've lived in Chicago my entire life. The city still fascinates me, yet there are some aspects of the collective city mentality that I find embarrassing: the fixation on the 1985 Bears, and the still prevalent use of the players on that team for local advertising purposes; local politicians promoting Chicago as a "world class city," as if the area was a small town looking to make good, rather than the third largest city in America; and, an act that nearly caused me to boycott the Chicago Sun-Times, terribly written opinion pieces by Jim Belushi. However, the Sun-Times is the home of Neil Steinberg, who has long been my favorite local columnist. From sports to opinion pieces, the majority of Chicago newspaper writers tend to write the same pieces over and over, looking for the quick riling up of certain emotions. Steinberg, however, at least tries to foster intelligent conversations. Late last year, the University of Chicago Press published his latest book You Were Never In Chicago, and I made it the final book I read in 2012. While vastly different in tone, prose, and era, the work made an excellent bookend to Nelson Algren's Chicago: City On the Make, since both titles are ultimately concerned with highlighting philosophy and sociology, rather than being straightforward "history" books.

But there is a wealth of history here. Steinberg compiles a variety of stories and hypotheses, from his own life, the formation of Chicago as a city and as an identity, his newspaper work, occasional mentions of local politics, and, as he tends to focus his columns on, the often unknown side of Chicago's citizens and (sometimes long gone) businesses and places. Sometimes these aspects are combined. You Were Never In Chicago opens with a chapter on Steinberg's move from the Lakeview neighborhood to the suburbs, along with a wonderful story about a trip to a hardware store during Chicago's Gay Pride Parade. This passage is just a small part of a longer, more complex rumination on political figures and the disconnect between city and suburban life. Steinberg moves seamlessly between the seemingly different elements to create a fascinating, intangible look at a slice of Chicago.

"Music whumps from passing floats. Honorees in convertibles roll slowly by, beaming and waving. The year before, I took our older son Ross, then three, to the parade, by accident. I was heading to the hardware store to buy a plunger and brought him along for company, forgetting that a quarter million people had gathered at the end of our block.

Undeterred--and not realizing that the hardware store would be closed for the parade--I swept him up in my arms and we pushed forward, joining the onlookers. Ross gazed around at the mustachioed leather boys, the bodybuilders in tiny Speedo bathing suits, the harlequins on stilts, the flamboyant drag queens wobbling under giant feathered Mardi Gras headpieces, the bannered vintage convertibles with that year's crop of dignitaries perched atop back seats, where they could be better seen by the crowd. His eyes widened, he pointed a quivering finger and said, 'Daddy, those men...they're not wearing seatbelts! It isn't safe (Steinberg 2)!'"

The book's title comes from a postcard sent to The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling in 1952 after his three-part feature on Chicago (the origin of the phrase 'The Second City'). The postcard said nothing except "You were never in Chicago," a phrase that has multiple philosophical angles. Steinberg spends some time wondering what makes a Chicagoan; he himself grew up in Ohio before attending Northwestern University, and even after years of city living, he sometimes has his doubts. But in his examination of the Chicago identity, he doesn't go for the obvious examples. A curious example is one that I've never thought about--Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, right outside Chicago, yet has never been linked or identified with the city. Steinberg explains why, and in the process adds another layer to the intangible notion of labeling someone as a Chicagoan. The passage below ends on Steinberg's most sentimental note, but it's genuine.

"'I never thought Chicago was a tough place,' Hemingway said in 1953--'tough' of course being the highest compliment Hemingway could conceive. Chicago, he said, wasn't even as tough as Kansas City.

Being a Chicagoan is a claim you have to press, a case you must make, and Hemingway, by not making it, lost the right. He had liked the place well enough as a young man in love, but having been born in Oak Park, Hemingway had no intention of lingering so close to home. 'Gee this is a terribly good town,' he wrote in a 1920 letter while living at 1230 N. State Street. 'Instead of hating it the way I used to, I'm getting terribly fond of it. However there isn't going to be any permanent settlege down in it...because there are so many more most excellent towns in different place that I'd like to be.'

Maybe that's the definition--you're a Chicagoan if, wherever you are at the moment, Chicago is the place you'd like to be. I would argue that Chicago is not simply a matter of where you put your pillow but where you place your heart, wherever you're sleeping now (Steinberg 40)."

Having been a reporter and columnist for years, Steinberg is obviously full of great stories, and some excellent ones are presented here. Pages are devoted to the now-defunct Division Street Russian Baths. His writing is very careful and precise, but in his best passages, there are elements of casual storytelling and seemingly fictional sketches of people and surroundings. These sections remind me of William Zinsser's thoughts on E.B. White in the book On Writing Well: the best, most casual form of narrative storytelling is actually extremely precise. What feels like a conversation is only possible when there's focus on strong writing.

"Take off your clothes, stash them in a locker, wrap yourself in the sheet, then pad downstairs, the key around your wrist. You enter a low-ceilinged basement room, the walls a mismatched hodgepodge of streaked, garish linoleum tiles and glazed yellow brick. There are two tables and two men--squat, hirsute, burly Mexicans in gym shorts and shower clogs--giving massages to the great pink hillsides of older gentlemen, face down. A half-hour massage is twelve dollars, plus tip. Averting your eyes, you step around the tables, unwrap, set aside the towels and the sheet--there are no hooks, nowhere to hang anything up, so place your towels carefully on the tile lip of the placid cold pool, by the door to the sauna--turn on showers that don't spray but pour, then step under the gushing spigot. The showers are not secluded by any kind of wall or partition, but out in the open in one corner of the room. Nobody else cares about that, and soon you don't, either.

Wrap yourself in your sheet, if you like. Leave one towel by the cold pool, saving it for later. Bunch the other one up, delivering a quick blot to your face so you can see, taking it with you as a pillow. Then pull the heavy glass door open and scoot dripping into the sauna itself, the superheated heart of the Russian Baths (Steinberg 102)."

His columns have literally taken him around and below Chicago. He writes about visiting factories, helping his younger brother through difficult times (and potentially incurring the wrath of citizens by helping his brother secure a job in the city), accompanying police on prostitution rounds, and the sweet story of meeting and dating his wife. But even at his most personal, Steinberg isn't being self-serving. This is slightly a memoir, but the experiences tie into the day-to-day living of Chicago, either directly or indirectly. He's traveled underneath the city with the Water Department, seeing a side that very few people have ever experienced. The descriptions are fascinating, and Steinberg projects a genuine enthusiasm for what he's experienced. Based on his career at the Sun-Times, newspaper work and office politics can make someone jaded very quickly. He recaps some of the tougher episodes in his line of work, and while he's experienced and projects the necessary toughness needed, there are moments of pure joy in his encounters. Even in strictly journalistic paragraphs, the reader can't help but be caught up in the wonder.

"Water mains, sewer pipes, telephone cables, service conduits, heavily shielded electrical lines, fiber optics, thermal cooling tubes. And those are just the main operative veins and arteries of the city--there are all kinds of defunct technologies down there too: pneumatic-tube message systems and wood-encased Western Union telegraph wires. To this day, crews from the Department of Water Management still occasionally dig up a water pipe made in the 1800s from a hollowed-out hemlock log. Many iron water mains are so old and decayed--relics from 1900--that only the earth around the pipes holds them together. Dig too close to some mains and pressure from the water within will burst them.

I toured the Jardine Water Purification Plant next to Navy Pier, nearly fifty years old and still the largest water treatment plant in the world, pumping out a billion gallons of water a day into Chicago. I visited each of the four water cribs perched on the horizon in Lake Michigan--intakes for the city's water system. For over a century men lived on the little castle-like round brick structures, caring for them. In winter, to keep the intakes clear of ice, the tender would lower a quarter stick of dynamite on a rod and blast them open (Steinberg 120-121)."

These cited passages might not seem like the obvious choices for examples, but they are such small, carefully written moments that appealed to me just as much as the bigger pictures. Steinberg never comes to any concrete conclusions about the city's makeup, but he culls together enough people, places, and events to paint one of the more accurate, touching looks at the city. Again, it's not the same as Nelson Algren's work (in a hilarious sentence about the gentrification of Division Street, which used to be one of Chicago's most dangerous, seedy areas, Steinberg says "Nelson Algren would vomit"). But taken together, readers can chart the development of the city's psyche. Again, I don't agree with everything about the city--I still feel like 'The Bean' in Millennium Park is too new to be classified as a city landmark, and Steinberg writes about it positively. You Were Never in Chicago was one of my favorite works in 2012, and I admire Steinberg's dedication and writing style. I was fascinated to see his work "Driving With Ed McElroy," a story about spending time with an old school publicist, in the book, since it was featured in Granta Magazine's 2009 issue dedicated to Chicago. While some readers might not expect a Chicago columnist to be a proper fit for a literary journal, Steinberg's themes and stories are, quite literally, written for everyone, combining narrative mastery and fascinating asides that balance between literary non-fiction and quick reads suited for spending a few minutes with a newspaper column. This balance is never pandering or insulting, and proves that excellent writing can and should be accessible to a wide variety of readers.

Work Cited:

Steinberg, Neil. You Were Never In Chicago. Copyright 2013 by Neil Steinberg.

Ninth Inning Town: Nelson Algren's "Chicago: City On the Make"

For the last several weeks, I was mentally plotting an essay about Chicago's collective psychology in relation to the views on the professional sports teams and athletes. While this could very well be a piece I return to, a random reading and thoughts on other strains of civic psychology turned me in a different direction. Back in May, when Chicago hosted the NATO Summit, Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a telling remark that was supported and repeated by local media outlets. Despite the protesters and general apathy about the magnitude of the meeting, Emanuel stated that he wanted to show off Chicago as a "world-class city." This isn't the first time that this idea has circulated, and it always strikes me as odd and pointless, since Chicago is the third-largest city in the country, yet local politicians and boosters maintain a mentality of Chicago being a small town looking to make good.

More recently, Chicago was beset by a nasty heatwave and a rash of gang shootings (which seem to be always ongoing, sadly). A local news channel conducted interviews with tourists vacationing downtown, with some of them stating they would have had reservations about visiting had they been aware of the rise in violent activity. While violence can happen anywhere at any time, part of me was incredulous, since a lot of upper-class visitors remain in the confines of the downtown shopping districts and would never come close to venturing to the areas with concentrations of violence. Media outlets often conduct interviews with the people living in the dangerous neighborhoods, yet I found it strange to watch interviews with people who have only heard of the less-savory parts of Chicago. These thoughts were in my head as I recently read Nelson Algren's poetic 1951 exploration, Chicago: City On the Make. The slim volume contains a wealth of sociological views and assessments, and while not all of them still apply today, it's still an excellent example of how Chicago's image, from both the outside and the inside, maintains a distinctly unique veneer unlike other major metropolitan areas.

Algren shares stories of his own childhood and tells Chicago's tale from the points of view of the drunks, the working class, and the hustlers, the nameless folks who oftentimes share the same personal qualities as the powerful in the city's hierarchy. The working class people represent the majority in numbers, yet are more likely to be disciplined and reviled for doing on a small scale what the elite minority do on a bigger scale. This is Algren's take on Chicago's beginnings:

"They hustled the land, they hustled the Indian, they hustled by night and they hustled by day. They hustled guns and furs and peltries, grog and the blood-red whiskey-dye; they hustled with dice or a deck or a derringer. And decided the Indians were wasting every good hustler's time.
Slept till noon and scolded the Indians for being lazy.
Paid the Pottawattomies off in cash in the cool of the Indian evening: and had the cash back to the dime by the break of the Indian dawn.
They'd do anything under the sun except work for a living, and we remember them reverently, with Balaban and Katz, under such subtitles as 'Founding Fathers,' 'Dauntless Pioneers,' 'or 'Far-Visioned Conquerors (Algren 11-12).'"

Some of Algren's passages are deftly comic and still timely, providing an early, hip assessment of how to handle Chicago's citizens and outlook. A paragraph about the suburbs might appear to be an insult, and in today's Chicago, residents of the city will likely smile, at least inside, at this take:

"So if you're entirely square yourself, bypass the forest of furnished rooms behind The Loop and stay on the Outer Drive till you swing through Lincoln Park. Then move, with the lake still on your square right hand, into those suburbs where the lawns are always wide, the sky is always smokeless, the trees are forever leafy, the churches are always tidy, gardens are always landscaped, streets are freshly swept, homes are pictures out of Town and Country (Algren 26)."

To reference my opening paragraph, Algren writes about his youthful attachment to the Chicago White Sox, especially in the aftermath of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. What led me to ponder Chicago's attitude toward athletes came about after Kerry Wood's retirement from the Chicago Cubs. After years of brilliant flashes and too many injuries, I couldn't help but wonder if Cubs fans still clung too tightly to Wood's 1998 game against the Houston Astros. In that game, Wood's fifth as a major-leaguer, he tied a baseball record with twenty strikeouts in a 1-hit shutout. His arm was constantly injured by the sheer force of his pitches, and for years, Cubs fans kept hoping for a resurgence, with that single game defining Wood for the duration of his on and off tenure with the team. Algren makes a reference to White Sox pitcher Charlie Robertson, who, coincidentally, threw a perfect game in his fifth major league game and never made any true progress afterward.

"(And what became of No-Hit Charley Robertson, who stepped off a sandlot one afternoon to pitch that perfect game for the White Sox? What ever became of No-Hit Charley, who put twenty-seven men down on strikeouts and infield popups--and then stepped back to his sandlot and left nothing behind but that perfect afternoon when nobody in the world could get a hit?) (Algren 54-55)."

Dozens of other writers have made names for themselves by exploring the lives of the downtrodden and blue-collar. The difference with Algren, at least through the lens of Chicago: City On the Make, is that, in addition to seeming like one of the people, is his deft understanding of how Chicago reflects its citizens. While the same claim can be made for Bukowski's Los Angeles, Algren was a much stronger writer. His prose is poetic without being forced or obvious, and while the work is a creative rambling, there are no obvious embellishments or romanticizing. Algren's Chicago was a tough place, and much like today, while solutions for the problems are needed, it's much easier to put a positive spin on the good qualities, even with serious problems in the background. One can only imagine how Algren would have responded to Emanuel, who welcomed the NATO summit with only passing nods to the protesters and the need to call attention to the myriad of problems in the world. Much like today's world, some of the issues in Algren's time were best represented in creative acts. As he states in his 1961 Afterword:

"When the city clerk of Terre Haute refused to issue warrents [sic] for arrest of streetwalkers in spite of his sworn legal duty to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers, and instead demanded of the Terre Haute police, 'Why don't you make war on people in high life instead of upon these penniless girls?' the little sport performed an act of literature (Algren 81)."

In the Afterword, he also acknowledges the negative reception the book initially received, since people were more comfortable reading positive spins rather than grim realities. This is still represented in today's political world, when attempts to shed light on problems can be met with resistance or a desire to maintain the status quo. In the 1950s and today, higher ups would much rather put emphasis on Chicago as a tourist destination than thoughts like:

"The slums take their revenge. And you can take your pick of the avengers among the fast international set at any district-station lockup on any Saturday night. The lockups are always open and there are always new faces. Always someone you never met before, and where they all come from nobody knows and where they'll go from here nobody cares (Algren 67)."

Despite these sketches of the seamy sides of city life, there's never a question of Algren not living Chicago. Chicago: City On the Make isn't a tour guide, but in the midst of the stark honesty, there's a bustle and liveliness that Algren continually evokes, even in the saddest pages. It continually evokes the often-used phrase of "history being written by the winners," when in reality, there's much to be gained from accounts of the losers. Before mainstream activism, before Howard Zinn, and before the start of the Occupy movements, writers like Algren were doing their best to shed light on the masses, even if nobody (at the time) wanted to read or think about such things. This is where Algren's beautiful prose becomes most important. Look at the carefully plotted and detailed paragraph below. Again, it doesn't romanticize, but it genuinely sympathizes.

"The nameless, useless nobodies who sleep behind the taverns, who sleep beneath the El. Who sleep in burnt-out busses with the windows freshly curtained; in winterized chicken coops or patched-up truck bodies. The useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows: that go as the snow goes, where the wind blows, there and there and there, down any old cat-and-ashcan alley at all. There, unloved and lost forever, lost and unloved for keeps and a day, there far below the ceaseless flow of TV waves and FM waves, way way down there where no one has yet heard of phonevision nor considered the wonders of technicolor video--there, there below the miles and miles of high-tension wires servicing the miles and miles of low-pressure cookers, there, there where they sleep on someone else's pool table, in someone else's hall or someone else's jail, there where they chop kindling for heat, cook over coal stoves, still burn kerosene for light, there where they sleep the all-night movies through and wait for rain or peace or snow; there, there beats Chicago's heart (Algren 67-68)."

And finally, I'd like to offer cited remarks as a representation of the state of Chicago journalism. In a recent "revamp," The Chicago Sun-Times has started a terrible trend. Chicago "celebrities" are given a one page editorial to sound off on their pet projects and view of the city. While the money often goes to good charities, the paper lets it be known that they paid the writers an excellent sum for terrible writing. The first editorial was an awful, embarrassing op-ed by Jim Belushi, who commanded a $1,000 writing fee (again, donated to charity, which is noble, but I'm still shocked that he can command that kind of money from a supposedly struggling newspaper). Chicago is full of great, hungry writers who would do anything for that kind of platform. Instead of actively seeking out the thousands of voices in the city, the Sun-Times plays it safe with pointless celebrity ramblings. These Algren pieces are my way of protesting this.

"Therefore its poets pull the town one way while its tycoons' wives pull it another...(Algren 57)."

"It used to be a writer's town and it's always been a fighter's town (Algren 62)."

Work Cited:
Algren, Nelson. Chicago: City On the Make. Copyright 1951, renewed 1979 by Nelson Algren.