Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

“Do you think he would have liked it?”

  “I think he’d have been amazed. But like it? No, I don’t think so. Would you really swap a picturesque log cabin in the wilderness for all this noise and stink and corruption and…?”

  “Okay, okay, enough!” The truth is that both of you love this city, for all its irritations. “We’d never have been able to survive back then. Can you imagine it? Handyman Tom Hunter sawing down a few trees and knocking together a log cabin?”

  He laughs. “You chose the wrong man.”

  Nobody will notice, will they, not on a day like this? On tiptoe, you reach up to kiss his pink cheek. “What would I do without you?” You stamp your feet. “I’m frozen.”

  There are dark icy patches on the road and a stream of carriages rattling past both ways, drivers wrapped up like Eskimos, their horses laboring through clouds of their own breath. Even though the road must be slippery, nobody seems to care. They don’t slow down. You watch one buggy take the corner and push straight into the traffic on Van Buren, which forces another carriage to skid sideways. Why should the poor pedestrian always have to stop and look both ways, and risk her life crossing a street, and never the other way around? Perhaps you should begin a campaign in the Tribune to introduce rights for pedestrians. Establish places where wheels have to stop and feet are given priority.

  You are about to ask Tom what he thinks about the idea when he gives a little tug on your arm, and you are both on the move. He guides you across the street. You lean into him as a blast of wind chooses that moment to barrel down Van Buren. It pins your skirts to the back of your legs.

  “Almost there,” says Tom.

  It is indeed true that you are almost there, that a cup of hot broth could shortly be making you feel human again, except that Tom stops outside the entrance to hand some coins to a vagrant, who is slumped on the ground against the wall. Oh God, Tom, must you? But of course he must because he always does, especially now, when these unfortunate people are everywhere. It was in the paper only today, that since the Fair closed another fifty thousand jobs have been lost in Chicago. The number is too large to comprehend. What do fifty thousand people suddenly do? How do they eat? Where do they sleep at night? The article was not encouraging. Either they go to soup kitchens, often run by Irish boodlers, or they steal, or they starve. It can be frightening, just the way some of them look at you. It’s not me, you want to say, it’s the very rich who should be helping out but never do. While Tom searches his pockets for coins, you try not to think about broth and attempt to work some feeling back into your fingertips. Your gloves are next to useless and your toes are dead.

  Tom frowns. “Oh dear. I must have forgotten my purse at home,” he says. “Antje? I’m sorry. Would you mind?”

  A few minutes later, you are cradling a cup of soup in both hands at a small window table in the restaurant, waiting for Tom to return with the tickets. He said he didn’t want any. Sometimes he eats like a bird, sometimes like a horse. You relish the sensation of the hot soup sliding down your throat. Feeling begins to come back to your fingers. You gaze out the window at the passersby and admire the station’s lofty roof and spacious concourse. It is a safe haven, a place where travelers can rest and recuperate. In a way, you think, that’s exactly what Pointe de Sable’s house was too. The first station in Chicago. In those days, though, the world beyond its gates was a wilderness. Today, it’s this beautiful, infuriating city.

  You flip the mass of copper leaves on the necklace that Professor Winship gave you when the interview was over. This is the first time you have ever worn it. Lighter than it looks, the leaves make a whispering sound when you move. It is protection, you remember, according to the Potawatomie myth, against the monster who lives beneath the Lake. You wonder if your grandmother actually believed that. It makes you shiver when you try to visualize this necklace being warmed against your grandmother’s skin, worn exactly as you are wearing it now.

  Tom comes into view, at the front of the line in the ticket office across the concourse. On a big board nearby a man on a ladder is chalking up the time for the next train along the South Shore. 10:25. The clock inside the station is working. Ten minutes. Tom catches your eye and gives you a speaking look. Just enough time to finish the soup and catch the train.

  * * *

  It must be seven miles to Pullman, and your journey takes well over half an hour, including stops on the way. It is a slow train and an old car, with worn wooden seats and drafty windows and a door that keeps swinging open and slamming shut. The iron roof rattles whenever the wheels cross a set of points. Once out of the center, the train shunts through a bleak industrial district full of railroad tracks and warehouses. The Lake comes back into view, pearled with breakers. The air begins to clear and through the dirty, fogged-up window, a number of elegant mansions flit by. On the other side runs the river, the same river where Eulalie and her friend Cicely must have taken clothes for washing. Today, the water looks brown and motionless.

  The train slows. You wrap up tight again, fix your scarf inside your coat and button up.

  “How long do you think it would have taken them to walk here from the Fort?”

  “I’d say it’s no more than a couple of miles, as the crow flies,” says Tom. “But it wouldn’t have been a straight path through the trees. And then there were the sandhills.”

  “Yes, of course. I’d forgotten. The sandhills. They must have been flattened.”

  You are the only people to step out onto Prairie Avenue at the Eighteenth Street stop. A frozen-looking porter in the Pullman uniform of hard gray cap and coat with lapels pulled up asks if he can help. Tom explains where you want to go.

  “No more than five minutes, sir,” says the porter, after he’s given directions.

  You step down onto Prairie Avenue. It is a wide, paved road lined on each side by pine trees and poplars, with flower beds every few yards in which clusters of snowdrops are breaking out. You hear little bursts of birdsong. A liveried victoria clips past, along the paved surface, its two top-hatted passengers wrapped in blankets. They do not look your way. In summer, you think, this must be glorious. Neither you nor Tom has been here before. This is one of those enclaves whose reputation goes before it. Millionaires Row is what some people call it. It is said that Marshall Field was one of the first to build here because the air was clean, it was within a reasonable distance of his store, and there was no need to cross the river. Others, like Mr. Pullman, then joined him.

  You walk fast and in silence, take a left turn as directed, and follow a long stone wall behind which you catch glimpses of a garden decorated with statues and curious figurines. There is a large house beyond with absurd turrets on each corner.

  “A Moorish castle?” you suggest.

  Tom chuckles. “Maybe it was left over at the end of the Fair.”

  “I was just thinking about that porter at the station,” you say. “You know why Mr. Pullman likes to employ former slaves?”

  “Certainly not out of the generosity of his heart. They’re cheap?”

  “Yes, but also because they’re ‘properly humble.’ That’s the expression he used.”

  “One day,” Tom says, “Mr. Pullman will get his comeuppance.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  A few yards farther on, at the next corner, you come to a standstill.

  There it is.

  The statue looks massive, even from fifty yards away. It stands in a compound protected by barbed wire, directly opposite a forbidding gray mansion that you guess must be Mr. Pullman’s residence. Beyond the statue lie empty grasslands that lead down to the Lake. A few other visitors are already there, walking around it.

  Tom squeezes your arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” you say. But you stop and look up at him. “How important do you think a place is? In a story, I mean?”

  “Sweetheart,” he says, putting his arm around your shoulder, “we don’t have to go any farther.”

  �
��No, tell me, Tom. I want to know what you think. Does a story always have to be tied to a place?”

  He frowns, and with one gloved hand he pushes his spectacles up onto his forehead. “Well, I don’t think you can remove place altogether and say, effectively, that anything could have happened anywhere. Place, though, obviously affects the mood and the action in some stories more than in others. Sometimes place is only a backdrop, but at other times it can be everything.”

  You think about what Professor Winship said, and wonder how you should be feeling.

  A few minutes later, you are at the gate. A white man in the Pullman uniform—presumably white because there’s an exchange of money involved—comes out of a small wooden hut with two tickets, for which you have to pay fifty cents apiece.

  “Professor Winship wouldn’t approve,” says Tom. “That Mr. Pullman is recovering the money he spent on the statue by making us pay to look at it.”

  “Also,” you add, “making us pay anything at all to visit the site.” You stop, and hold Tom back too. “I’m not feeling anything. Maybe because it’s so wintry and frozen when we know it happened in the middle of summer.”

  It has dawned on you how much you have been wanting this place to affect you. And yet the truth is that you are standing underneath a huge bronze statue on a bitterly cold day, with the Lake on one side and Millionaires Row on the other. It does not fit with the place you have imagined.

  “I suspect it’s not unusual, Antje,” says Tom. “We all like the idea of investing place with significance. To think it happened right here. But when we actually visit the spot, especially when it’s been changed out of all recognition, we can’t make the connection. It’s not the same place anymore.”

  “You mean it could be anywhere?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not saying that. It’s just that we need a prompt, something that directly links now with then.”

  “Well, it’s not this,” you say sadly, looking up.

  The bronze figures are larger than life-size, set on a great marble pediment, which is what you had been led to expect. An almost-naked Indian brave stands, with tomahawk raised, over a defenseless, fully clothed American lady. At her feet, a child is trying to escape. The brave is about to kill her. But the intended murder is being thwarted by another Indian who stands over the woman in a stylized heroic pose, his right hand raised. This is Chief Black Partridge. He has been made significantly taller and broader than the other Indian. And you’re supposed to understand he has been civilized by the white man because he is partly clothed, in a pair of buckskin trousers, and he is carrying a rifle over his shoulder.

  “Notice that there’s not an American soldier in sight,” says Tom.

  “Indian braves went around murdering innocent white women,” you say in a flat voice, “but it’s possible for even savages to be inculcated with civilized, noble traits by the white man. The reformed Indian proves the efficacy of this treatment by saving the white woman and her child from a brutal savage.”

  Tom nods. “A notion that a man like Mr. Pullman would be happy to promote.”

  You remember with fondness the Old Magic Man you met in the Indian camp when you were a child and how dignified he had been, even as he saw his own death approaching. He had needed no civilizing instruction by white men. Rather the opposite.

  “Remember what Professor Winship said?” you say. “That a memorial should illuminate the bigger story in which it plays a part? If it doesn’t, it dishonors the memory of the other participants. And it traduces history.”

  You step back to allow a couple with a Kodak “snapshot” camera to take photographs of themselves in front of the statue. That image will end up in their house, you think, proof that they visited a place where a terrible battle of some kind was fought a long time ago when this was still a wilderness.

  “You know me,” says Tom. “I don’t believe facts need to be precise, as long as the gist is true. But this statue is a deliberate distraction from everything—from the gist, from the facts, from the truth. It’s like using perfume to cover up a bad smell.”

  You look at him. This has clearly touched a nerve.

  “Let’s go,” you say. “I’m frozen and I’ve seen quite enough.” You need another cup of something hot after this excursion. “When we get back to Van Buren,” you say, “I’m going to make you drink something hot too. And we’re not walking home.”

  You move around the statue, out of the way of the people taking photographs, and head back toward the gate.

  But you do not go far. “Wait!”

  A dead tree stands near the wall between Mr. Pullman’s garden and the park. The trunk, to which a few crooked branches still cling, is gnarled and shrunken. In what looks like an exhausted last fling, it forks into two stumps at the top.

  You pause, arm in arm, but neither of you says a word. Tom, probably, is wondering the same as you, whether the dead tree might once have been the cottonwood. It would be better, you decide, not to know. There is something indecent about imagining it might have been. And who, after all this time, would know?

  In silence, you walk back toward the station.

  1900

  PREPOSTEROUS TALES

  A review of Chicago: An Alternative History 1800–1900 by Professor Milton Winship, A. C. McClurg & Co., 1902, published in North American Review, June 1902.

  THE VERY TITLE of Mr. Winship’s rambling, labyrinthine tome about Chicago in the nineteenth century hints at the confusion that lies in store for the unsuspecting reader. His opus, claims the author, is both “Alternative” and a “History.” An “Alternative,” one wonders, to what? Any attempt to compare Mr. Winship’s book with the work of serious historians who have addressed key periods of the century gone by would soon founder. For a text to be categorized as “history” implies, does it not, that attention has been paid to historical truth and accuracy? Anyone, then, who ignores facts or, even worse, blithely distorts facts for his own “Alternative” purposes has no right to attach the label of “History” to his offering.

  To read Mr. Winship’s motley, meandering collection of half-truths, digressions and dilettante musings from beginning to end, is an endeavor I would not wish on anyone. I have worked through the long, dark nights on his typescript, only to prove the lie to that otherwise admirable proverb, “In all labor there is profit.” On this occasion, I regret to report that none is to be gained. Mr. Winship abjures the triumphs of our nobler forebears in favor of some whimsical tales about a cast of decidedly second-rate fellows.

  Let me give an example that is fresh in your reviewer’s mind. I shall address the final chapter of the book. Proof, readers, that I persevered until the bitter end! And because I doubt few will cross that finishing line, perhaps I can offer you the following courtesy. I shall illustrate the duplicity of the author’s approach while relating, in more detail than you might want, how this maladroit volume staggers, huffing and puffing, toward its shabby, improbable end.

  I should mention, in fairness to Mr. Winship, that he occasionally seems to remember that a book, like a building, needs a solid foundation. Whenever this notion reoccurs to him, he reverts to reflections about the land on which Chicago has been built. Hence, he starts at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the first of many a preposterous—to use his own word—tale. This one is about a mulatto trader involved in what Mr. Winship claims was the first recorded land sale in Chicago. Not only does this lead him to the startling conclusion that this itinerant deserves to be called the founder of Chicago (the venerable Mr. Ogden must be turning in his grave), he also strays into banal reflections about a board game. He claims (I do not jest) that the destiny of Chicago would “hinge” on a game of chess.

  We are treated to a stream of side stories that touch on real estate speculation, balloon houses, canal digging, railroads, sewage systems, agricultural machines, the timber trade, the Great Fire, the futures market, skyscrapers and the World’s Fair. And while attempting, in this hapha
zard way, to document how the empty swamps and prairies were peopled and exploited over our first century, he also pokes his nose into the city’s political, business and social affairs. He regularly chooses the wrong protagonists, thereby insulting our city’s true visionaries and heroes, and credits his bumbling cast with achievements they do not deserve. Apparently, it was mad John Wright who not only brought the railroads to Chicago, but also revolutionized American agriculture. And how Mr. Winship lavishes attention on the weaker sex, appropriating for them competencies and strengths far beyond their capabilities. In his fanciful picture of the city there are, can you believe, female photographers and female journalists. Worst of all, he insinuates that many of our leading businessmen and political leaders have been engaged in corrupt practices. Every city has the odd rotten apple. But why does Mr. Winship imply that Chicago has a barrel full?

  Enough of the charges. Let me now provide the evidence. To do so, I shall refer simply to that final “Alternative” chapter, in which Mr. Winship excels in all the aforesaid techniques.

  * * *

  Students of Chicago history will know that the provision of clean water has bedeviled the city for decades. For most of the century, Lake Michigan was both the source of our drinking water and the repository for our waste, with predictably dire consequences. An engineer named Ellis S. Chesbrough tried to solve the problem, first by tunneling beneath the Lake and then by enlarging the first “canal” in a flawed attempt to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. I am sure the poor man tried his best but simply got his sums wrong (a fact from which Mr. Winship chooses to distract us with one of his grubby asides about purported political corruption).

  The magnificent new Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, built parallel to the original Chesbrough version, was officially opened on January 19, 1900, covering a distance of twenty-eight miles and connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers. As promised, it has permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River, thereby ensuring that the city’s waste is no longer deposited in our Lake but, instead, flushed into the Mississippi and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. Readers will also recall with pride that the Canal is the largest and most advanced sanitary engineering project that has ever been constructed, anywhere in the world. They would therefore assume that an honest, responsible and patriotic historian would praise the Canal’s technical feats and record the extraordinary exertions and achievements of the characterful men behind it. How upset they will be to discover that Mr. Winship chooses to cover this triumphant moment in the annals of our city with a squalid little tale of intrigue about a buildings inspector, an alderman, a photographer and a journalist.