by Ed Zotti
After I’d been laboring in this manner for a day or so the Chief came by—he hadn’t been to the house in a couple weeks. Heaving to a short distance off, he stared without speaking for a good thirty seconds, possibly the longest I’d seen him neither talking, smoking, nor engaged in useful work in the time I’d known him.
“What are you doing?” he asked finally.
“Sieving the dirt,” I said, indicating the bagged detritus now covering a corner of the garage slab.
“Going down to bedrock?” The Chief was never judgmental; he just liked to know what he was dealing with.
“Just the topsoil,” I said. “Eight inches.”
“Lot of people would just cover it up.”
“I know.”
The Chief pursued the matter no further, no doubt thinking I was best left alone till my compulsions had run their course. They did, but not quickly. Damned if I didn’t run pretty much all the dirt within ten feet of the house through the sieve over the course of a week or so, filling scores of plastic bags with the leavings. That done, I flattened the filtered earth with a roller, seeded and watered, and by September had (temporarily, as it turned out) grass. I don’t claim it was the right way, just my way, and as anyone who has done similarly knows, you paid a price sometimes for the privilege of pursuing it. But the plus side was, you were free.
From that point on work proceeded sporadically. All the space in the house was now usable to some degree. Major projects remained, but we’d complete them as time and money permitted. In the meantime, we decided, we were going to return to the surface world.
21
This may not be the average person’s idea of light recreation, and I won’t say it was invariably mine, but not long after making the above resolution I took an afternoon off to hear the New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger give a talk to a local civic group entitled “Is There Still a Need for Cities?” Unshocking answer, given the speaker and audience: yes. I don’t recall much of what he had to say, but toward the end he made a declaration along the lines of: We who live in the city embrace diversity because, let’s face it, in the city diversity is pretty much constantly in your face. (I’m sure he phrased it more eloquently than that, but as I say, the details are vague.)
I was skeptical of this line of argument at the time. I was willing to believe it was true of New York, particularly the twenty-five-ring circus known as lower Manhattan, but it didn’t seem all that obviously true of Chicago. The venue in which Mr. Goldberger had given his talk was a block or two from North Michigan Avenue, which, while undoubtedly one of the world’s more imposing shopping streets, was no paragon of diversity. In the 1970s, Chicago had had the reputation of having two downtowns—State Street, the city’s original retail district in the Loop, was for black people (it was the era of blaxploitation movies, which attracted a lot of teenagers), while North Michigan Avenue across the river was for whites. The division was never as stark as it was sometimes portrayed and had become less so over time; still, you saw a lot more minorities on State than you did on Michigan, and the idea that city life was inherently conducive to tolerance struck me as smug.
As time went on, though, I had occasion to reconsider. In 1996, the North Michigan Avenue business association asked me to edit a “vision” plan for their street, which had been the beneficiary of considerable vision already. Originally it had been a narrow residential thoroughfare called Pine in what was then a quiet (because inaccessible) part of town. The 1909 Burnham plan had proposed turning it into a grand ceremonial boulevard. This took quite a while. The major public improvements, including widening of the street and an ornate double-deck bridge over the Chicago River, were completed in the 1920s. Energetic private development ensued for a time, among other things producing a famous quartet of buildings flanking the Michigan Avenue bridge (Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building are the best known) that the architectural historian Carl Condit, whose class at Northwestern I’d once taken, described as “the foremost skyscraper enclave in the world”—a large but not indefensible claim. Unfortunately, due to the Depression and World War II, large-scale commercial construction then pretty much stopped, with some lots remaining vacant or given over to marginal uses well into the 1960s. Development resumed in a big way with the construction of the one-hundred-story John Hancock Center, which was completed in 1969, and within another twenty-five years North Michigan Avenue had been largely built out. Now the street had become a tourist attraction and the business association was trying to deal with the usual problems attendant on success—crowding, insufficient parking, and so on.
The committee in charge of the vision plan had come up with a pretty good first draft, I thought. Among the factors contributing to Michigan Avenue’s success they’d cited density, mixed uses, and a pedestrian-friendly environment—either they’d been reading their Jane Jacobs or had arrived at similar conclusions on their own, a good sign either way. The sad fact was that a previous generation of civic leaders in Chicago and elsewhere had been depressingly oblivious to the qualities that made cities citylike. In the Loop, for example, hundreds of street-level shops had been demolished in the 1960s and 1970s due largely to a crack-brained zoning code that encouraged the construction of office buildings with empty glass lobbies. No doubt the more enlightened view now prevailing among North Michigan Avenue business people derived from the observation that there was money in it—lively streets drew more shoppers. All the more reason to wonder what had been going through the minds of everybody else.
At times, though, Michigan Avenue could be a little too lively, or so some felt. One issue the plan attempted to grapple with was street performers. Sidewalk entertainment had been illegal in Chicago until 1983, the authorities having taken the view that only vagrants performed in public for pocket change. Dogged argument had been required to make the city understand that 90 percent of the industry worked on this basis. The law having been amended, musicians, dancers, and other artistic sorts doing their thing in the public way became considerably more plentiful. Some performers were amazingly good—Mary and I spent part of a charmed summer’s evening at the Water Tower off Michigan Avenue in the 1980s listening to a talented a capella quartet that went on to a successful career in the clubs.
Other performers drew a more ambivalent response. Many of these fell into the category of what we might call inner-city entertainment—your robot dancers and so on. They tended to concentrate on the busiest corners, drawing large crowds and blocking store entrances, which annoyed merchants. A few sniffs may have felt a bunch of ghetto kids detracted from the ambience. But for most people the main issue—certainly this was true of the bucket boys—was noise.
The bucket boys were synchronized drummers. (They are now, anyway. The earliest drummers in my recollection had played solo; whether this had given way to the now-standard team approach by 1996 is lost in memory’s fog.) Urban percussion, of course, has a long history. As far back as I could remember Chicago had had informal aggregations of conga players who performed in the parks during the warm months, often on the lakefront. The performances were hypnotic and went on for hours, commonly attracting hundreds of people. The drummers weren’t in it for the money—I never saw a hat being passed, at any rate. One had the sense of eavesdropping on some ancient rite.
At some point, presumably after 1983, drum-centered ensembles began showing up on State Street and Michigan Avenue. Mostly they used professional-looking drum sets; once in a while they were joined by horn players and other musicians. In contrast to the conga sessions in the parks, these performances generally were intended as moneymaking ventures, with a conspicuously displayed receptacle containing some coins and bills.
The bucket boys hoped to make money, too, but their equipment was more basic—they played on upended five-gallon plastic buckets using drumsticks. I’ve heard this practice originated in New York, although it’s not like the technology took a Stradivarius to perfect. If we neglect the annoyance factor, the bucket
boys were actually pretty good, with precisely coordinated stick-and headwork and deft handoffs between soloists. The fact that a few of the guys were exceptionally buff and sometimes played shirtless no doubt added to the appeal amongst the frivolous. To me there’s no question the lads had talent, though I concede there’s a diversity of views on this subject. But there’s also no doubt they were loud.
Cities are unavoidably noisy places, as anybody who lives in one knows. Much of the din you simply tuned out. Mary, for example, was genuinely surprised when I informed her one day that our favorite outdoor Mexican restaurant, which we’d patronized for years, was located perhaps fifty yards from an L line, where the trains clattering past made enough racket to loosen your teeth. She hadn’t noticed—possibly because, what with the many buses, motorcycles, and beaters lacking mufflers regularly passing the location in question, nothing short of a pipe bomb would have really stood out.
Human noisemakers were more difficult to ignore. Anyone who worked in downtown Chicago during the 1980s, for example, remembers the fierce-looking giant who played saxophone near the Michigan Avenue bridge. He had his defenders, I realize, and possibly there was some late-period-Coltrane thing going on that I lacked the capacity to grasp, but whatever delights his work may have conveyed to those at the top of the food chain, it sure sounded like a car wreck to me.
The bucket boys weren’t in that category, but the extreme decibel level they generated, plus the fact that they could go for twelve hours at a stretch, strained the patience of the most devoted music lover. Although they showed up periodically on State Street or at the ballparks and other popular venues, Michigan Avenue was the 100 percent location in Chicago crowd-wise, and that they favored most of all.
So there was simmering unhappiness, of which I thought I detected some trace in the vision plan. I was apprehensive—this was Chicago, after all. In the old days a controversy pitting high-rise residents and prominent business interests against street kids would have been resolved in about ten seconds, and how different things were now I wasn’t altogether sure. The North Michigan Avenue association had formerly had a reputation for archconservatism, and even now had a low tolerance for gaudy signage and other perceived breaches of propriety. The draft plan, it’s true, offered the mild proposition that a committee be formed to study the matter; perhaps I was being paranoid, but I wondered if this were merely a placeholder for an argument yet to be joined, with advocates of a clampdown waiting for their moment. I dropped the mild suggestion into my new draft after some polishing, submitted the finished document to the review committee—not a bashful group, from what I’d seen—and braced for the reaction. Surely someone would demand sterner measures to deal with annoying street performers—more regulation, possibly a ban.
But no one did. The issue never came up that I heard about. The mild suggestion about a committee made it into the published plan unaltered.
I found this interesting. It’s not that no one thought the issue important, as we’ll shortly see. The review committee had been vocal about plenty of other subjects. But something had changed. I had a hard time putting my finger on what it was until I heard a comment at one of the committee’s meetings. A businesswoman recalled how impressed she’d been by Michigan Avenue on her return to Chicago in the early 1990s after an extended absence: “It had matured,” she said.
I was struck by this remark and thought about it a lot afterward. The woman had been speaking of the commercial district, but it seemed to me her comment applied to the city as a whole. Although people were only then beginning to realize it, the town had grown up.
Partly this was a matter of appearances—the city looked more finished, a matter to which I’ll return. But it seemed to me the city’s maturity involved more than just physical improvements. You could see it in people’s attitudes. A good example of this, I thought, was the subsequent controversy over street performers, which as was to be expected didn’t end with the formation of a committee. On the contrary, what we’d seen in 1996 was the beginning of a protracted and bitter dispute, of which I can give only a summary:1. In 1999, a ban on street performers at certain times on certain downtown streets was proposed by Alderman Burton Natarus, who’d already joined the ranks of Chicago’s legislative immortals for a vain attempt to get carriage operators to put diapers on their horses.
2. After impassioned arguments on both sides, a watered-down ordinance was passed that didn’t ban performances but did limit them from ten a.m. till ten p.m. on weekends and nine p.m. on school nights.
3. Whatever may have been the case in 1996, after the turn of the millennium bucket ensembles became the rule, typically consisting of two to five players, although I have heard possibly apocryphal tales of groups as large as twenty.
4. One especially polished contingent of bucket boys came to the attention of talent agents and performed at Bulls basketball games and in a KFC commercial.
5. Notwithstanding commercial success, the increased volume generated by massed bucket drumming led to fresh demands for its suppression, impelling Alderman Natarus to introduce another ordinance in 2005 banning street performances of all types at certain Michigan Avenue locations.
6. During the ensuing debate numerous downtown (including Loop) residents were heard from, some no doubt sharing the low tolerance for urban distractions exemplified by the woman who complained that the bucket boys made it impossible to concentrate on her opera recordings, but others having on the face of it a legitimate beef, including one plaintively arguing in a blog that s/he could tolerate the L, fire trucks, ambulances, honking taxi drivers, garbage trucks, the saxophone player in need of lessons, Christmas Muzak blaring from Daley Plaza, and the incessant preacher in front of Old Navy, but the sound of buckets being drummed on for hours at a time was an order of magnitude worse.
7. Even though the bucket boys and other street performers didn’t make campaign contributions or constitute a sizable voting bloc, many politicians nonetheless spoke up in their behalf, including the mayor and some aldermen, although their expressions of support at times betrayed a certain ambivalence—for example, “Michigan Avenue belongs to all of us, and the music on the street I sometimes enjoy.”
8. Lest I give the impression that the bucket boys constituted the entirety of the Chicago street-artist corps, you also had violinists, numerous guitarists, the aforementioned robot dancers in metallic body paint, the occasional mandolin player, Peruvian flautists in native costume, and bands of varying composition, with one ensemble consisting of six brothers in their late teens or early twenties who among them played two trombones, two trumpets, a tuba, and a French horn.
9. In the end street performances were banned on the four-block stretch of Michigan Avenue most densely thronged with tourists, plus one location near the Millennium Park concert pavilion about three-quarters of a mile south, but only when concerts were in progress.
10. Predictably, no one was happy with the outcome, with bucket-boy opponents claiming the ban didn’t go far enough while supporters claimed Michigan Avenue was fast becoming a bland suburban mall.
None too edifying, you may think. I disagree. Whatever one’s view of the solution pro tempore (I doubt we’ve heard the last word on the subject), it seemed to me just the sort of argument to be expected in a city come of age. Even during the city council debate, those doing most of the talking weren’t the civic leaders who in earlier times would have dominated the discussion (if there had been a discussion at all), but rather the people most directly involved—the politicians saw themselves mostly as mediators or champions of their constituents’ rights.
Moreover, if we ignore the thin-skinned sort, the attitude of bucket-boy opponents could be generally characterized as: There’s only so much urban irritation you can ask even city people to take. Sure, nobody was entirely happy with how things had turned out, but in a way that was the point. City life had innumerable drawbacks—noise, congestion, crime. Some of the problems might ease over time but they
never disappeared. What kept the city going was the collective calculation by those who lived or did business in it that the attractions outweighed the costs—and people would fight hard to keep the cost from getting too steep.
Arguments over street artists were by no means the only arena in which you saw this. I had some friends who were fixing up an old Victorian town house on the west side, on a street where homes in the mid-1990s sold for the then royal sum of $350,000. Their house faced a small park, on the other side of which was a sprawling low-rise public housing development. My friends weren’t enthusiastic about this, speaking darkly of shots fired and visits by the police. But they put up with it—it was the price they paid to live in the city.90
So I think in that sense Paul Goldberger had been right. City people weren’t necessarily more tolerant because they were naturally inclined that way, but because living in the city didn’t give them much choice. I don’t mean to suggest that their acceptance of the raucous urban scene was in all cases grudging; on the contrary, whatever they might think of this or that detail, I think most found it one of the city’s great charms. Nor would they put up with conditions they found intolerable. But they didn’t feel powerless to change things. Unlike city dwellers fifty years earlier, they didn’t just bail when things got tough; they waded in and duked it out.