Never a City So Real (12 page)

Isn't That the Corniche?

This is a short and yet emblematic tale about Chicago. At its center is a man who was so in love with his city's architecture that he decided to find a way to have it captured on film for posterity. In the course of one year, he managed to accumulate more than half a million photographs, but in the end, few of them were of buildings, and even fewer have remained on display in the city itself, instead ending up in the unlikeliest places.

In 1963 Gary Comer, an unassuming man who had grown up in Chicago and who had a comfortable position in advertising, quit his job to pursue his passion: sailing. He and a friend opened a small mail-order company that sold hardware for sailboats, and the firm did okay until the oil embargo of the early 1970s, when powerboat stores, faced with the decline in sales of their usual wares, muscled in on their sailboat business. So Comer diversified and began selling other things—first big-brimmed hats, and then clothing in general. His business took off, in time morphing into what we know today as Lands' End. It became the nation's largest catalogue clothing company, and Comer eventually sold the firm to Sears for $1.9 billion.

Not long ago, in a survey conducted by the American Institute of Architects, its members declared Chicago home to the finest architecture in the country, and Comer and his wife, Francie, would agree; every Sunday they used to take a drive around the city, mostly to admire its older buildings. On one of these drives, in 1999, Comer was approaching the Loop from the south and he suddenly understood that he was watching a city shedding its skin: “I saw this magnificent façade of buildings, and I realized that what I was looking at was temporary. There isn't much over one hundred twenty years old in the city. Most buildings last eighty to a hundred years. I realized the city was really in transition. New buildings going up. Old ones coming down.” And in that instant, Comer had a notion. “The city was being rebuilt from the center out. I thought, ‘Gee, let's lock it into place at the end of the millennium.' ” He decided to hire some photographers to capture the city as it was right at this moment in its history; then he might create a kind of time capsule, perhaps bury it in a canister beneath a new park under construction downtown.

Comer approached Richard Cahan to head up the project. Cahan was a likely candidate for the job because he'd written a book about a local architectural photographer, Richard Nickel, who was among the first preservationists to fight for buildings because of their architectural rather than their historical significance. (In 1972, Nickel died doing what he loved: While he was combing through Chicago's old Stock Exchange, bulldozers bore through the building and buried him.) Cahan, who was also the picture editor at the
Chicago Sun-Time
s, told Comer, “If you're going to capture the city you ought to capture its people, its life, not the architecture. That's what people will care about a thousand years from now.” Besides, he added, “Human lives are more interesting than buildings.” Comer gradually came to agree, and so Cahan left his job at the
Sun-Times
to direct the project, which they christened CITY 2000.

Two hundred local photographers were hired, most of them on a part-time basis, to take pictures around the city over the next year. Comer didn't set a budget; he just told Cahan and the photographers he assembled to make it as good as possible. “I don't want to hear any excuses,” he told them. Initially, Cahan skimped. When they needed aerial shots, for instance, he rented an old Piper airplane that cost seventy-five dollars an hour, but the resulting photographs were distant and out of focus. Comer heard of the problem and suggested they hire a turbo helicopter at five hundred twenty-five dollars an hour. In the end, Comer spent roughly two million dollars on the project.

Photographers were given free rein and told to do whatever they'd long dreamed of doing. Leah Missbach asked women throughout the city to empty the contents of their purses, and then shot the contents along with the owners. Lloyd DeGrane took photos of people in uniform, from players for the Chicago Cubs to maids at the Hilton Hotel. Scott Strazzante documented the last days of a tire store where his father worked. Kevin Horan set up a makeshift studio at ten locations around the city, including outside the Criminal Courts building, by the lakefront, and on the streets of Albany Park, and asked passersby if he might photograph them against a white sheet. The result is an arresting collection of everyday people out of context. The subjects' faces, their clothes, their postures reveal all, almost as if you'd caught them in a state of undress: two elderly women in matching pink bathing suits; a bulging defense attorney in a mustard-stained shirt; a musician with his trumpet. Horan asked each subject two questions. The first was, “Why are you here?” The second was, “What would you like people to know about that they wouldn't know from looking at your picture?”—to which one woman, a young model, replied, “That I am really a nice person because everyone thinks I'm a bitch.”

So, what to do with all these photographs? For two and a half months they were shown at the city's Cultural Center in the Loop, where they were visited by twenty-five thousand people, a respectable number for exhibitions there. Then the five hundred thousand negatives were collected for storage at the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The collection has never found its rightful place in the city.

Both Comer and Cahan have moved on. Comer grew up on the South Side—his father was a conductor for the Illinois Central Railroad—and during the CITY 2000 year, he visited the elementary school he'd attended. The students are now all African-American, and mostly poor. He asked the principal, “How are they treating you?”

“Beg your pardon?” the principal replied.

“Are you getting everything you need?”

In fact, the principal told Comer, they had new computers that were sitting idle because the school wasn't properly wired. Comer paid to have that done, and he has since made the well-being of the Paul Revere Elementary School an ongoing priority. He has also provided funding for the South Shore Drill Team, whose director is the school's disciplinarian; two hundred fifty kids participate, and there are another hundred on the waiting list. They're a crowd favorite at the Bud Billiken Day Parade. As for Cahan, he opened a store in Evanston, the suburb just north of the city. It's called CityFile, and it sells rare books on Chicago as well as photographs, memorabilia, and original art. Cahan's running out of money, though, and when I last saw him he told me he would probably close soon. But one of his final gestures was to hold an exhibition, the first in the city, of Robert Guinan's work. In Paris, there's a tradition that on weekends artists will drop by their galleries to meet with art-seekers, and so, for a month, Guinan visited Cahan's store each Saturday afternoon and held court. A number of visitors, thinking Guinan lived in Paris, asked him how often he visited Chicago. Another began speaking to him in French. “All I could say is
'Où est le téléphone?'
” he said. “It's the only French I know.”

Guinan would undoubtedly identify with the fate of CITY 2000, for the project has resurfaced far from Chicago. In September 2001, the city entered one hundred thirty-five of the photographs in the International Photography Festival in Aleppo, Syria, and the show opened on September 11—the day the world's axis shifted. Valentine Judge, who works for the city and was traveling with the exhibition, told the Syrians that “in these pictures you see the faces of the fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers of the people killed in the World Trade Center. This is what America looks like.” People were drawn to the photographs, which were the hit of the festival, and so the U.S. State Department chose to take these images of Chicago around the world—more precisely, to the places where America is viewed with some hostility. So far they have been exhibited in India, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Brazil, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The pictures continue to make their way around the globe.

People, after all, like looking at people, and peeking in at American life. A photograph of a rather large woman in a body-clinging dress often gets puzzled looks, presumably because obesity is not a common sight in most Third World countries. Passersby look on in amusement at a diptych of a woman in a North Side bar called Slow Down Life's Too Short and the emptied contents of her purse, which include a disposable camera, an address book, a pack of Marlboro Lights, a cell phone, a makeup case, a wallet, keys (to her motorcycle, car, bike lock, and apartment), a credit card, and sunglasses—the daily accoutrements of life in America. There are portraits of two waitresses, one with a nose ring, at the South Side restaurant Soul Queen; a group of Ethiopian Jews celebrating the Sabbath; two Mexican-Americans dancing at a rodeo in Pilsen; four Knights of Columbus members dressed in feathered fezzes, capes, and sashes; and Rex, a toothless, smiling homeless man in a Laborers' Union baseball cap.

But people also see themselves in these photos: an entire world reflected in one place, in one city. In Beirut, a woman looking at an image of two veiled Muslim women standing by Lake Michigan asked, “Isn't that the Corniche?” In Bombay, a cleaning woman in her sari took Judge's hand and walked her over to a picture of a nine-year-old girl about to be baptized at the Unity of Love Missionary Baptist Church on the city's South Side; she pointed first to the shower-cap-clad girl, and then to herself. An Indian diplomat translated: “She's trying to tell you she's Christian. That she was baptized.” In Tunis, a middle-aged man looking at an image of a young Puerto Rican man with his wife's name, Natalie, shaved into his hair, mumbled, “Oh, I hope my son doesn't see that.” One of the favorites is from Horan's collection, a portrait of two teenage friends on their way home from school: One girl is a Somali, wearing a traditional head scarf, and the other is from Thailand.

For Cahan, the project had from the beginning seemed like an opportunity to freeze-frame America, and what better place to do that than in Chicago. Ordered and bedraggled. Excessive and austere. Familiar and foreign. An imperfect city, a city of quixotic quests and of reluctant resignation. A city that was, Algren once wrote, the product “of Man's endless war against himself.” These are Chicago's truths but they are also, after all, America's truths, and they always have been.

I've heard it suggested that Chicago is passé. The steel mills have closed. Public housing is coming down. The mob has been dismantled. And, Chicago is no longer hog butcher to the world. Even the city's one claim to edginess,
Playboy
magazine, has picked up shop and moved. “I love Chicago,” the magazine's new editor who's now based in New York told a reporter. “It's my second favorite city.” The city, though, always finds a way to move on: Now, for example, with more than a hundred sweets manufacturers, it has become the world's candy capital. (As I write, two large confectioners have announced their closing; it is, indeed, a city in motion.)

When Comer first considered his project, it was because he'd been struck by the vast physical changes here, but in the end, what he captured was a people—a people evolving, a people shifting and changing, a people finding their way. I asked Comer why he thought the photographs of Chicago had become such an attraction abroad. “Because,” he replied simply, “the place is real.”

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Tony Fitzpatrick, Kale Williams, Andrew Patner, Nancy Drew, Julie Aimen, Isabel Wilkerson, Rachel Reinwald, John Houston, Dan Kotlowitz, Melissa Fay Greene, Amy Dorn, and my wife's family. A grateful nod to
This American Life
and
The Atlantic,
where I had told much of the Cicero story before, and to Chicago Public Radio, where I first told of meeting Milton Reed. Of course, with gratitude and for their patience: Ed Sadlowski, Millie Wortham, Brenda Stephenson, Milton Reed, Andrea Lyon, Bob Guinan, John Celikoski, and Dave Boyle.

Thanks to my friends Alice Truax, who, with her usual grace and exactness, nudged me when my storytelling was out of whack; Kevin Horan, who kept me from going off half-cocked; and Tim Samuelson, who kept me from getting it wrong. (Any errors, of course, are my own doing.) And to Studs Terkel, whose friendship and work has inspired.

To Doug Pepper, for asking—and for seeing it through with such care and good cheer. It's a better book for it. And to David Black, my agent and good friend, for making it happen, as always.

Finally, to my father, Bob Kotlowitz, for all good things. And to my beloved wife, Maria, who keeps me real.

A
LSO IN THE
C
ROWN
J
OURNEYS
S
ERIES

Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown
by Michael Cunningham

After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival
by Edwidge Danticat

City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome
by William Murray

Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation's Capital
by Christopher Buckley

Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg
by James McPherson

Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon
by Chuck Palahniuk

Blues City: A Walk in Oakland
by Ishmael Reed

Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket
by Frank Conroy

Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
by Tim Cahill

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of
The Other Side of the River
and
There Are No Children Here,
which the New York Public Library named as one of the most important books of the twentieth century. A former staff writer at the
Wall Street Journal,
his work has appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
and
The New Yorker,
as well as on
This American Life
and PBS. He has received the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award. He is a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University and a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame.