I had a much more productive trip downtown than last time. After attempting not to assassinate the guy sitting in front of me on the train, who made phone calls all the way in, starting each by describing exactly where he was (I�m calling from the train crossing the intersection of��), I stopped by my old office on my way from train to el to have coffee with my friend F and to see the old place one last time. After ten years in that location, they are moving to new digs a few blocks away. I spent a lot of late nights and weekends there and had both the best and worst experiences of my working life there. I was feeling a little nostalgic.

After yesterday�s storms cleared out, it was another perfect day. I took a detour through the Gold Coast for a more scenic route to the Historical Society before sequestering myself in a windowless room with dusty books for the next five hours. As usual, I lost track of time and ended up having to grab a cab back to the train.

I enjoyed the ride though, even if it wasn�t as pleasant as a walk. Spending time at the Historical Society always gives me a different eye for the city. I tend to notice more small architectural details reflecting a building�s origins or original purpose. I revel in the remaining kitsch, like Howard Johnson at LaSalle and Superior. They�ve tried to dress up the balconies with window boxes, but it is still a Howard Johnson. I always found the presence of that particular building strangely appealing. It seems so out of place, a refugee from the expressway, a reminder that Chicago is, for many, merely a crossroads on the way to somewhere else.

I always assumed Chicago would be nothing more than a crossroads for me. I�ve gone through my entire life certain that I would eventually go home to New York. I�ve never actually lived in New York itself, save for a few months of research. But for most of my life I�ve lived nearby (this distinction reminds me of one of my favorite Mary Richards quips from the Mary Tyler Moore shows: �I�ve been around. Okay, maybe not around, but I�ve been nearby!�). Even as a very young child I yearned for an apartment in The City. In elementary school art class I drew page after page of pictures of windows looking out on more banks of windows, often viewed from behind the head of a cat who stared out purposefully (I didn�t have a cat either). My family, however, kept returning periodically to the Midwest. Worst of all, I was forced to graduate high school in Indiana, a state for which I had very little use at the time, having been thoroughly indoctrinated in New England snobbery which was further nurtured when I did some time in a French boarding school. I gladly returned to my home coast for college, and only deigned to return to the Midwest when a graduate school made me an offer I couldn�t refuse.

My very first experience of the city of Chicago took place on a business trip. I was working for a small Boston-based theater company and came out to attend a convention of some sort or another in Rosemont. They put me and my friend and supervisor Taffy up on the 13th floor of the Blackstone Hotel, overlooking the park and the lake. I was transfixed by the view from the windows. The day we left, Taffy, who had been here many times before, dragged be down the street to the Art Institute. I spent the ten minutes we had before our cab came standing with Taffy in front of Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte.

Two weeks later, my university flew me out for a campus visit. That week I stayed with high school friends sharing an apartment at Spruce and Belmont. I took the el, which I loved, to the south side for meeting day and ended up, thanks to some station construction, in one of the worst neighborhoods on the south side. Sitting on the el, I stuck out like a sore thumb in my interview clothes and my new cherry red winter coat. A woman taking her child to daycare took one look at me and said, �Are you lost? Excuse me for saying this, but you don�t look like you belong here.� She was so worried about me, that she got off with me and walked me to the edge of the Midway, lecturing me very seriously about not going back the way I had come.

A few months later I returned with a few suitcases of clothes, my stereo, my violin, and a few boxes of books and cooking equipment to move into my furnished university apartment around the corner from Harold�s Chicken Shack. I acquired a computer and spent a lot of time wearing a groove in the pavement between my new space, the library, and the practice rooms. I stared at 53rd street from the living room windows, recoiling in horror when, late one night in my first month there, I witnessed a gun battle in the parking lot of the Mobil station. I quickly discovered how difficult it was to do anything outside of Hyde Park without a car. I arrived downtown for symphony concerts and was perplexed by the lack of convenient restaurants and the relatively vacant sidewalks. How was this a city?

The next year I moved a few blocks away into the apartment a friend was vacating to leave the city for the one I had just left � Boston. The apartment was sunny and had a huge bay window overlooking a tree-lined street where the cats would soak up the sun daily. My Croatian super would hand me roses if I happened to walk by while she was pruning. And my best friend lived across the hall. We spent many evenings smoking and drinking on our shared fire escape, watching people slink up and down the alley to rifle the dumpsters while talking about just about everything. We were resigned to staying put.

The lack of coherent public transportation has always made it difficult for me to think of Chicago as a real city, despite its Olmstead-designed parks and towering skyscrapers. It wasn�t until I got a teaching job out of my neighborhood and a car to get there that I really started to understand how limited my city view really was. I resolved to try living in another neighborhood. I spent a lot of time at my boyfriend�s house in Bucktown. Tiring of the commute, I found myself an apartment on the second floor of a Ukrainian Village coachhouse. I had a sunroom all to myself with a view of the alley. From the window of my study I could see a sliver of Western Avenue through which I could watch the annual Toys for Tots motorcycle parade. I walked or biked or took the el or bus. My car gathered dust. After the great snowstorm of 1999 I didn�t even bother digging it out when I realized there was virtually no chance of having a parking space to move into afterwards. The elderly Ukrainian couple that lived in the front house tried another tactic: they reserved the space at their doorstep with a broken wheelchair and a walker. A few months later I bought a condo in the Loop with a garage. I lived a block from my office. The car almost never left its space. The el rumbled by steps from our entryway. Our windows looked out onto the tops of the columns of a Deco-era building. Over the rooftops I could see the Flatiron building jutting up from the plain, a guidepost to my former life.

After being in Chicago for well over a decade, it has become a real city, not a New York imitator, but its own entity. New York wears its idiosyncrasies on its sleeve. Chicago makes you look for them. The chief appeal of being in a city is, for me, the knowledge that there are places I know that are hidden from most or that hold secret meaning for me. My arcane knowledge personalizes it. As I walk through the streets I notice many markers � I went to a party in that apartment, that�s where I bought my first pair of Italian shoes, that�s the corner where my car broke down, that�s the fabulous Indian restaurant that doesn�t even have a sign. It has taken longer to feel ownership here the way I do in New York, where the subways are an open book. Chicago is starting to feel like the end of the road. Ironic, isn�t it, that I am about to embark on a job search that will most likely take me elsewhere. Maybe even New York.

[second entry today]

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