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Our City, Ourselves

A guide to guidebook Chicago

Reader

March 25, 1988

I suppose that I was attracted to guidebooks to Chicago because I remained a tourist in that city, and used them myself more often than a real Chicagoan would ever admit to. As you might expect, commercial guides are as interesting for what they don’t tell vsitors about a place as what they do. 

Reviewed: Norman Mark's Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City (third edition) by Norman Mark, Chicago Review Press, 1993; Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide (third edition) by Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur with Tem Horwitz, Chicago Review Press, 1987; and Chicago's Museums: A Complete Guide to the City's Cultural Attractions by Victor J. Danilov, Chicago Review Press, 1987

 

Perfect frankness in a city guide is as rare as perfect honesty in a politician. Proof of that proposition is offered in three new guidebooks from Chicago Review Press. The most interesting of these are Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide, by Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur, and Norman Mark's Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City. Each is the third edition of a deservedly popular guide, updated to reflect the updatings that Chicago itself has undergone in the last few years. And each is a fine book whose failings are as troubling as its virtues are admirable.

 
Sweet Home is a compilation of 35 urban how-to articles by 31 contributors. It is a primer for the beginning student of the city, be he tourist or recent transplant, from all-night copying shops to health care cooperatives. The book's first edition appeared in 1974, a sort of countercultural Baedeker in the days when Chicago guides were still aimed at the upscale transient. (Typical was a 1967 Rand McNally guide with one entire page devoted to "fine, absolutely reliable furriers.") Sweet Home changed authors in subsequent editions, but its cultural priorities remain almost steadfast. Its contributors devote much attention to music radio but do not mention TV. They try to explain the public transportation system but do not deign to talk about taxicabs. We get the third in Sweet Home's series of alternative sight-seeing attractions (for those who regard the Sears Tower as the world's tallest bore). The new edition adds Lower Wacker Drive to this list, which rather stretches the definition of "scenic." The alternative press still gets attention (although the book unaccountably fails to list the Sun-Times as Chicago's alternative daily).

 
Times change, however. Tem Horwitz, who authored the first Sweet Home, is today a busy loft rehabber. Baby-laden baby boomers are instructed where they can buy antisexist children's books. The Chinese peasant leader whose views on politics were quoted approvingly in the first edition has not survived the editors' purge; duck sauce, not revolution, is what excites us these days.

 
Accordingly, Kent and Szpur tried to bring this new version of their guide "closer to the mainstream," which may upset older readers. The phrase "so-called police riot," used here to describe the 1968 romp through demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, smacks less of revisionism than of amnesia. And it is not mere nostalgia that makes Nancy Banks's description of Hyde Park from the second edition ("chauvinistic, isolated, and self-consciously intellectual") more pointed than the new one offered by Philip Charles, Jack Helbig, and their editors ("cosmopolitan, tolerant of eccentricity, very liberal").

 
Norman Mark, on the other hand, has always paddled as happily in the mainstream as a duck in a pond. Mark remains the unregenerate Chicago guy—wisecracking, romantic, a bit of a rube with an appetite for the dubious in all its forms. Mark's Chicago really is a guidebook, with step-by-step directions for 26 tours designed mainly with the ambitious pedestrian in mind. Not everyone will be as enamored as he is of gawking at posh hotels, where the rich might cavort at rates up to $4,000 a night; and a few may conclude, on the basis of the anecdotes supplied here, that Chicago was indeed a toddlin' town—until about 20 years ago. (Sadly, no one recently has hired World War II bombardiers, as the National Pickle Packers did at their 1946 convention, to drop pickles into barrels from atop the Hotel Continental.) But Mark's fund of anecdotes (some of which may be true) is inexhaustible, which makes his work that rare thing, a guidebook that is as much fun to read as it is to use.

 
Mark's purpose, in short, is to show readers how to enjoy Chicago, while Sweet Home's is to teach them how to live here. Sweet Home's chapters on gay men and lesbians, for example, discuss sex in terms of something one is, not something one does, while Mark passes on the advice of a singles-scene veteran: "Go ugly early." Still, since enjoying Chicago requires a little education, and since living in it requires some occasional fun, the two approaches often overlap. We're not surprised that Mark devotes several of his recommended tours to drinking, but Sweet Home also mixes instruction with intoxication whenever feasible. (The authors direct thirsty explorers of Hyde Park, for example, to Jimmy's, "the only bar in the Midwest with a complete 11th edition Encyclopaedia Britannica behind the bar.") Nor is Mark devoid of social consciousness. Sweet Home dutifully alerts readers to the Museum of Contemporary Art, for example, but it is Mark who tells us that the museum was founded in part because Chicago's Jews were excluded from "the upper reaches of the city's cultural establishment (such as the Art Institute)"—a fact that says more about the city's culture than does the acreage of Impressionist paintings that decorate it. Indeed, this item of Mark's is a helpful reminder that the counterculture in Chicago includes religious and ethnic minorities as well as politically disaffected whites of the suburban Left.

 
In a mobile nation that is both urbanized and deeply ambivalent about urban living, city guides fill an expanding need. Counting these two, there are at least two dozen about Chicago in print at the moment. Most sensibly address themselves to the resident as well as the visitor, since many a Chicagoan outside his own neighborhood is as raw a tourist as any Shriner just off the bus from Sheboygan.

 
Whatever their focus and whatever their audience, city guides tend to speak in the accents of the booster. Marketing compels that tone to some extent; what is rendered unattractive will be unvisited, and guidebooks to the unvisited are in about as much demand as ethics texts at the Justice Department. So the writing in this genre often teeters between gush and guffaw. Mark, for instance, praises Chicago most effusively for what it is not, concluding rousingly that it is withal a better place than Cincinnati.

 
Indeed, Chicagoans in general have become masters of the inverted boast, as befits citizens of a city that has invariably been good at being bad. (I will always admire the local choreographer who explained to a reporter that one of the spurs to innovation in Chicago dance is its backwardness: dancers here are so ill-trained, she said, that they don't know what they're not supposed to do.) Both of these books, consequently, devote much attention to crimes of a very picturesque sort—brothel-keeping, gang-shooting, politics—which have given the city its reputation as a Six Flags for the antisocial.

 
This may be back-lot Chicago, Capone-on-a-stick, but it is not necessarily dishonest. Our love for a city is as wayward as for a person; what seems brutal to the outlander often seems "honest" to the forgiving native. Affection may be genuine, however, and still be untrustworthy. Both of these books aim to portray the "real" Chicago, to take the reader (in Mark's words) "under its skin, where it lives, breathes, and smells." But do they? Where much of real Chicago lives, for instance, fear of crime, especially physical violence, is pervasive. Sweet Home, however, scarcely mentions crime beyond an occasional reference to a "rough" neighborhood or to the fact that some people feel safer taking buses instead of the el late at night. Mark is more forthcoming, perhaps on the advice of his lawyers, since his book encourages readers to set out afoot where they will be particularly vulnerable to mayhem. "Chicago is far less dangerous than its reputation says it is," he notes. True enough: the tourist is more in danger of being robbed by his near-north-side hotel than by a street thief.

 

Even so, if you read Mark with the eyes of a suburban innocent or a wide-eyed rustic, he makes the city seem a very dangerous place indeed. He advises tourists to be "sensible," which in many a small town and suburb means removing the lawn mowers and any ten-speeds from the front yard at night. In Mark's Chicago, bodily harm, not petty theft, dictates what being sensible means: women should never walk alone at night, drinkers should avoid side streets, travelers should not park in certain lots or take certain buses.

 
If there is one subject that intrudes more insistently than crime on the mind of the native Chicagoan, it is race. It couldn't intrude less in these guides. The real Chicago is two-fifths black; the Chicago revealed by these guidebooks is white only. In their otherwise excellent chapter on neighborhoods, Kent and Szpur write that they tried to cover the south and west sides as well as the north, "since the trendier parts of the city seem to get the lion's share of media coverage." An admirable goal: the black south side in particular is where much of the city's postwar history happened and where much of its present life is lived. But of the south-side districts Sweet Home describes, one is Chinese, two are Hispanic, and one is Lithuanian. Middle-class Beverly is also on the list; while integrated, it is about as representative of black Chicago as the Gold Coast is of white Chicago. Mark's south side reaches no farther than Bridgeport and the old Stockyards. Chicago, City of Neighborhoods, by Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett, does much better by the black neighborhoods, and thus better by readers. To its credit, Sweet Home recommends the book; it would have done better to emulate it.

 
In some ways the insider is the least dependable guide to a city because of all the things he has learned not to notice, such as (in Chicago) the city's ghettoization by class as well as race, the extremes of wealth, or the ugliness of the neighborhoods. The wide-eyed often see such things more clearly, if only because they have not yet learned where not to look. I chatted with one such naif not long ago, a white man in town only a few months. He told me how, on one of his early visits, he consulted a map and opted to take Washington Boulevard as the most direct automobile route from the Loop to Oak Park. "Someone threw a bottle at my car," he recalled, with more wonder in his voice than anger, of his first exposure to the real Chicago. As most residents know to their sadness, Sweet Home's description of Chicago as an "open city," like Mark's advice that one can visit any part of it, is more hopeful than helpful.

 
A franker guidebook would warn whites against such expeditions, including advice about those parts of town in which blacks are not always safe either. A better guidebook, on the other hand, might encourage them, for the sake of the wisdom such experiences might bring.

 
Publishers, of course, are less interested in wisdom than sales. Is it assumed that only black people would feel comfortable on the south side? If so, then publishers must further assume that black people do not buy guidebooks. Either suggestion is pernicious. Do they assume that white people, even those who crave "ethnic" experiences, do not want to go there? Probably; that reluctance is real enough. But to the extent that such reluctance is owed to racism it ought not to be catered to. Besides, it is just as likely that it is owed to ignorance of the sort that guidebooks at their best seek to dispel.

 
Both books have lesser faults. Maps, for example. Sweet Home has only one, showing the street grid. Mark's tour maps are not keyed to a larger citywide map, so tourists will find it difficult to know in which part of the city the tours are set. Even if you buy the book for your boring cousin Freda, you'll probably still have to escort her when she blows into town from Milwaukee for the first time.

 
Buy both books anyway. If you're a Chicagoan, you will find something in each that you didn't know about; nonnatives will find something in each they'll wish they'd read before making their last trip. Both books will do until someone publishes a guide to the real real Chicago, complete with "Another Other Top Ten Sights." Think of the possibilities. Cook County emergency room on Saturday night. The Dan Ryan at rush hour. Lake Calumet landfills. The Robert Taylor Homes . . . .

In his otherwise comprehensive Chicago's Museums, Victor Danilov unaccountably fails to list the Hard Rock Cafe among his 144 cultural attractions, this in spite of the fact (reported by Mark) that Mick Jagger's guitar is displayed there.

 
Admittedly, Jagger's guitar is not the Pieta. (Jagger plays guitar?) More in a class with Ernie Banks's bowling ball, in fact. But it shines with significance compared to what Danilov does list: the spark plug collections, Mother Teresa souvenirs, 1920s iron lungs, and similar jetsam that has washed up at the zoos and aquariums, nature centers and arboretums, historical houses, children's museums, religious and ethnic museums, and fine arts museums and galleries in the city and suburbs.

 
Collector plates? Phony western shoot-outs? All cataloged here, along with a tantalizing collection at Glen Ellyn's Willowbrook Wildlife Haven—"more than 100 permanently disabled birds and mammals." Open 9 to 5 every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. See you there. ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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