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A Pedestrian Argument

Chicagoans should walk. Why don’t they?

Chicago Times

July/August 1989

I tend to think when I walk, and what I thought about a lot when walking in the Loop was walking in the Loop. Two pieces resulted from these rambles, very different in tone and focus. (The other piece is here.)

 

There are facts hidden among the jokes in this version. Trust me.

 

Topography favors the pedestrian in Chicago, but custom does not. Chicago likes a guy who runs where he is going—a Payton, a Daley—and disdains the plodding pedestrian. It was no surprise when the Cubs, who represent a city whose sole innovation in footwear design was cement overshoes, drew the fewest walks of any team in the league last season. Historians will dispute it, but I am convinced that DuSable was on his way to Milwaukee when he stopped to rub his sore feet and founded Chicago instead.

 

Walking styles vary from city to city, with both distance and speed of the average walk increasing with city size. In a fair race to the subway stop, for example, the smart money bets on a New Yorker. According to William H. Whyte, author of City: Rediscovering the Center, New Yorkers walk farther and faster than people in any other big city in the United States. Whyte isn't sure why: He says maybe they're busy, but I think they're looking for an exit.

 

Either way, walking is something that Chicagoans are happy to finish second to New Yorkers in. A few years ago the city commissioned a survey that found that the average walking trip by Loop workers was less than 1,200 feet. The distance is disputable: A workday walking trip is as hard to define for statistical purposes as good sex, since in both cases what matters is not how far you go but how many things you do along the way. If accurate, however, it means that an average trip is shorter than three-and-one-half blocks—which suggests that it isn't booze that causes celebrants to stagger up and down the sidewalks on St. Patrick's Day. It's lack of practice.

 

Of course, Americans in general don't walk much. The patriotic reluctance to step on that U.S. flag on the floor at the Art Institute was reinforced by the general opinion that walking on anything is un-American.

 

Walking is associated with subversives. Thoreau walked a lot; so did peace marchers. Harry Truman (many right-wingers contend) decided to recall General MacArthur while on one of his morning constitutionals. College professors walk; so do poets. Carl Sandburg, Poet of the Big Bunions, came to know Chicago by foot.

 

So did the late Ira Bach, long-time city planning director and author of Chicago on Foot. He walked from his Loop office each day, rain or shine, to his home five miles away in Uptown. To the sedentary this regimen did, and does, verge on the heroic; Wally Phillips resorted to italics to express his amazement in the foreword to a recent edition of Bach's book, as if it were odd that a man who loved cities might enjoy being in one every day.

Bach nevertheless lived to a ripe old age, confirming the adage that every hour spent walking extends one's life by an hour. Lewis Mumford, the great critic and urban historian, advised in The Culture of Cities, "A walk to work, as much as a mile each way, is at most seasons a tonic, especially for the sedentary worker." That's still true—unless, it is believed, you walk alone, after dark, in the wrong neighborhood, in which case you may shorten your life expectancy to a matter of minutes.

 

One can think of at least one recent mayor who might be alive today had he availed himself of Mumford's tonic. Politicians hereabouts love to run for office, but they ride in cars everywhere else. Illinois voters were briefly mesmerized by Dan Walker, who seemed to confirm walking's practical benefits by walking across the whole state into the governor's mansion. The spell did not last, however, and Walker was turned out of office after a single term by Chicagoan James R. Thompson, a pedestrian governor in every way but the way that counts. State-house insiders report that Thompson moved from the sprawling executive mansion in Springfield to his smaller North Side house in order to cut down the number of steps to the bathroom, with the result that the locus of political power in Illinois has shifted from Downstate to Chicago.

 

City hall is heir to the same tradition. (Why do you think they call them "sitting mayors"?) Aldermen were prepared to deal with a hands-on mayor when Richie Daley was elected, but a feet-on mayor? No move the new mayor made in the early days of his administration was as controversial as his decision to walk back to the office from a meeting at the Hyatt Regency. And making a city worker turn in his official car is like making a cowboy turn in his gun at the door of a saloon.

 

Is Daley yet another case of a politician out of step with the voters? Chicago's refusal to take to the streets seems impervious to reform, indeed even to explanation. These streets—all flat, and mostly paved—were made for walkin'. Weather? Montrealers walk in January, and Chicagoans don't walk on nice days either. Crime? History tells us that you're safer on a sidewalk in Chicago than in a car. Mayor Cermak, remember, was shot while riding in a car, and Bugs Moran's boys might have grown up to become sports agents had they stayed out of garages and spent St. Valentine's Day in a shoe shop getting half-soles.

 

The most persuasive explanations come from those most arcane of specialists, the perceptual geographers. These students of the ways people perceive space remind us that walking down a flat, straight street is boring. You can see where you are going to be minutes before you get there, which robs the trip of those qualities that liven travel of all kinds. A walk needs adventure, serendipity, surprise. Europe's old city centers are like rat's mazes with cheese at the end of every passage. Even Manhattan's grid is full of surprises; the island is so dense with skyscrapers that much of it is dark at noon, with the result that turning from a side-street onto a sunlit avenue is like stumbling out a canyon onto one of the Lost Cities of Gold.

 

Build a city on a flat former lake bed and then lay out its streets on a regular grid, and you have provided for a pedestrian's ennui. See people sitting on benches? They aren't tired from a long slog. They're depressed, having glimpsed what life holds in store before they've had the chance to live it.

 

What Chicagoans need, in short, is cul-de-sacs, odd turnings, hills. Strollers on DuPage County's curvilinear boulevards move in a state of constant expectancy, filled with hope, the terrifying truth of their being in Naperville hidden by their inability to see more than a block or two of it at any one glance. The cynical Chicagoan, on the other hand, sees too much wherever he turns and grows weary of the world. □

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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