And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

The joke was, of course, found in the color of the magician’s skin and the sing-song Tapatío accent with which he charmed the crowd. It was a dark joke told lightly. It was masterful.

It wouldn’t be the last time the sleepy magician amazed.

In Andersonville, off Clark Street, through a fake laundromat dryer, through a fake fireplace opened by moving a book, then through a bar and past the greeter, the Chicago Magic Lounge offers wonders and a small plate menu Monday through Saturday, with a matinee for kids on Sundays.

It’s in part an homage to Chicago’s magical heritage, part a response to a weekly stage show at Uptown Underground that got big enough to need its own venue, emcee slash artist in residence slash keyboardist for the night John Sturk told the audience in his warmup-act patter. Close-up magic performers and waiters milled the room offering cards and magic-themed specialty cocktails (the drink “How Houdini Died” is a punch — too soon, man).

Then Mago Gozner took the stage, put a toiletry kit on a chair and made a joke about deportation.

Guadalajara-born, suburban-dwelling Gozner was dressed all in black when he took the stage. Gray-haired and straight-faced, he had a wry, sleepy demeanor as he turned to tell the audience terrible jokes.

“It’s my first time performing here,” he said before taking a step two feet to his left. “Last night, I performed here.”

If I could capture one thing in this repetition of events, it wouldn’t be the magic. It wouldn’t be the paper heart he had a woman rip up, only for him to restore it to fullness. It wouldn’t be the cards that seemed to pull up each time as the one the selected audience participant called or the rope that cut, rehealed and cut itself again.

What made the show great and what I fear no words could catch would be that sleepy demeanor with which he worked the crowd. When the woman selected from the crowd ripped the paper heart in half, he dabbed the obvious follow-up gag “You broke my heart” with a touch of real sadness. He exhibited slight frustration that a separate woman he asked to shuffle an invisible deck of cards forgot to mime taking them out of the box first.

He had her fling the invisible deck back across the room while he narrated its progression flipping through the air, spiraling into then out of an audience member’s pocket and then into a brown paper bag he was holding. It was a goofy gag, a momentary joint make-believe where we pretended to watch a deck of cards fly across the room while servers refilled How Houdinis.

A real deck landed in the bag. He pulled it out, took the cards out of the box — he remembered — and the only card faced forward was the exact one the woman named.

“I’ll tell you how it was done,” he said, giggling like a proud dad about to tell his daughter her first knock knock joke. “When it was flying through the air, I look.”

Stage magic is amazing because it is. It is, by definition, what amazes, be it a card trick, a self-healing rope or finding yourself with a hand full of foam rabbit when you had expected clown noses. Magic that doesn’t amaze is just prop comedy.

But what’s amazing to me is how authentic the enjoyment is. With some notable exceptions, stage magic can be dorky, and the performers at the Magic Lounge fit that bill. The night was full of dad jokes and randomly selected cards that tended to be aces, pretty women assistants pulled from the audience and three-piece suits with wacky ties.

The best turn those conceits on their heads. Gozner’s stagecraft was sublime in a way a louder, broader entertainer couldn’t have mustered. The jokes were the same, the tricks were the familiar cards and cut ropes — even if what he did with those props was all him.

But it was that wry, sleepy tone in a thick Mexican accent that sold the audience on a truthful enjoyment of a night of lies.

Meet Chicago magic mainstay Mr. Ash

Meet magician Jeanette Andrews, an exception named above

And, just for fun, a leather and kink museum

Who has a clue what the second-biggest city in the state was before Rockford?

What is a reasonable amount of Cheap Trick lyrics to expect people to know? Like, all of them or just most?

On Sept. 21, I’ll be participating in Lit Crawl 2017, a series of literary and storytelling events flung across Andersonville for one night only. Sponsored by Women & Children First, the American Writers Museum and The Neo-Futurists., the night brings together some of the stars of Chicago’s storytelling scene, and some dumb guy named Paul.

I’ll be one of the readers at Hopleaf at 7 p.m. on Sept. 21 as part of the “Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology” event. I’ve been asked to not only read from my contribution to the book but also to help come up with questions for the pub quiz that will follow the readings. And therein lies the rub: I didn’t write about well-known stuff.

Sure, my piece “The Carnival” is about going to Chicago Cubs games as a kid, but it’s really not about baseball. It’s about loss, poverty, the decline of American manufacturing and calling the Chicago White Sox “pooey dumb-dumb heads who smelled like poo.”

And it’s also about my hometown. So I have to write trivia questions for a mass audience about a place that elicits, if any response, either “That Madonna movie with the baseball team, right?” or a quiet “Oh” followed by the person slowly moving their purse or wallet out of my reach.

When you grow up in an area, you know a lot about it. You lose perspective on what’s reasonable for outsiders to know. I grew up knowing the town’s name, its founders, a bit of the history of American screw manufacturing and a thousand other bits of info equally endemic in my mind. I don’t know which of these things other people know.

It’s not if people know DeKalb made barbed wire or not. It’s that, if you’re not from Northern Illinois, do you even know DeKalb exists? Do people know about Rockford’s past as global leader of manufacturer of nuts, bolts, screws and other fastening devices, or just that it’s a good rest stop when driving between Chicago and Madison? In terms of Cheap Trick, everyone’s going to know every lyrics from 1979′s “Cheap Trick at Budokan” of course, but how deep into 1983′s “Next Position Please” is too deep?

I don’t know what’s reasonable to ask of strangers crawling between literary events.

You should come to the Lit Crawl on Sept. 21 to find out what I come up with.

Since I don’t want to miss a moment of this, I loaded up the site before we left with Le Tour de Chicago, four bike routes through famous sites in the city’s history. I’m not posting these as thought exercises — get out there and explore this city.

We rode through Chicago’s newspaper history on Friday, and later this week will learn about lakefront encroachment and something I’m just calling “A Warhellride to the Goddess.”

Today’s bike tour is going to go through some of the spots connected to Chicago’s gay and lesbian community

See other LGBTQ landmarks not on this bike route

She sat at a table for four alone at the bustling Andersonville breakfast spot. She smiled wan but warm at the server when he brought her the massive pile of pancakes, whipped cream, berry compote and streusel crumbs.

Then she delicately picked up a fork with her right hand and, as a slow, peaceful smile lit on her face, she picked at the pile of warmth and fluff. She picked at a book with her left.

Aesthetically, she was well in the geeky punk poet zone. Electric shock blue hair fluffed down only as far as her neck. No makeup, but a septum piercing nose ring. She wore a light, flowy sundress and a sun-yellow cardigan layered over the top. The combined effect of outfit, hair and ring made her look like a ’50s housewife in a coloring book completed by a kid who doesn’t like rules.

I was at the breakfast spot because I was running errands and wanted sausages. I wolfed my eggs, picked through my own book and ran off to try and get my stuff moved before the next cloudburst.

She sat alone reading with a pile of pancakes, gently smiling every second. No friends to gab with, no phone to beep and buzz her into connection. A table for four held by pancakes and a feminist novel was her plan for an alternately sunny and rainy day in Andersonville.

So here’s to the breakfast-eaters. Here’s to the people whose dining companions come with folios.

It’s a short story today because of Memorial and picnics. I know the Civil War funeral’s going on up at Rosehill today. I know frisbees, bags and barbecues are going on elsewhere.

But let’s take a moment to consider a blue-haired poet punk ’50s housewife with book, flapjack and fork, and a little calm smile that meant alone with words and compote was exactly where she wanted to be.

Some thoughts on holidays

You know you’re curious about that Civil War funeral

The other head peered in the other direction, taxidermied into immobility to stare out forever over the shop of blips, baubles and morbid curios. Animal heads, a glass case purporting to be human skulls, old books, a shelf full of medical X-rays from god knows when and god knows whom, a plastic basket full of (human?) vertebrae to pick through the way another store might have a basket of gumballs, buttons or other cheap tchotchkes.

It was ghoulish and it was morbid and it was carnival-carved circus joy. It was the absolutely perfect place for a 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago story.

“Ready to go?” I asked my companion.

She looked at me, then around the storefront on Foster.

“No?” she said, her body language filling in the “This isn’t what you’re looking for?”

“No,” I said, my body language filling in “No, it isn’t.”

We left.

The feminist bookstore is famous, of course. You might know the one I’m talking about already. It’s been spoofed on “Portlandia” and is one of the holdouts from the days when Andersonville was full of lesbians and Swedes instead of the current crop of rock-ribbed urbanites wandering sidewalks with gourmet coffee cup and ergonomic stroller.

We walked in this store too.

In it, books of course. I could and have written odes to watching bookstore crowds. The milling happiness of some lounging readers there to be surprised by what they’ll encounter. The anxious looks of those who want something in particular but haven’t yet found if the book exists. The gasps of delight when a chance glance finds the thing that is The Thing, the melding of object and thought that a book provides, something to be clutched to chest and run to register so you don’t waste any more of your life not reading this.

This was where a 1,001 story lived.

“Ready?” I asked my companion.

She nodded and we left.

The toy store brought games and joy, thoughts of childhoods past and ones we haven’t yet created. It was perfect and it was wonderful and we spent less time there than in the bookstore. We spent even less time in the record shop. Both were perfect. Neither were what I was looking for.

The site’s a tricky bird based more on gut than plan or analytics. I write only what I want to write and nothing else. If it’s not what I want to write, why write it at all?

So what do I want to write? Why was my gut being so fussy that day?

We walked along sunny streets, shop to shop, looking together for something to excite. We laughed and joked, held hands at points, sometimes put arms around each other or just reached over to touch, silently making sure the other person was still there. I smiled and got quiet. She asked what I was thinking.

I shook my head and lied to her. I said something innocuous about the weather or schedule — I can’t recall my fib.

What I was really thinking was that the story was strung between stores, in a walk down sunny sidewalks with her. I had found what I was looking for.

A similar tale when I hit 100

Are you a scientist? If so, we need your story.

So what should I write this milestone story about?

I decided to toss that question to the folks who made up the first 499, asking the people who got me this far how I should kick off the second half.

My first call was to honorary nephew Roland, age 10, who appeared in #362: Uncle Go Paul and #237: On Dining with Children Where I Used to Get Shitfaced and who was the subject of #365: Why Write? A Letter to my Nephew.

He wanted to talk history, surprisingly focused on the 1893 Columbian Exhibition for someone who still makes up stories about robots.

“I thought you were talking about writing a fiction story, but I like, um, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s the Ferris wheel. Because it involves the Fair,” he said.

“And if I were writing a fiction story?” I asked.

“The Cubs winning the World Series.”

“Did your dad tell you to say that?”

“Yes.”

His brother Milo, 7, suggested I write about boats.

“They would go boating!” Milo said.

The unnamed narrator of The Nut Hut Trilogy (#193, #196 and #199) is an old friend of mine who sat down for tripe soup and a chat about how she used to be the bait in a phony prostitution scam (read the stories — it’ll make sense).

“In keeping with my theme,” she said, she’s digging up the name of a church group she’s heard of that goes out to “minister to prostitutes, porn stars, strippers and other sex workers.”

Another longtime friend, fellow hipster striver Steven Gilpin, who made his musical debut at Schuba’s last month, was profiled in #140: Evil Twins back in 2013. He suggested I talk to the Chicago tamale guys, those saviors of hungry nights out who circle local bars with coolers full of hot, homemade tamales.

Puppeteer Stephanie Díaz, whose handmade constructions told the tales of Mariposa Nocturna: A Puppet Triptych in #424: Paper, Wood and Wire, suggested I profile the famous Chicago Puppet Bike.

However, this is the only of the ideas I already had myself, profiling the mobile puppet show in #66: The Kitties Dance to Country.

Geologist and paleobiologist Asa Kaplan of #484: The Man in the Dinosaur Hat sent this as a response, which I’ve decided to run verbatim because I’m pretty sure he’s messing with me.

“Hmm something about lightning bugs? Midsummer, I mean. Something in the middle of something.”

Joann Martyn, who each year celebrates the day she didn’t die in #444: Didn’t Kick the Bucket Day, took a different approach.

“You’ve profiled a lot of people and told us their stories, but what I want to know — how have those stories impacted you? How has your life changed because of these stories you craft and share with the rest of the world?”

The answer, of course, is that when I started this project, I was 6 foot 5 and so muscled I looked like an over-inflated Stretch Armstrong.

Martha Bayne was first featured in late 2013 in #251: Karen’s Stone Soup, which was about a fundraiser Bayne and her friends held for Swim Café owner Karen Gerod’s medical bills. Gerod passed away the next summer, much missed by the Noble Square community.

Although she didn’t appear by name, Bayne next showed on the site through artist collective Theater Oobleck, the focus of #344: The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show.

So it’s only appropriate that a two-timer give two suggestions, “one self serving and one a wild card.”

One’s on the Veggie Bingo event she holds at The Hideout (itself the setting of #473: Autophagy, or Why Progressives Lose). The event looks as insane as the name implies, and you can bet your kale and golden beets I’ll be writing about that soon.

Bayne’s other idea, which I might do as early as next week, is to “go to the corner of 500 N/500 W and then 500 S/500 E and report on the street life.”

Absolutely perfect. I think it’ll still work even if it’s not story #500 on the nose.

Sculptor, graphic recorder and one of Chicago Magazine’s Most Eligible Singles in 2014 Dusty Folwarczny also worked with the number notion.

“I think you should write about something that has to do with the number 500 and Chicago. Maybe it’s the address of where you interview, or how many bottles of beer are produced in an hour, or how many oysters are consumed at Shaw’s happy hour,” she said.

Dusty’s company Ink Factory appeared in #162: The Graphic Recorders and she guided me through the why of modern sculpture in #197: The Hypothetical Zulu Test.

Rachel Hyman, my co-organizer co-host in the Welcome to the Neighborhood reading series, suggested I do something lighthearted and fun, “Since you already took the meta angle with the last story.”

Yeah… wouldn’t want to get too… meta.

Hm.

I don’t think I’ll be writing about the Cubs winning the series, and technically every story I write is “something in the middle of something.” But I want to take this chance to thank all the people who have shared their stories with me over these last three years. And I’m looking forward to the people I’ll meet in the next three.

Now come back Friday for the completely original idea I came up with myself about boats that go boating.

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

Do you know former South Side steelworkers? I’m writing a book on the mills and want to hear their stories. Email me.

And beer.

On Thursday in the Swedish-turned-lesbian-turned-yuppie haven of Andersonville, attendees got a crash course in Swedish drinking history — from Heiðrún the mead-titted goat to British trade relations to disturbingly restrictive ABV regulations considering they used to be Vikings.

Sweden had to loosen several of their booze laws when they entered the EU in 1995, leading to a slow but ramping interest in that most American of pastimes, fancy-ass craft beer.

The joking, laughing, flirting crowd sampled the wares of Swedish breweries like Nils Oscar, Carnegie and Omnipollo (which I kept calling the every-chicken) along with beers from Iceland, Denmark and Chicago.

The celebration of beer (in Swedish, öl) was the brainchild of Jenny Pfäfflin. Frequent readers of this site last saw JP searching for Americana and fried fish in a Lakeview church’s gymnasium.

Now she was in Andersonville’s Swedish American Museum, teaching the history of Swedish craft beer.

The event raised money to restore the Andersonville Water Tower, a Swede-themed neighborhood landmark that went up in 1927 and came down in 2014 due to damage from the “polar vortex” hell-winter.

But anyway, that’s not Heiðrún, the mead-titted goat.

Heiðrún was a goat of Viking legend. Warriors who died in battle went to either one of two heavens: Valhalla, which is sort of an eternal party, or Fólkvangr, which, as near as I can tell from a quick Wikipedia, involves hanging out in a field forever with Odin’s wife Freyja.

Choose Valhalla.

In ‘halla, as I choose to call it at this moment, warriors partied hearty on wild boar as they got blasted on mead. On Earth, mead is made from honey. In Valhalla, it runs from the goat Heiðrún’s teats, forever filling a caldron from which all the warriors drink.

Maybe Fólkvangr isn’t that bad a choice after all.

A culture whose heaven had a goat leaking booze spent a disturbing amount of the 20th century holding the maximum legal alcohol content to 2.25 percent.

Miller Lite’s is 4.5 percent. The former Viking hordes maxed out at half a Miller Lite.

The point’s not to mock Sweden or Swedish beer — the öl presented at the event were clearly crafted with skill, taste, precision and the high alcohol contents the EU allows. Plus, who says that a beer has to knock you down with ethanol to be good?

The point is culture.

Chicago bars wouldn’t be loaded with fancy-ass crafts today if Jimmy Carter hadn’t legalized home brewing in the ’70s. Swedish bars wouldn’t be filled with porter if the trade winds from Britain hadn’t been just right in the 1700s.

Heck, the crowd at the Swedish American Museum wouldn’t have been sampling the every-chicken’s “new school” brews if the EU hadn’t thought Sweden was too fussy with the booze laws. For as much as people talk about will to power or the influence of great leaders, a lot of culture seems to be based on just dumb luck.

I guess you could explore the ever-shifting dynamics of a culture by tracking its art, literature, philosophy or social movements. Jenny Pfäfflin chooses to explore it through beer. And isn’t that the tastier option?

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Donate to help restore the water tower

Download JP’s history of Swedish beer

Download the program from the event (includes list of Swedish microbrews)

Read about JP’s search for Americana and fish

…

We used to work in newspapers, he and I. We talk about it.

…

The first he started distributing newspapers in 1981. He was lucky enough to get in on the first wave of USA Today in 1982, when that one launched. He had the whole territory: Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, out into the suburbs. It was where you wanted to be when it launched.

It was big pages, bright colors, he said. Lots of photos. It was exciting, new. People liked it. People bought it. The paper made money. He made money.

Now, he said through the Plexiglas partition between the front and the back of the cab, if it wasn’t for the hotels, the newspaper would be out of business tomorrow. He asked if I wanted to turn left once we got to Chicago Avenue.

…

The second he is a friend of mine. We work together. We talk about newspapers from the former reporters’ perspective: All that is now lauded is crap and true news died six months before we both left the industry.

It doesn’t matter we left at different times. Every reporter knows the death of news was exactly six months prior to his or her own personal arc.

While I laid fallow in suburban news, my friend lived the dream. From high school to his early 30s, he never had a job that wasn’t at a newspaper. He worked big metros before moving to magazines before getting a job at what I consider the big show, the Chicago Tribune.

He spent five years there. His newspaper story ended. They all do.

…

Distributorship went well, the cabbie said. It went well until 2005 when business started getting bad. In 2010, they closed shop. He needed a job.

He lived by the lake, but all the Quiznos franchises they offered were in the far ‘burbs. 7-Eleven had too many regulations. Dunkin’ Donuts had no opportunities.

He considered an opportunity to run a store in Gurnee Mills mall, an hour from Chicago. But since he and his family lived near the lake, it would have been too hard. They have regulations about when you can be open. You can’t close if you’re sick. You can’t close if weather keeps you from getting that hour away. You can’t close when the 1.8-million-square-foot mall is open.

I expressed commiseration. He said it’s like a condo agreement. You can own the place, but rules are rules.

…

My friend and I work in marketing. We market a business school, a good one in case you’re curious.

My old punkers sometimes look askew at me about how much I like the job. And sometimes I groan and grumble about the B-school entitlement I meet. But my job is to promote the good stuff.

I don’t see the grads who work for vulture capitalists or the ones who spend their careers at bland economic jobs. I promote the people who bring to market new treatments for breast cancer. Or who microfinance African farmers. I promote the works of people whose work deserves trumpeting and my biggest shame is that I like it so much.

My 22-year-old self might scream, but at 34, I accept that people need jobs. I might not always like the people who provide those jobs, but I think of the families and the vacations and the lazy Sundays those jobs provide the people who work there.

My friend feels the same. We talk about it. We talked that night at the bar about it, me and him and the postdoc who runs the research magazine. We talked about how to keep our souls while promoting these entrepreneurs.

…

“It sucks,” I said, my logic wobbly from the Koval and microbrews my friends and I had enjoyed at the bar while shooting 9-ball and dissecting our lot. “It sucks they make it so hard for the people who make this country work -”

“The entrepreneurs,” the man added, nodding along.

I paused. My commie soul screamed.

I still think there’s a role in this world for the lieutenants. I still think anyone who works a day’s work deserves a life he or she can live on. I still think my grandpa was right when he said, “No Republican ever did a thing for the working man.”

I will always be on the side of the servants rather than the served. That’s not a choice. I am one. Always. Proudly.

But the divide is choked.

“Yeah,” I said to the man driving me home. “Can you pull up here?”

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Another dream I have

“This is my neighborhood,” he said, giving the poster an unintentional tap with his finger before he the print marked Andersonville at the bottom of the pile on our table.

I was sitting down with poster artist Chris Gorz of StudioChris. Andersonville resident Gorz, originally from the South Side neighborhood of Clearing, is 12 into his project to design and create one poster for each of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

After graduating in 1991 in graphic design and advertising from Columbia College Chicago, he’s spent the last 20 years doing global marketing communications for a pharmaceutical company. It’s a good job and he likes it. But he missed art.

“I just wanted to get dirty,” he said. “I wanted to see ink under my fingers.”

In 2010, he took a screen printing class at the Lillstreet Art Center to re-scratch his creative itch. His class project, one of the bold eagles outside the WPA-era Uptown Station Post Office, got some good feedback and even a sale. StudioChris was soon born.

“I wanted to work for MTV and I’m in this heavily regulated industry, so this is the most beautiful project ever because I can do whatever I want without any constraints,” he said.

Each of the posters picks a non-landmark landmark in a neighborhood and re-creates it in this sharp, colorful and somehow eerie Art Deco style. You know these places, but you don’t know them. They’re familiar, but not jumping out at you.

When he did Edgewater, he didn’t pick the famous Edgewater Beach Hotel. He picked a manor house “that was built to be the British consulate but it was never used as the British consulate.”

He didn’t pick the wrought iron gates welcoming people to Old Town. He picked the facade of the Second City improv club.

He said if he ever does Wrigleyville, he’ll probably do something Cubs, but not the Wrigley Field sign.

“I kind of go for the more underdog type. Even Uptown. People say, ‘How come you didn’t do the Green Mill?’” Chris said, chuckling and shifting his coffee cup in a slim hand wearing a wedding band. “Because I like this.”

Gorz’s current project is Victory Monument in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville. The monument was put up in the 1920s to honor the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an all-black unit that served in France during World War I.

“It’s something that the people in the neighborhood can relate to and it’s part of Chicago’s history because a lot of African-Americans from that area fought in that war,” he said. “So that’s how I decided what that my next poster would be.”

Neighborhoods in Chicago are a motley bunch, based on everything from century-old plat maps to the ethnic groups that once lived there to what developers think will sell houses to 40-year-old nicknames some old-timer at the bar swears the place “used to be called.”

There are 77 designated community areas, the Realtors and that poster every Chicagoan owned briefly in their 20s say. The best estimates for the number of neighborhoods and pocket neighborhoods head well past 200.

Chris Gorz can do about six posters a year.

He works a lot on the train during his three-hour round-trip commute to the suburbs. He builds Chicago by poster as Metra takes him away from it.

After coffee and a monkey bun, a farewell and a handshake, I trudged the few blocks down Clark to see the Swedish flag water tower Chris used in his Andersonville poster. Once I spotted the tower, I walked up and down the street to find the exact spot where the parallax would jut it over the Ann Sather roof at the angle Chris’ poster shows.

I found the spot a bit back from a bus stop, near a gift shop with a going out of business sign. I held up the poster for comparison, a greeting card version Chris gave me as a souvenir. It was perfect. The angle, the mood, the tracing of the word “Hall” over the old building. It was right.

I looked around at the people wandering through the neighborhood that cold Saturday morning.

No one was looking up.

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