That’s not sarcasm, and it’s only a little snarky. It actually pleased me to park my bike among the concrete Duplo blocks slapped down by mismanaged ’60s architects to form the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It pleased me to watch the cosplay the pretty girls and pretty boys played in, knowing that within a few years, deep, committed women and men would put their selfies and fashion aside. It pleased me to watch lovelorn boys sulk and scowl, pleased me to see groups of friends who looked like grownups joke and tease each other the way kids do.

(It did not please me that the Jane Addams museum I had come to see was closed for renovation, particularly since I had just come from an ill-fated side jaunt to the closed-on-Mondays Chinese American Museum of Chicago. I really should have checked the hours first.)

I had come from a coffee shop in the Bridgeport Art Center, where I downed an iced latte with coconut milk and as much junk food as my body craved to keep up the calories. I was starting to flag in my massive bike ride, which if you’re just joining us started last Monday at the city’s southernmost tip and will wrap up on Halloween, when I reach the city’s northernmost.

If you’re just joining, I traveled the length of the city one day in July, and I’m still on the South Side. I’m not yet watching the awful, wonderful, awful college kids, and I’m not yet standing outside a locked museum in Chinatown. I’m still in the Bridgeport coffee shop.

One wall is lined with a DJ station and turntables, another has a drum set and a third has a massive screen set up to play 1990s console games. I play a few rounds of Nintendo’s StarTropics, which I loved as a child but now realize has boring, repetitive gameplay and no interesting characters.

Nostalgia lied, as it does.

The Art Center is a magnificent place, a former catalog warehouse now filled up with event space, artists lofts, a museum dedicated to maritime history and, I find, a funky coffee shop where dance music plays for two men set up on Mac laptops.

This isn’t the Bridgeport people think of, the self-imposed, self-imprisoning nostalgia of working men chopping hogs and climbing up ladders of Irish politics. That’s a wonderful nostalgia and staring at the former Bubbly Creek, I find myself longing for the mass employment we used to have. I long for jobs.

But it’s a false nostalgia. Bridgeport was racist, conformist, confining. The waters roiled with pollution — “bubbly” is not a good adjective for a creek — and those jobs vanished as the world changed. We don’t butcher hogs for the world, don’t stack wheat or play with railroads. Our shoulders aren’t big; they’re hunched over Mac laptops while dance music plays.

I turned off StarTropics, having my fill of repetitive gameplay, coconut milk latte and nostalgia’s lies. I rode off to closed museums, and found myself among concrete Duplo blocks and memories that, if not nice, were pleasing in their accuracy.

It pleased me that college students are still frivolous, irresponsible, brilliant, self-involved, fearful, charming and just awful, wonderful, awful human beings. It pleased me that UIC students are still as horrible as I was.

UIC was where my Chicago began, in a way. I wasn’t a UIC student, but sublet an apartment from a high school friend who had been.

We were both recent grads, thrust out into a world and told we were men. We were given an instruction book. We were given hundreds of instruction books, each with the exact opposite advice from the last one. Do this, do that, go here, go there, go to church, find a girl, find atheism, stay single. The world was our oyster, with our age turning everyone within earshot into a kibbitzing auntie giving us unsolicited advice and opinion on the exact proper way to shuck it.

I really needed to get out of my parents’ house, and Jeff had a sublet. So I came to Chicago.

Nostalgia lies and you grow out of the things of youth. I was pleased to discover college students are still like me when I was awful, but it was time to leave. I pointed my bike north.

It’s time for story #1,000 of 1,001. It’s time to head home.

You know it from the half-Jetson, half-corncob conical twin towers of Marina City on the Chicago River. You know it from the looping concrete of River City I and River City II a bit further south along the water. You know the former housing project turned apartment of the Hilliard Homes, or maybe the old Prentice Hospital. But you know the man’s odd, compelling and utterly human approach to housing.

This is the story about Chicago’s skyline was changed by Nazi Germany, a prank call and that time Bertrand Goldberg got super-drunk with his wife.

The Jewish Kid

Goldberg was Jewish, which is relevant to the story. That heritage was what gave him his in with developer and political operator Charlie Swibel in the Marina City contract in the late ’50s, one of the first major projects designed to lure posh, up-and-coming, white Daley voters to live in a city facing massive white flight after the interstate system made suburbs a thing.

“[Swibel] heard there was a young architect who was Jewish, and he was going to give an opportunity to a Jewish kid,” Swibel’s son Howard said in 2008.

The “Jewish kid” was actually 14 years older than Swibel.

Marina City, the castle created to entice whites to stay in the city, was a hit. Goldberg was a star.

While Swibel was a legendary figure of corruption in the city, Goldberg was a true believer in the cause of housing. A few years later, the star architect submitted a design for a federally funded housing project. He wanted to create a version — an improved version — of his white-flight enclave for the almost-entirely black community in Chicago projects. He believed public housing could be beautiful, livable homes for low-income people, not just falling-apart boxes in which to store and hide away poor people.

The Federal Housing Authority told him no. He asked why. The federal agency tasked with housing for low-income Americans said, according to Goldberg, the designs were “too good for these people.”

“I was having evening drinks, and out of desperation had more than a reasonable share of drinks,” Goldberg would later tell Art Institute of Chicago researchers. “By ten o’clock or eleven o’clock that evening I was feeling very little pain and getting more outraged as the evening went on. Nancy [Goldberg] and I were just talking about the system that was creating this, and I finally late at night called Charles Swibel at his home, and I said to him that I considered this to be the equivalence [sic.] of book burning.”

This was big.

Pranking the Landlady

Chicago-born Goldberg had been studying at the Staatliches Bauhaus art school, living the art school life of parties and Berlin’s cabaret scene. In 1933, his apartment’s “rather strange” cleaning woman told him the landlady had called the Nazis on him as a radical, an American and a Jew. It was, in part, out of concern for him.

A few days earlier, Goldberg had prank called his landlady pretending to be the Nazi gauleiter in charge of the district investigating the “suspicious characters” she was housing.

“She was so angry at the whole thing she decided to make it real,” he later said. “She was also scared for me. That was not precisely the thing to have done, but she wanted to make it real for me.”

If light pranks seem an odd move for a man named Goldberg in Nazi Germany, remember they didn’t know at the time the end result would be WWII and the Holocaust.

“It was easy to make fun of the idiocies, and the Jewish jokes about Hitler were still very much in fashion,” he said.

The police were on their way, the cleaning lady said, so Goldberg threw the rest of his possessions in his steamer trunk (already partially packed in anticipation of the Nazis shutting down the Bauhaus) and took the first train out of Berlin. It happened to be to Paris, where he stayed with friends for a week until he could get a boat back to the U.S.

The Do-Fer

In 1937, the Swibel family fled Poland two years ahead and in anticipation of the Nazi invasion. They landed in Chicago’s rough West Side, the 10-year-old Charlie learning English so quickly and well he won a citywide essay contest on “What America Means to Me” at age 14. He acclimated quickly, but for the rest of his life, his Polish accent would get more pronounced when he got excited.

After school and language lessons at the public library, he would go to his job filling mustard packets at a kosher sausage factory on Roosevelt Road. He got a basketball scholarship to the University of Illinois, despite standing a whopping 5 foot 8. He wanted to be a doctor, but that was sidetracked when he got a job sweeping floors for slumlord Isaac Marks. This led him to dual careers in housing and city politics, which he used to finance each other, political foes like strategist Don Rose accusing him of using inside knowledge from the Chicago Housing Authority to benefit his work as a private developer.

A major Daley insider, Swibel got a reputation as a “do-fer” — someone who would ask “What can I do for you?” He’d get things done, then you’d owe him.

He was a major West Side slumlord, and his hotels denied service to black people well after segregation was deemed illegal, but he was a frequent party guest and close friend of Chicago Urban League Executive Director Edwin Berry. He was a Chicago Machine operative taken into the administration of Mayor Jane Byrne, who got elected in 1979 by blaming everything on Machine “rascals.” He built castles like Marina City for the rich and he ran the Chicago Housing Authority for 19 years. Even Don Rose, who left Mayor Jane Byrne’s administration in disgust when she brought Swibel in as a fundraiser, called him “probably one of the most charming men I have ever met.”

“If I didn’t hate him so much, I would have liked to have gotten close to him to learn what makes him tick,” an anonymous politico said in 1982. “He’s the kind of guy that you should write a novel about, because he’s so complicated and has so many sides to him.”

The Call

The well-meaning artiste Goldberg and the amoral political operative Swibel had an odd relationship, Goldberg would later recall. Swibel seemed amused by the architect’s naivete. Goldberg also had the developer pegged.

“Swibel believed in other people’s greed and he operated in that fashion,” Goldberg said. “Swibel had no illusions and he, in a sense, did the things that other people wanted to have done for them but wouldn’t do themselves.”

But back to the drunken late-night phone call, both were Jews who had fled the Nazis, and one just dropped a book-burning analogy. Swibel knew that was not a comparison Goldberg would make lightly.

He told the tipsy architect he would look into it in the morning. The Raymond Hilliard Homes were built.

“He had the connection of power through the local political system which, in turn, controlled votes and had representatives in Washington and the usual channels of power and communication,” Goldberg said. “But he singlehandedly, with this response to my own concerns, made it possible to continue this.”

I hold no praise for Charlie Swibel. Under his 19-year reign, the CHA became a hotbed of incompetent patronage hires, substandard construction contracted by bribe and dangerous housing for low-income and minority residents. He was only ousted in the ’80s after HUD threatened to cut Chicago off without a dime unless Swibel and the entire CHA board stepped down. Even in the Hilliard Homes story, he only cared about slights that triggered personal memories, not the injustices he committed against others on a daily basis.

But when you look at the looping modernist works of Bertrand Goldberg, you’re now stuck knowing a few drinks, the right friend and a prank call about Nazis helped Chicago look the way it does.

Read the ugly story behind the Art Institute

And the ugly story behind Lake Point Tower

And the ugly story behind the downtown Bloomingdale’s

And how our streets got numbered (this story’s not so bad)

But in the 1920s, this stretch was another block of shops, grocers, drug stores and the like, with a hidden network of underground tunnels connecting them all.

Maybe. Well, actually probably not.

In 1927, narcotics agents raided a drug store/opium den on that block where, according to the Chicago Tribune, they found a passageway to a network of tunnels, four to six feet under the ground and “wide enough for two men to pass each other.”

The network of tunnels went under the entire block, a warren that also netted five barrels of Chinese wine the narcs to turn over to prohibition agents, the article said.

Stories of secret tunnels under Chinatowns are traded in New York, San Francisco, Fresno, Vancouver, Boise, Los Angeles, El Paso, Bakersfield, Portland, Victoria, Oklahoma City, Tacoma. If a North American city has a Chinatown, it seems someone has told a story about tunnels underneath for opium dens, sex trafficking, shanghaiing sailors — pick your anti-immigrant stereotype.

The “burrowing Chinese” myth is good tourism and a quick story on a slow news day — stating the legend as fact in the more dire era of journalistic integrity and backpedaling “… or is it?” stories in the modern age.

There were tunnels and underground passageways, of course, just like there are tunnels and underground passageways through huge swaths of cities.

But in Chinatowns, the Asian mystique and good old-fashioned racism turn normal service corridors and basements into something mystical and grim.

In Portland, a passageway for hauling dry goods between the docks and nearby hotels became the mysterious, ghost-filled “Shanghai Tunnels.”

In the Doyers Street tunnel in New York, an aggravated office worker put up a sign that said in part “Don’t you feel silly? Duh! You are in the cellar of an office building! Ask for your tour money back!!”

Newspaper accounts aren’t exactly smoking guns either. Newsmen of the day would often make up stories or just repeat others’ fantastical notions, justifying whatever lies or exaggerations might exist through those cleansing words “he said.”

Maybe W. W. Overton was making up the “hundreds of crazed yellow men” fleeing a three-story subterranean city during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but who cares? He said it. We’re not lying, just reporting honest and true that one guy did say a thing.

(And, for the record, since Overton’s account ticks off every Chinese stereotype from opium pipes to what I think’s an allusion to bound feet, I’m willing to go out on a limb and not trust this one.)

I don’t think the newspapers or the police were lying about finding connected basements after a drug raid, but consider the source: narcotics agents trying to stir up some press after a big raid. A network of tunnels constructed, presumably, for druggin’ in mind sounds more sinister, nefarious and heroic-to-uncover than “They ran into the neighbor’s basement when the cops came.”

It’s not without peer. When police in 1914 were trying to close down Feiberg’s, the last brothel left in the notorious Levee red light district a few blocks east of our lot/anthill, they told the press of “a maze of tunnels, secret passages and hiding places” for the police raids.

Freiberg’s closed a month after that article. I have no doubt a brothel had hidey-holes in it, but when law enforcement was trying to shut a place down, the stories became more ominous and dark.

I started researching this believing in the tunnels, but the logic doesn’t bear out, or at least points more toward connected basements and storage spaces than underground cities.

Every old store was a speakeasy once. Everyone’s great-grandma drank with Al Capone. The same star-crossed lovers leapt from every Lover’s Leap from Starved Rock to Baku. If you listen at night, you can still hear the little girl’s laugh and did I mention Lincoln, Washington, Mark Twain and Ringo Starr slept here?

Maybe I’m wrong and there was a secret network, not just narcotics agents hyping up a service hallway, but I don’t think so. There’s enough real and mysterious and odd in the world that I don’t have to imagine hidden cities under a parking lot by the Chinatown Red Line.

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Take the Chicago Corruption Walking Tour

Around her, they disassembled the south end of the fair. The tables, folded. The booth tents, retracted. The sinking cruise ship bouncy house, flattened on the ground.

Only her little table full of meditation booklets for the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Association Chicago Chapter still stood south of 24th as they took down the far end of the Chinatown Summer Fair.

The woman came from Mount Prospect in the northern suburbs to offer peace and zen to fairgoers in Chinatown.

“A lot of people today?” I asked the woman behind the table.

“Yeah,” she said, adding “Well, before this” with a gesture at the empty.

The fair itself was fun and typical. There were booths offering food. There was a petting zoo. There were corporate ventures signing up for drawings and raffles that would net no more than a spot on a mailing list. A breakdance crew on the main stage taught children a few B-Boy steps.

Dim sum was sold for local parish fundraisers. Fairgoers of every race, mostly Asian, wandered the Wentworth south of Cermak. Fairgoers of every race but Asian sported recently purchased conical Chinese bamboo hats for keeping the sun away as they wandered.

While some booths were filled with expected dragon-dappled parasols and chubby Buddhas, others were more practical than Chicago street fairs usually offer.

Packing tape. Sponges. Sieves and brushes. Merchandise laid out in cardboard box after cardboard box that no one would quite explain where it came from beyond the fact there is no store and yeah, sure, “wholesale” works.

Chinatowns are remarkable to me. I use the plural because they’re all odd, wonderful, unique and strangely the same. I’ve dined and shopped at ones from San Francisco to Montreal, wandered different identical streets of window ducks and waving cats.

Candy or tea? Chinatown. Fruit of nebulous import origin? Chinatown. Christmas Jews and knives either for cooking or for showing off to combat nerds? Chinatown.

Chinatowns are like the little newspaper-wrapped mystery boxes you can only buy in Chinatowns. You don’t know what you’re going to get with each one, but you can expect a few key components are probably inside.

After I left the fair, I biked through the neighborhood. Beyond the main strip of ersatz pagodas and window ducks is the true test of Chicago’s Chinatown. Here, it’s just a place where people live.

Two-flats where families joked on the porch. Apartment complexes where old men shuffled out to check on tiny gardens. Kids in strollers howling as parents scrubbed their faces. A wildflower-dappled park by the river where teens strolled, momentarily too at peace to show off for each other.

It’s the same as and different than any other Chinatown because it’s the same as and different than any other neighborhood.

People live here. That’s all anyone really needs to know.

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A Polish neighborhood

An Indian neighborhood

An Irish neighborhood

A Vietnamese neighborhood

A Korean neighborhood

A Puerto Rican neighborhood

The most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Chicago

An egg stares at me from my desk.

Two weeks ago, a friend and I ventured to Chinatown for an afternoon of dim sum. In a second-story restaurant with tanks full of the largest crabs not currently fighting Ultraman, we laughed and joked over buns, dumplings and our inability to eat either with the chopsticks provided.

We spent the next two hours wandering in and out of shops, taking in everything from $800-a-pound dried sea creatures for traditional medicine to bakeries that sold cookies made with pork.

At the candy shop, after trying and tasting almost every sample there, we pick up some of that candy wrapped in rice paper and a chocolate egg I noticed en route to the register.

A few days later, I was about to dive into my egg when I noticed a few English words scattered amid the Chinese label. I read the words, then set the egg on my desk, where it has been ever since.

It’s not a chocolaty delight, full of wonder and whimsy and mysterious spices that you wouldn’t think taste good in a candy but, you know what, maybe they’re onto something.

It’s an egg. A chicken egg from a chicken, soaked in what a Taiwanese import-export site later told me was called “unique marinade” until it turned chocolate brown.

It’s a room temperature, dark brown, soft-boiled chicken egg that’s been sitting on my desk for two weeks.

“40 years of experience heritage, the most authentic Taiwanese specialties were made portable package!” the import-export website says in English that, while terrible, beats the hell out of my Mandarin (which consists of speaking English slower and louder).

“Under CAS quality specifications, using exclusive stewed methods and strict selected recipes, insist not add preservatives and artificial flavorings. Using the unique marinade pickled, give a unique spicy taste to spiced egg, whatever with drinks or snacks, definitely worth to savor!”

I lean over to my desk and pick up the plastic-sealed egg, gently turning it in my hand. I think about Chinatown, that weird, wonderful place for expanding horizons. I think about new experiences, about courage, about taking the plunge and trying something that could be truly odd and wonderful.

What makes Chinatown special isn’t the restaurants or stores packed with waving cats and obese Buddhas. Those can be written away as tourist attractions, spots for cheap dates and Jewish Christmases.

What makes Chinatown special is the dentists and lawyers with signs in Chinese. It’s a reminder that this isn’t just a place to buy dim sum and weird candy — it’s a community where people live their lives.

They just do it in Mandarin.

Who’s to say this egg won’t be delicious? Who’s to say I won’t try it and love it so much I run down to the Red Line daily to get my fill? Who’s to say the unique spicy taste to spiced egg is not definitely worth to savor?

You know what? Maybe tomorrow.

I put it back on my desk, as I have every night for the last two weeks.

The egg stares at me for another day.

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I missed the first part, having slipped past dense-packed tables and chattering servers to make my way to a bathroom so filthy it qualified as “disturbing.” He was already full steam by the time I slipped back to the big, round table.

“She dialed the same number, got the message, made the sound and hung up. She kept doing this,” he said to the other seven of us.

The group questioned him, picking up details along the way. He had seen the woman on two separate occasions, both during peak commute hours although she wasn’t dressed like she was going to a job.

She would do the same routine incessantly. Dial a number, get a message, make a frustrated half-squeak, half-grumble sound, hang up, then immediately dial the same number again. Every time he had seen her, every moment of both times.

He and his friends – few of us at the table had met before that night, the birthday girl our only connection – had considered this at length. It was that perfect level of odd. Not normal enough to pass unnoticed and not insane enough to be written off, this earworm of bus behavior was just right to get stuck in his mind.

His friends had come up with two options.

“The first is that she’s calling someone who died.”

She couldn’t admit her mother was gone. Or her sister. Or her friend or lover or little lost daughter. So she called. A soothing comfort, maybe? An unthinking tic? A sad flagellation, reminding herself of the pain over and over during her commute?

“So she was calling to listen to her voice,” someone at the table said, the words hanging sadly in the air.

“No,” the man with the sandy hair corrected. “She was getting the automated message.”

We in the group looked around at each other skeptically. No one would call over and over for the joy/pain of hearing a robot voice say “You have reached 7-7-3 …”

We moved on.

“The second is that she has OCD.”

The chords get tangled if she doesn’t call. Something bad will happen if she doesn’t check with Suzie. The man with the sandy hair was talking real OCD, not Hollywood cute counting or claims of “I’m so OCD” if a person makes a point to separate whites and colors in the laundry.

In this option, the woman on the bus is in dread. She’s overwhelmed by the absolute emotional conviction that her habit, her routine is what’s keeping terrible things from happening and mocked by the absolute knowledge that the world doesn’t work like that. Driven by anxiety and ridiculed by knowledge, she dials, over and over, a number she knows won’t answer.

We moved on from this option quickly.

The man with the sandy hair then turned the question to us. What else could it be?

We considered, some calling out suggestions to the table, others vetting their theories in whispers to the people immediately to the left or right. If the earworm lady was stuck in the sandy man’s head, he was in ours now too.

I suggested she had been the victim of a scam, her pittance lost to the Irish lottery representative or Nigerian prince she could no longer get on the phone.

The bearded man to my left interrogated the storyteller about the exact spots he saw her. He happened to know there was a clinic nearby that provided services for schizophrenics.

The symptoms sort of fit, he said.

Among dense-packed tables where servers whisked steaming plates to families chatting happily in Mandarin, a table of mostly strangers considered a woman we had never met.

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