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.

I spent way too long trying to find out the exact location of the Second Precinct of the 18th Ward in the 1884 presidential election, working myself into a lather of old maps from names like Mitchell, Cram, O.W. Gray & Son and something called “Rand McNally” before realizing it didn’t matter.

On Nov. 18, 1884, somewhere south of Division, west of Franklin and east of the river, election canvassers opened an envelope containing the returns from the recent state senatorial race in the Sixth District and found the lousiest election fraud in American history.

“The word ‘four’ in the sentence ‘Henry W. Leman had four hundred and twenty votes for State Senator,’ as it was originally written, had been erased, and the word ‘two’ had been written in its place. And the word ‘two’ opposite the name of Rudolph Brand, as originally written, had been erased, and the word ‘four’ written in its place, making the vote to appear to be four hundred and seventy-four instead of two hundred and seventy-four,” a later history of Chicago would recall.

The Chicago Tribune from the next day concurred with the memory, adding the even sadder detail that the new numbers were written “in a peculiar shade of ink differently colored from the rest of the writing.”

Maybe today it’s in the offices and yupscale bars of River North, or in that big community garden along Chicago Ave. Maybe it’s where the condos bloom by the former Cabrini-Green or in the last industrial holdouts on the southern half of Goose Island — it doesn’t matter. Wherever it was, someone committed a fraud parents would laugh at a grade schooler for pulling on a report card. They scribbled a two to a four and a four to a two in the wrong color.

If you know anything about American politics in 1884, you’re probably congratulating yourself for remembering Grover Cleveland had two non-consecutive terms. But elections were nasty affairs at the time.

A far cry from today’s grade-school gyms manned by sticker-dealing old ladies, elections were semi-secret, sometimes violent affairs held at saloons and other spots voters could be easily spotted and bullied into submission by poll-watchers and marshalls the parties picked for intimidation factor.

Down at State and Harrison the same election two became four, the race turned bloody after two poll watchers — one with the awesomely 1884 name of Black Jack Yattaw — drew guns after each tried to arrest the other for trying to sneak in the room where the ballots were kept. En route to the jail with a mob cheering murder, those guns went off and an election constable named Curran ended up dead.

“He may be a very bad man but he was not on trial for that,” his lawyer told the press after Black Jack was cleared of the killing.

Back in the 18th Ward, the sketchy con of two and four got sketchier. The Daily News found out that a few days after the two and four were spotted, the ballot box was taken to a saloon nearby the old courthouse at Dearborn and Hubbard to be stuffed with hastily added ballots to confirm the hastily scribbled numbers. They were all new and clean, recently printed and folded in the exact same manner.

The forgers even put down Leman’s father-in-law and brother-in-law as having voted for Brand.

The race was vital in setting the razor-thin party majority down in Springfield, and the precinct was vital in the race since, overall, Brand had “won” by 10 votes. The legislature and the governor later flopped the results, giving Leman his likely rightful seat. The printer who forged the hasty ballots flipped on the conspirators, there was a trial, jail, fines and a later pardon.

“He is not as pretty as he once was, but he knows a heap more,” the Trib wrote of one pardonee.

And that is the sum of American political history. All it’s ever been, from bloodshed by Black Jack to the modern fiddling and finagling with district boundaries, is a battle to switch two to four and four to two.

They used to scribble twos into fours and get all Black Jack gunplay if someone deigned to stop them. Nooses were brandished and often used against black voters to make sure those fours never got to a polling place. Political hacks would slip beers and bribes to rum bums to add to columns early and often, just so the lesser candidate would get the nod, four and office.

Then we grew up and got all fancy about it. We screamed over hanging chads and electronic voting machines that maybe are hackable I’m not sure. We learned to rig the game on a macro level so we didn’t even have to bother with stuffing ballots. We even learned to use fraud to create fraud, harnessing the specter of the bad old days to invalidate reforms that would allow millions more low- and moderate-income citizens of color to access democracy.

A president who lost his way into office now screams three million to five million of the votes he didn’t get were super phonyfake. Some believe him. Some will just capitalize on his jeers to force-feed the nation new voter ID laws, tighter restrictions on polling tech, locations and hours, other new methods of disenfranchising voters and turning that four into a two that I’m neither clever nor evil enough to concoct.

At its core, all this statistical, technological and legislative hugger-mugger amounts to fancy modern ways to swap a two and a four to get the race to come out how you like.

You have to use the past imperfect a lot when writing about history, because it was. They used to do this. They used to do that. But don’t think the game has changed that much, that we’ve somehow gotten more clever or noble.

They’re still swapping twos and fours, and we’re still here, watching, waiting and fighting tooth and nail to stop them.

Read about more bloody 1800s politics (including Black Jack)

In the wake of Trump, can a good person support the Chicago Cubs?

Cubs/Trump, part two

The fiddly bits around the metal plate continents were detailed in Micro Machines; larger Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars made up the infinite oceans. A man-sized statue planet Earth of old toy trucks, buses, hot rods, cement mixers, fire engines, limos — I think I saw a Batmobile in there.

The statue globe was painted checkerboard black and white. The silvery mental plate continents bore eco-friendly messages for those passing by the recycling scrapyard across the street.

Africa says “Rechargeable batteries can be used many times before they need to be thrown away. Americans throw out 179,000 tons of batteries a year.” South America says “Glass can be recycled forever but if put into the landfill it would take 4000 years or more to decompose.”

Hawaii just says “Aloha.”

And circling this planet of junk toys and reclaimed steel, red letters like you might find in a 1950s-themed drive-in. The letters, one or two of which were bent, spell out “REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE.”

The statue is a promise, a pledge that good jobs and good environment are friends here. It’s a bit of hope that things might turn out OK by the recycling scrapyard across the street.

The hope itself is, of course, hopeless.

The smelly, messy scrapyard is part of the gentrifying Second Ward, a mishmash map created in 2011 to swoop up 15 potentially redevelopable industrial sites and keep them away from longtime Alderman Bob Fioretti.

Now that Finkl steel is gone to the north and developers are sniffing around the recycling center, the city is suddenly cracking the whip on violations it let go for years.

Recycling is loud, smelly, noxious and not a good neighbor, more junk scrappers and construction workers looking for paychecks than lovely hippies, like, saving Mother Earth, man. Faced with the Not In What I Have Suddenly Decided Is My Back Yard crowd, North Side industry is being wished away to that magical “elsewhere” some seem to think life’s grodier things, jobs and people go when Mother Market decides a spot of city is gotta gotta have have.

Environmental injustice is a thing, and a horrible one. The areas around power plants, brownfields, petcoke heaps are almost homogeneously longtime low-income black and brown neighborhoods struggling for decades to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

Certain classes decide to move into an industrial area and, with a snap of the finger and the right alderman, the industry gives up, heading off to elsewhere.

But that’s not the topic. The topic is hope.

Hope requires a lot of caveats. It requires assertions you’re not naïve or uneducated on the topic or just plain stupid. It requires a pledge that, yes, you do understand others’ suffering is greater than yours and, yes, you do understand the size and scope of the issue at hand.

Hope has become a thing you have to apologize for before people will listen.

But I’ve got a little hope, and it’s not from that statue.

I tipped my hand more than a little bit with the title of this story. When I found the globe, I was coming back from one of the spots the Chicago River caught fire.

It was June 1899, and the second time in as many months that oily scum on the surface of the water went up in flames. June’s fire was a smaller affair than April’s waterfire, only $200 worth of damage compared to April’s $4,400. That’s $5,700 vs. $126,000 in today’s cash.

The river doesn’t catch fire anymore.

We reversed the river’s flow and rerouted whole swaths and did other damn fool things we’re still paying for today, but our water hasn’t caught fire in a long time. And that’s enough hope for me.

I just deleted three paragraphs of caveats no one was asking for but me. There were adjustments in there for Chinese factory conditions and the free market and international accords — there was even a bit alluding to competitive trade advantages in the post Clean Air Act economy.

But it was nonsense. My hope isn’t based on reality. It’s based on the human notion that if we don’t grip onto even the smallest bit of hope, we’ll say “Oh well that’s life” and wallow in our own filth, thinking ourselves savvy and wise.

I think it can get better, that jobs and steel and, yes, even rich people’s condos can find a way to coexist, if not happily then at least with a grumbling peace. I think it because I have to, because if I give up I’m ensuring the worst outcome.

So I hold onto my silly hopes, my Matchbox statues and flaming rivers. I hold onto anything to assure myself it will be OK so that there’s a shot it will be OK.

We really have no other choice.

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A man who cared about the water

He wore light khakis. He wore a checked button-up shirt under a cardigan under another cardigan.

He looked around, his fine mustache twitching, and found a spot. From his canvas bag advertising the Environmental Law and Policy Center, he pulled a folded-over copy of the New York Times. He pushed his thin bifocals up on his nose, twitched the ‘stache a time or two more and proceeded to read the Times, article by article, in order.

…

She sat on the bus in one of the inward-facing seats. She was young, Latina, very very cool.

She was old enough for a septum piercing and tattoos, young enough to retain a thin patina of acne. She toyed on her phone, did Millennial things.

She wore a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off. On her arm, a tattoo.

VIII XVIII XX

That was it. No accompanying illustration, no design or pattern. Just those 11 letters grouped into three Roman numerals.

VIII XVIII XX

8 18 20

A code? An address? High school locker combination forever scrimshawed into her flesh? I ripped through the possibilities as the Division bus bumbled through the bottleneck on Goose Island.

When the bus neared Wicker Park and she made moves as if to gather her bag, I asked.

She flashed a broad, full smile as she told me about VIII XVIII XX. It meant 8/18/20. August 18, 1920.

“It’s when women got the vote,” she said.

…

The man with the kitten shirt is not who I want to be.

He was a stumbling drunk, even compared to the other stumbling drunks of Wrigleyville after a Cubs game. Among this tide of blue, one young guy walked (stumbled) in a dangly sleeveless T-shirt screen printed with the faces of dozens of kittens.

It was a hip shirt worn hiply. He wore a hip hat of hip-cut curly locks. He trod with hipness, dipping between sidewalk and roadway as his leisure and Wrigleyville’s foot traffic dictated.

Hiply, he slammed his fist onto the trunk of a limousine for no reason, continuing his walk as if nothing had happened.

The limo driver yelled something at him from the front seat, but the man kept walking down the road, not looking back at the man whose livelihood he had just damaged for funsies.

The limo driver was a short, somewhat tubby Middle Eastern man dressed in a uniform all of black. Bright-polished black shoes, pressed black trousers, ironed black short-sleeved dress shirt. He got out of the car, watched as the kitten-shirted man continued his hip march and then inspected the damage done to his job.

The kitten man had dented the trunk. For fun. For no reason.

The black-clad limo driver grumbled a bit, got some well-deserved condolences from Cubbie-clad onlookers and then went about doing his job.

…

The world seems angry, full of noise. It seems a place of loud declaration, rancor and yelling, one where my opinion is just as valid as your fact. Sometimes it seems like our culture celebrates willful ignorance as purity of thought, hotheaded backlash as purity of emotion.

But then there’s a white-haired guy on the train reading the entire New York Times, article by article.

Then there’s a young woman on the bus who has such a deep abide for her forebears’ struggles she had a date needled into her skin.

Then there’s a man who stays calm and professional even when damage is done on a lark.

I want to be informed. I want to respect the past, when the past deserved it. I want to show grace under fire.

I still worry about cancer and racism, about the orange-skinned hateball running for president and about when it’s appropriate to tell people on Facebook to Shuckup about Hodor. But there are people walking these streets who show, not through words or speeches or loud declaration, who they really are.

And who they are is who I want to be.

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Three True Moments in North Side Chicago

The Bare Minimum Voting Guide

Just a reminder that there are only a few days left to vote for me as the best bahn mi sandwich in Chicago

He was a local boy turning 26, an old friend who had quit a downtown ad job where he was popular and loved to start a new, yet-to-be-defined new life. He was in the process of losing touch with his old friend workmates. His new ones were transient and weird, also filling a lifting-and-hauling job while we figured our own next steps.

None of his old friends showed up at the bar that cold, wet night in an otherwise glorious summer. Only three of his new ones came. So in the wordless way young men have, the three of us decided to make it a night the birthday boy would remember.

Oh we drank. We drank and we talked and we yelled and we bought. The sole married one of the party soon headed home, leaving three men in their 20s spilling out into the night.

I don’t remember who decided to climb up onto the Bloomingdale Trail.

The old rail line cutting through Goose Island, Bucktown, Logan Square and Humboldt Park once hauled the tools of industry when Chicago had some of that. The city approved the rail line in June 1872, just nine months after the Great Chicago Fire.

Two years later, to beat a mandated deadline and get around community protests, the Chicago & Pacific Railroad Company snuck in work in the dead of night at Goose Island. Goose Island residents rioted, tearing up the new-planted ties and setting them on fire.

They argued it would endanger their community. Nobody lives on Goose Island anymore.

The rail line spurred growth and industry. Nobody lives on Goose Island anymore.

Two drunks and a birthday boy wandered the trail’s length years later.

The then-abandoned line — it hadn’t seen a train since the 1990s — was rocky and dim, cold sprinkles turning to showers that did anything but sober us up. We joked and sang, leapt onto nearby garage roofs to skitter about like squirrels just to prove we were agile enough to do that in the rain.

We did what young men do. Until we came upon the shantytown.

In 1893, the city ruled all trains must be elevated within six years. The railroad company, now called the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company, complied more than 20 years later, finishing raising the Bloomingdale Line in 1913 or 1915. Sources vary.

From there it followed the path of the rest of America’s trains. Boom-times until the highways made car and truck hauling a thing. Sputtering in the ‘70s and a choking, lingering death in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Talk of the Bloomingdale Trail as a park and bike path started in the 1990s, as the last trains slugged over the aging tracks.

That park opens tomorrow. It’s called the 606.

It’s going to price people out of their homes. It will be glorious and I’ll use it and I’ll love it and it will price people out of the homes they’ve had for decades. My luxuries will mean their displacement.

Poor people don’t get to have nice things.

Nice means it’ll cost more to live by. Opportunity and the middle finger flashed by Adam Smith’s invisible hand means scavenging developers will charge people for fancy spots in brand new condos by the new pretty park.

Developers have already started to sniff around, several residents told the Chicago Reader.

But the park will be wonderful. Its wonder makes it dangerous. The way to keep a place affordable is to keep it terrible.

The shantytown we came across that cold, drunken night was by where the tracks leapt Ashland. It was a collection of pup tents and of tarps lashed, propped and duct taped into acting as tents. A Depression-era Hooverville in the reign of George W. Bush.

None of the homeless who lived in the town of tents were there that night. One of them had tied a radio to a bit of stone and iron sticking from the overpass. It was left running on AM talk radio, an eerie, tinny soundtrack to the dark and cold rain.

We turned back silently and walked along the Bloomingdale Trail, asking Schwartzie if he had had a nice birthday.

The shantytown’s gone now.

Gone like the Goose Islanders.

Gone like American industry.

Gone like who knows how many homeowners just scraping by in Humboldt Park.

I don’t know how to get around that. Tomorrow, when this glorious new park opens and I use it day after day after day, I’ll have to keep one fact in my heart.

It’s because of me.

Read more lost history

Read lost prehistory

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