It’s a place where posters for accordion-drenched Mexican Norteña bands get taped to the sides of Korean-language newspaper boxes. The walk west along Lawrence brings Ecuadorian restaurants, Indo-Pak grocery bazaars, barbershops with signs that say both “Se Habla Español” and “Free WiFi,” travel agencies with hand-painted signs promising low-cost trips to “India, Pakistan, Europe, Middle East, S. America & Africa.”

It’s a place where people work, live, breathe alongside each other.

El-Jeeb Hijab & Gifts has a window full of head coverings two doors down from the Admiral Theater, where women take their clothing off. One door down from El-Jeeb, a roomful of middle-aged Hispanic Christian men sit eating around a table at Sala Evangelica.

The smell of fried chicken wafts in from nowhere.

It’s a walk, a simple walk west. No reason, rhyme or campaign finance paperwork on this one of the 1K1 afternoons in the city. On a cold, bright day, taking sidewalk footpaths worn or chipped into wet ice, it’s just a walk west on Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Across Pulaski, the signs blare into English with the arrival of a large, corporate chain plaza of Starbucks, Chase Bank, Petco. This side is called Mayfair, large orange metal pillars placed along the roadway say.

There’s the same diversity in Mayfair, the same mixture of Korean, Spanish and Arabic writing on the walls, of hookah bars and taquerias and State Farm and American Family Insurance agents with Asian last names.

But the streets seem wider here, the storefronts further spaced. It’s more suburban. Fewer businesses are shuttered.

It’s still the bungalow district, metal plaques shoved in the concrete claim. But the houses and families and increasingly large yards are back among the side streets. Developments start to line Lawrence farther west. Minty fresh apartment complexes and suburban-style townhouses that claim the neighborhood is the much more marketable Jefferson Park.

Chicago is a town of invisible barriers, where one side of the street gives friendly welcome to a person of your age/class/race and another seems angry and cold. Winding on worn paths in the sidewalk ice past lumberyards and jam-packed car washes, another barrier has been crossed. And another.

The walk continues past two highways and then past Cicero into the actual Jefferson Park, where the signs I can’t understand are once again in comforting Polish.

On this small side trip through Chicago, I saw a Plexiglas cow in the back of a pickup slathered in the Spanish names for cheeses. I saw a bakery with a massive Korean sign and a small English translation in the Gothic calligraphic font usually reserved for either “Thug Life” or “Chicago Tribune.”

An old Asian woman in a walker missed the bus. A young black man smoking a cigarette told me to watch the ice beneath an underpass. A white man with long strands of gray hair peeking from his wicking fabric ski mask waited for transit by the highway.

These are all people I will never see again.

On Feb. 22, 2015, I walked 2.6 miles from the Kimball Brown Line stop to the Jefferson Park Blue Line. I took the train back to write these lines in my own hipster haven of young artsy types where we tell ourselves we’ve found Chicago.

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I watched the man poke around the platform. I watched chatting old guys leaning against a newspaper recycling box and texting young ones lean against the stair railing. I watched the screaming cars’ headlights shoot down the highway, an endless daisy chain of light and stress in both directions.

And I watched as one by one, the expected times for the trains back home switched from numbers to the word “Delayed.”

I had gone to this train station at midnight to, well, be at a train station at midnight. It’s a song by The Jam.

But where Paul Weller’s surprisingly grim (if you listen to they lyrics) station was a London Underground “Tube” stop, Paul Dailing’s midnight train destination was an open-air “L” stop strung between the east- and west-bound lanes of Interstate 90.

To kill time between the train that let me off at the Jefferson Park stop and the now-delayed one the beta test train tracker had promised would take me home 18 minutes later, I had toured the darkened streets of Jefferson Park.

A guy in a Blackhawks shirt tried to order from a McDonald’s drive-up. Two young lovers chatting under a tree across from a Masonic temple. Twenty feet from them, an old workman on break sipped coffee. There was a surprisingly lively hip bar where youngsters chatted and flirted over microbrews and a surprisingly lively old man bar where 60-somethings who could still hand you your ass shot the shit over shots.

I wandered rows of darkened storefronts, past a statue of a photographer outside a photography studio, under an upholstery sign from the ’50s where the S and T in the middle of the word had been replaced since then with slightly off-font versions.

Soon I wandered back to catch my train. I wandered back past the man in the CTA rain gear power washing the floors as a worker in a sweatshirt and cap wiped it clean with a push broom squeegee.

In the glassed-in walkway over the screaming cars of I-90, a yellow-vested worker I had seen earlier wiping clean the new Ventra machines had moved on to wipe down the pop machine.

My phone got to midnight 30 seconds before my watch did. I allowed myself a little twirl under the Sauron eye of the CTA security camera. I had made it. I had made an arbitrary and pointless goal and I accomplished it.

It was a new place. A new time. A new experience. And that’s enough for me sometimes.

For that brief odd moment of bulging Gumby shirts and howling cars, I was exactly where I wanted to be.

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