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 felt like my friends were more playful, goofy, spontaneous, like whole, emotional, funny, alive,” she said as we sat in the grass by the Lincoln Park Children’s Fountain, the coincidence not occurring to me until I wrote this sentence. “As a kid it seemed to me like there was a light in their eyes — that’s the way I described it when I was young — and I didn’t see that same level of fullness of being or animatedness or livingness in most adults. It looked like something had happened.”

As an adult, she found that moment. 

Teaching performance at a progressive school in San Francisco after college, she would watch students go from kindergarten through eighth grade. Over her decade there, she studied and pinpointed when her students’ light started shutting down.

“I see that to be between fifth grade and eighth grade,” she said. “I see it having a lot to do not only with expectations from adults around them — the socialization that comes from their teachers and their families — but also from each other. There’s cool. Cool comes into play and does a lot of the shutting down for the kids. So every summer they would leave and come back to me and be cooler.”

To fight the cool and shutting, in 2005 Janna invented a week of games for the students, each day steeped in an aspect of improvisation. There was the day spent in antique shops or ruins, inventing the story of a place or thing they hadn’t seen before. There was Tourist Day, where the students would create characters and have to live as that person for a day while they explored their hometown. There was a day of learning to trust others — Falling Down by the Sea, that one was called, a name that explains nothing and it all.

And there was Intuitive Treasure Hunter, which Janna and I came to the park to play.

Imagine turning left every time you wanted to turn left, or climbing a tree, or knocking on the door of a house you wanted to see the inside of. Imagine following and nursing that little voice of whim or whimsy and, if you doubt that voice for a moment, you have a pair of friends or strangers there to tell you to stop being stupid and to sit on that statue already.

That’s what Intuitive Treasure Hunter is. Sort of.

It’s a way of recouping yourself when you start to feel “worn down and squished, and fit into the compartments we’re supposed to fit into.”

It’s a way of “reminding people of a thing they already know but forgot about.”

And more importantly, it’s a small side business with a website and tickets available for this Sunday afternoon and a price point I can absolutely, perfectly 100 percent vouch is worth every penny.

It’s pretty cheap admission for finding your personal treasure.

Janna is a storyteller, actress and teacher, who found her way to Chicago by playing a massive, monthslong version of the game with an Amtrak Rail Pass and a summer heading wherever her light told her to go. She ran into an ex on a New York street so they could cry and move on, met strangers who connected her with long-lost mentors, and she found herself standing on the Michigan Avenue Bridge 10 years ago watching tour boats pass when she got a call from a friend about a theater putting on his play, and it would be a perfect role for her if she only were in Chicago.

Her improv side shows as she uses her hands to form the Half Moon Bay fog cresting over a cliff.

“In walking with this white wall of fog is this giant white stallion, the kind of white stallion that even if you are not a girl who had dreamed of horses your whole life would be the best thing you’d ever seen in your life,” she said.

She’s telling me the story she tells at the beginning of Intuitive Treasure Hunter games. It’s about one of the early games she ran with the middle schoolers in San Francisco. This game was with three 12- or 13-year-olds, two girls and a boy.

The boy is “simultaneously gangsta and goth, safety pins in his ears and black eyeliner and throwing gang signs and bandannas backwards and all of it at the same time, and he’s one of my favorite people.” He’s six feet tall, “in a brand-new, grown man’s body,” and paired in the game with a popular, athletic, horse-obsessed girl and and a tiny girl with a story so sad, I’m declining to write it now. It’s not my story to tell.

The horse-obsessed girl is walking toward the horse.

“We just watch them meet in the middle of this field and [the girl] bends down and picks up a leaf of one of these giant cabbage plants and the horse lets her feed it, which is awfully generous because it has all the options,” Janna said, improv gesturing at invisible cabbages. “And she stands there with this horse for probably like a minute or two, not very long. And the thing is sweet enough to let her pet it, she pets its long face, and they just have this sweet little moment of communion until it gives her this really nice little nudge, ‘Here,’ and then just continues along its way.”

The girl who loved horses had found her treasure. She found her horse, the boy found a conversation with an old man who reminded him of his recently deceased grandfather and the girl with the sad story found her voice — I’ll let Janna tell you what that means if you go on a game.

Janna tells the story at the start of games because it’s magic, and it’s banal.

“If you think about it, there was nothing so incredible about what the kids found,” she said. “They found a horse on a farm, they found an old man and they found a river. There’s nothing fancy about any of that. The reason it felt like treasure to them is because of the way they were paying attention.”

That’s part of Intuitive Treasure Hunter too. You will find your treasure because you’re looking for your treasure. It’s magic because things are magic, if you look with light.

“Can we play?” I ask.

She says yes.

Read about sadness on a bridge

Read about a game with strangers

Read about a drunk in the snow

Why not to tell stories (sometimes)

They gathered in the theater to talk about hair.

The Moth, as most of you might know, is a live storytelling event and radio show. It’s famous in its circles, so I don’t know how much explanation is needed to advance the story and how much is just me nattering on. There’s a national NPR show. There’s a cabal of followers and little subfactions and sects among “the storytelling community.” It’s a name among people who want to tell crowds about their own lives. It’s a big deal.

More immediately, it’s a contest. Each month at 28 venues across the world, eager audience members show up, put their names in a hat and find out if they’re the night’s entertainment. They’ve all practiced their story on the night’s selected theme. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they’re sad. Sometimes they’ve been asked to prep tales about technology, or the airier, less-defined topic of “endings.” A night’s theme might be summer or learning curves.

At the Lincoln Hall music venue late last month, it was hair.

Think for a moment. Just do. Think about a story you have about hair. A bad haircut before a big event maybe? Or about getting gum caught in it. Falling in love with the way someone’s hair shimmers in the moonlight. The dumb way a newly shorn toy dog blinks in dismay. Finding a long, stringy hair in a gourmet meal.

Maybe it was that, maybe it was some other variation, but something just popped into your mind in that last paragraph. But you have a story. Everyone has a story. And that’s the concept The Moth is dedicated to.

Sure, it needs to be teased out, extended, have some duller bits blown out and colored over, but your story is worth presenting to the world, and that’s what The Moth is for.

Once the show begins and the host (in our case, the excellent Rashawn Scott) warms up the crowd, a name is drawn and the stories start. In total over the night, 10 stories are selected. Teams of audience members judge the stories on a scale of 1 to 10 and a winner is chosen at the end. From there, audio of the best stories are sent to New York to be considered for The Moth Radio Hour.

I’m not a particular fan of storytelling-as-competition, but I will admit it encourages people to bring their A-game. We laughed at the tale of the Irish brothers who set up a head-shaving business at their school, gagged at the (eventually winning) story of a grown human woman who went to the hospital for a hairball. We cracked up at the mother convinced a “cool guy” pastor was behind her son’s long hair and we nodded in solemnity with the young woman talking about hiding her own sad past behind hair dyed the color of a bright flame.

For me, the most telling moment was at the end, when Scott called to the stage all the people who put their name in but who didn’t get selected. They each said the first line of what would have been their story. Line by line, person by person we were given a tease and taste of different stories about something so simple, banal, prosaic and universal as hair. Everyone had a story.

Everyone has a story.

Meet a diner colloquium

Hear a cabbie’s stories

And a veteran’s

And an illustrated story from bond court

Field trip after field trip plowed through the revolving doors on Clark Street into a room of signs, cars, photographs and interactive displays for children to chatter to each other near. The Chicago History Museum on a free-to-Illinois-residents Tuesday was simply hopping with wide-eyed kiddos and teachers growling those angry teacher stage whispers to let the students know what will happen if the they ever do what they just did ever again.

The third floor, by comparison, was as silent as a pope’s tomb.

Above the noise of free Tuesday field trips and the eye-catching lights and relics of the museum’s main floors, the third floor research center is a bone-silent hunting ground for facts, figures, dates, context and whatever else people want to find out about the city’s past.

It’s a bit chattier than the Newberry Library’s collection, less of a homeless shelter than the Harold Washington’s main floors, but it’s free with ID, a cozy refuge from the field trips and by god for three-and-a-half hours a day Tuesday through Friday (and 10-4:30 on Saturdays) it’s sheer heaven.

Happy-faced librarians shuttle about a clean, well-lighted place with tables for reading, original source documents at the asking and that glorious quiet I keep coming back to when recalling this.

I was the first one there when the doors opened Tuesday, followed within seconds by a gray-haired white man who, like me, had been puttering about the museum waiting for the center’s 1 p.m. starting gates. A staffer smiled at the man and directed him to a table where the large, flat files he had requested were waiting.

As he flipped through document after document of what looked from my perch like deeds, he made inadvertent little yummy sounds. “Mmm” over a particularly interesting land transaction. “Hmmmmmmm” over juicier bits of municipal property record.

I can’t explain what a good research run means to me any more than others can explain why watching sports at a wing bar is a good use of financial and emotional resources. In the end, neither’s superior to the other (camaraderie and celebration of physical prowess versus sitting by yourself making yummy noises at land transactions) but there’s not much in the middle of that Venn diagram.

But research is glorious. It’s soul-swelling and occasionally transcendent. There are these little quiet corners of the city tucked away from others’ eyes. People don’t press the elevator button for the history museum’s third floor. They meander the park near the Newberry but don’t hit the inside. They walk past the Stony Island Arts Bank as if these places are invisible, not knowing they’re just a door away from worlds opening up.

I realize I’m making research sound like some nerdy combination of Diagon Alley and Cap’n O.G. Readmore, but that’s sort of the situation we’re dealing with. The research project that brought me to the research center on Tuesday afternoon (and the Newberry that morning) is eyes-only for now, but I spent hours lost in my world of shady land deals and Native disenfranchisement.

The room never quite filled, but once there were a whopping six researchers in there, it did seem a bit crowded. Three loud white ladies wanted to know more about the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. A younger woman inquired about some matter in such a soft tone a librarian had to lean over the desk to hear her. I was flittering about trying to find a book that wasn’t there.

And the gray-haired white man sat at a desk flipping through yellowed sheets of paper making yummy noises to himself, too entranced by what he found to care how the matter looked to outsiders.

A visit to the Newberry

And the Stony Island Arts Bank

A young guy who binds books the ancient way

This story is featured in the CHM’s “Chicago Authored” exhibit

There’s a block where even the back entryways are tastefully decorated — can’t seem unseemly even to the rats and covert urinators who seek alleys as habitat.

There’s a block where tall staircases lead to immaculate brick homes with Christmas tree fairy lights and the everyday crystal chandeliers glinting and glowing out the windows.

And I was hunting these streets for an alley made of wood.

The wooden alley off the 2100 block of Hudson Avenue is one of two left in the city according to the article that alerted me to the prize, one of three according to a different site.

I had no desire to spend a dark 5 p.m. night heading to the moderately well-known wood-paved alley behind the mansion the archdiocese keeps for the archbishop. I wanted to see the other one, the crappy one, the one not recently renovated and restored by a cabal of friends, neighbors and fans of antiquated paving materials.

I wanted to see what history looks like when it’s ignored.

At the time of the Great Fire, 37 of Chicago’s 61 miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Twenty years later in 1891, wood made roughly 480 of the city’s then-774 paved miles.

It was called Nicolson pavement in honor of its inventor, Samuel Nicolson of Boston. Cost had forced Bostonians to use wood over stone; Nicolson invented a process for making the wood last as long as possible while providing a smooth surface for carriages and horses.

“The Nicolson pavement, if not the most durable, is certainly the most agreeable of roads,” an undated but no doubt ancient Scientific American article claimed.

So off to Hudson Avenue. Off to one of those little streets even Edward Paul Brennan (1866-1942) couldn’t fit into order. It starts, it stops, it jumps two blocks to the left, it continues for a mile, then only lasts a single block. It was a dozen streets crammed in a single name when Brennan tried to make the city make sense. The street’s as much an archaism as the paving.

I walked by twice before realizing I had found the alley. I even walked all the way down it on one of the gos, before realizing later that the bricks I had stood on weren’t.

On the second, maybe third look — wondering all the time when the richies would call the cops about the guy clearly casing the neighborhood — I looked down. One brick, I noticed, had rings. Then I noticed a second with a whorl. And a third with loops.

In the dark and cold, among garbage cans, recycling bins and a scurrying that sounded too much like a rat when I stepped too close to said bins, I realized I was walking on a wooden floor. They were arranged in brick pattern, sawed into brick size, rectangles held in perfect brickian proportioned, tarred to a wonderfully brick finish in Nicolson’s effort to make wood act like cobblestone.

The wood section only extended maybe 40 feet into the alley. Beyond that, decades of residents had poured amorphous 10-15 foot splotches of asphalt, hot patch — maybe even some macadam here or there — to coat the alley by their garages. The different materials used and times they were spread made a multi-colored, multi-level effect, the only consistency being it covered that damn wood that rattles the Bentley.

Little semicircles of the wood lay exposed surrounding each garage’s rain gutter. Either the asphalt had never been poured there, or it had worn away through decades of rain splash, the more useful material dissolved like a stalagmite to reveal the more beautiful one. I prefer the second option, but I believe the first one.

On Monday, I wrote about a man who hand-built an arts center to revive Englewood. Last week, I wrote about a group of volunteers trying to make Springfield make sense. The week before, I painted in glowing bacteria amid a group of biologists who want to teach the world. Even by this site’s capricious standards, “Hey, that’s not a brick!” is a big who cares.

But I find it important. People talk about how no one looks up — I’ve bemoaned it myself. We become complacent to glass towers a thousand feet high and magical metal birds that whoosh us wherever we want to go.

I like the secrets of alleys as well. I like the little hiddens. I like that things we take for granted sometimes aren’t.

I like walking down a darkened street, looking down and realizing the world isn’t made of what I thought it was.

The historian was still talking.

The event was a lightly boozy after-hours tour of the Chicago History Museum, punctuated by “flash tours” of 15 minutes through the museum’s various exhibits. Rather than the Playboy tour or the one run by improv performers (Chicago’s greatest shame), we had opted for the one run by the museum’s chief historian.

So, breath still wheaty from the craft brews and whisky samples we were forced to leave in the café area, we followed the head museum’s head man for a 15-minute talk on the city’s two World’s Fairs, the 1893 Columbian Exhibition and the 1933 Century of Progress.

And the historian was still talking.

He talked Ferris wheels and freakshows. He talked the fake fair Buffalo Bill set up next door to try and steal business. He talked construction and architecture and Louis Sullivan refusing to abide the color scheme and hobos setting up camp once the fair was done and he kept going.

He ran over the time allotted for the “flash tour.” Well over. He knew it was happening, too. He checked his watch a few times, had to see that he’d run over the 15 minutes given to pitch two of the greatest public events the city ever knew.

But he kept talking. With a pained look in his eyes that there was so much more to get through than he was able to accomplish, he kept talking.

It annoyed me last night. It charms me this morning.

He couldn’t bear to give this topic short shrift even when that’s what people had signed up for. He saw us shifting from leg to leg, discreetly checking our phones for the time, then overtly checking our phones for the time and he still could not stop.

There was so much he wanted to share with us that it pained him not to be able to. He was a new parent showing off baby photos to glazed-over colleagues. He was the buddy at the bar who will not shut up about this amazing woman he just met.

But it wasn’t a baby or a new sweetie. It was the fate of the scrap metal from the first Ferris Wheel. It was the social dynamics that led Roosevelt to ask the Century of Progress to run for an extra year. None of this was new to the historian. He’d had his job for years.

And he still had that much excitement and love.

Eventually, a museum official sidled up to the historian, whispering something in his ear. As he had gone past both the planned end time for the first tour and the planned start for the second tour, I guess that’s what it was about. The historian quickly ended the tour and shot out of the room, leaving us surrounded by Chicago history and slightly jealous we would never love it as much as he did.

The polar bear just slouched. It slouched back to the colder area of the enclosure; out of sight, out of warm, sunny day.

The lion laid back and let the sun warm its tummy.

It was that day.

Every spring there’s a day you remember why you live here. You remember why you put up with the gray and the traffic, the noise and the gasoline smell.

It’s a warm day, mostly. A sunny day, always. And that’s when you remember the city is beautiful.

It’s the day it all seems worth it again. It’s the day it all seems possible.

Having visitors helps, out of towners being all out of towny so you have a reason to hit up the zoo, wander among the throng also stretching the winter away. Having visitors makes it reasonable to do all the things you really want to do but are too unbearably local to spend time on.

It seems to make sense to track down penguins when others are near. It seems to make sense to hunt out the sun and lake breezes.

It’s raining as I write this, or at least threatening to in a way so lifelike as to be mistaken for the real thing. It’s windy and annoying and I just want to sleep and wait for more days like yesterday.

Because I know they’re coming. Because I had that day.

The zoo in autumn

The zoo in winter

Remember that one-armed gibbon they used to have? He’s fine

The stores were bright and fragile-looking, casting glances out the window, reverse shadows turned whirly rainbows reflected in the thin layer of oil slick city streets only show in the rain.

He held her in his arms.

He kissed her comfortingly, assuagingly. He put his hand on her cheek whenever she tried to bury her face in his scarf, gently raise her head for one more kiss, one more comfort in the rain and oil.

I heard a light sob as I walked past, trudging into the cold spatter and darkened streets.

Who says there’s no noir in the world?

A friend of mine is planning a modern noir novel. I’m giving away no details, but what started as a joking conversation between us about a millennial detective agency — quick-hit jabs with pulpy titles like “He Vapes at Midnight” and “Her Preferred Pronouns are… DEATH” — evolved into what promises to be a dark, funny, touching look at youth culture and modern crime.

But is noir still relevant? We’re in the era of exposure, not secrets. It’s not the era where sex, death, love and money are hidden down dark alleys and in hidden flops. The sins a Sam Spade or Nora Charles would root out in ‘40s fiction would be broadcast loud and open online.

Noir is drama in the darkness. Humphrey Bogart tracking a black bird. Barbara Stanwyck getting a phone call she can’t unhear. Henry Fonda screaming to deaf ears that he is the wrong man.

Can this happen in our bright, gaudy, tacky world?

A powerful man wouldn’t kill to hide a mistress. He’d Facebook Live an apology to his wife and ask for a nation’s thoughts and prayers. Faced with scandal dug up by an inkstained newsman, the politician wouldn’t crumble. He’d just yell “WRONG!” at a debate and tweet that the reporter’s a loser.

The hidden speakeasy siren would brag about her 50,000 Instagram followers and how the Kickstarter’s going for her adult coloring book.

But then there’s that kiss in the cold winter rain.

The man was a middle-aged Asian man with thick glasses and hair that poofed each which way, so as a romantic lead, he doesn’t fit the tropes of the racist noir era. And the light swirling into rainbows on the oily streets was coming from a Walgreens on a ritzy strip of a ritzy North Side shopping district.

But a kiss in the darkness, a sob as a lonely walker trudges by, a romantic lead and a woman whose pain he can’t reach?

Sounds pretty noir to me.

DNAinfo on a Jan. 18 fundraiser I’m co-organizing

RSVP for the fundraiser

I grew up in an old house which, apparently, used to have an outhouse right below the maple I used to climb. *

Outhouses in the 1800s were apparently trash dumps too, so my parents let some privy diggers — professional excavators — dig down to see what was there. They pulled out crystal wine stoppers, old bottles, cracked porcelain plates with blue-dyed townscapes, all right under my old maple.

It got me thinking about what’s beneath our feet in Chicago.

Abandoned Streets and Train Lines

I’ve already written about (and broken into) the abandoned subterranean Carroll Street. It was an old train line that, nowadays, is a grimy dirt road housing House of Blues roadies, missing political signs, night shift workers and spots for breathtaking views of the Chicago River.

Photographer AJ Kane came with me to document this buried roadway.

A different abandoned train line had a wetter fate.

In the early 1900s, tunnels were dug beneath the city for a telephone system that never happened. They eventually became the Chicago Tunnel Company, 47 miles of train 40 feet below the Loop, carrying everything from coal to mail between office buildings.

The company went bankrupt in 1959. Efforts to stop the tunnel from flooding started soon after. Aside from the completely predictable talk during the Cold War about using it as a bomb shelter, it was shut off and pretty much forgotten.

In 1991, workers replacing the pilings around the Kinzie Street Bridge (pilings are those big bundles of logs that keep boats from hitting the bridges) got permission to put them two-and-a-half feet south of the original spot.

Those 30 inches were the difference between some boat-bumper logs in the mud and cracking into the long-forgotten tunnel wall. The wall burst in 1992 (my dad had taken us into Chicago for a Sox game that day) and the underground areas of the downtown flooded.

“The Great Chicago Flood” cost $1.95 billion in damage, $25 billion in lost trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and eight city officials their jobs.

12,000 Corpses (Possibly)

I won’t dwell on this too much, but Lincoln Park (the park itself, not the neighborhood, used to have a massive cemetery. So many bodies so close to the city’s drinking water was problematic, so they carted the bodies off to various other cemeteries in the 1856 “Great Removal.”

There might be as many as 12,000 unaccounted for, left under the joggers and sunbathers at Lincoln Park.

A $400 Million Hole

Block 37, the massive, stupidly convoluted development project next to the Daley Center, has condos. Beneath the condos, a mall. Beneath the mall, a pedway walking path and, below that, subway lines.

Below that, the abandoned and padlocked empty shell of a CTA superstation for nonstop trains to the airports.

Mayor Daley the Second’s administration spent $218 million to build the superstation before abandoning the project in 2008. The nonprofit Civic Foundation estimates taxpayers will pay $2 million in interest on the superstation every year until 2028. This will bring the total cost to $400 million dollars for a gigantic, locked-up hole in the ground.

And here’s the stupid part: The original plan was to use existing ‘L’ tracks to get to the airports until the funding would be organized for their own private tracks.

The “non-stop” trains would have been stuck behind the Blue, Red and Orange line trains that make every single stop.

For More CHUD Life:

For a better look at the city through time, check out these historical “What’s under Chicago?” articles:

• “Underground Chicago Rivals Rome’s Famous Catacombs,” Jan. 19, 1902
• “Underground Chicago is as Mysterious as the Sewers of Paris and as Wonderful as the Catacombs of Rome,” July 4, 1909
• The amazing city that lurks beneath Chicago’s streets,” Oct. 28, 1980
• “Six Tunnels Hidden Under Chicago’s Loop,” June 21, 2013

What? I never claimed I came up with the idea.

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* A pastoral hometown? Yes. One where the unemployment rate is so chronically high the New York Times drops by every few years whenever we hit worst in the nation? Also yes. Don’t get judgy because I write about Chicago but grew up in Narnia.

The purpose, aside from the fact I’ve been all coughing and bronchial and wanted a story I could write from my sickbed, was to get people to explore certain sites I like, including this one, Atlas Obscura, the Chicago Collections Consortium, the Chicago History Museum, Mysterious Chicago and Curious City.

So I made the quiz goldanged impossible. (And Curious City, that thing we talked about? It’s handled.)

From the Fool Killer submarine to park bats to Iroquois Theater Assistant Chief Usher Archie Guerin, here are the answers you didn’t get to the 1,001 Chicago Afternoons Really Difficult Trivia Quiz.

The Answers

1. Assistant chief usher of the Iroquois Theater, seen in news photos following the fire.

Archie Guerin, as seen in this Chicago Collections Consortium photo.

A brief word about the Collections Consortium: It’s awesome.

It’s an online home for the combined collections of 18 local institutions, from universities to libraries to museums to the frickin’ Brookfield Zoo. A big reason for this quiz was for an excuse to tell more people about the site.

…

2. The first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, located underneath the University of Chicago’s football field, was in a room originally constructed for this sport.

Squash. As in “that sport that’s not quite racquetball but no one can really explain how it isn’t.” As outlined in this Curious City story, Enrico Fermi and his team turned a squash court into the home of the first self-sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.

…

3. Her husband signed away her objections to the Art Institute.

For this we turn to, well, me. Her name was Sarah Daggett and you can find out more about her in #566: The Gray of the Lions.

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4. A mysterious submarine found in the river, maybe.

The Fool Killer. Maybe.

Adam Selzer of Mysterious Chicago has put in a yeoman’s effort on separating truth from lie in the story of the Fool Killer, which was possibly a scam, possibly a hidden submarine complete with dog skeleton. Check out his whole fascinating site.

…

5. The only newspaper to make deadline after the Great Chicago Fire.

A little blurb in an 1888 listing of newspapers I got as a gift once led me to the story of Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News. It’s one of my favorite stories about the Great Fire. A little girl rescued the mailing list from the legal newspaper created by her mother, who was kinda sorta the nation’s first female attorney, oh you know what? Just read #555: Myra Bradwell and the Fireproof Newspaper.

…

6. This obscure library at the Leather Archives and Museum has a flowery name.

The Teri Rose Memorial Library. See what I did with the hint there? Obscure? Like Atlas Obscura? Like this Atlas Obscura listing of Chicago’s secret libraries?

I’m very clever. The “mysterious submarine” was a hint too.

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7. The exciting voice of this person appeared at the Cairo Supper Club in this Egyptomania photo.

Manuel De Silva.

Although it’s not part of the quiz, here’s a review I found of him in a review from Billboard in 1948:

“Manuel De Silva, billed as the “New Voice,” loses little time living up to the cognomen. Handsome youth exhibits an excellent song choice and his lusty-lunged barying nets him the show’s top mitt. Manages striking nuances with a cultured piping of Donkey Serenade and surpasses this effort with smart selling of Sorrento, Temptation and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Had to beg off. Lad looks like a comer and it shouldn’t be long before he’s rated tops in the field.”

It’s on page 48, where you also learn the “Mary Kaye Trio” was originally the “Mary Kaaihue Trio.” They’re from Hawaii.

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8. You can find the records of the Jane Dent Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People at this library.

The Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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9. When the Loop addresses were converted to the new numbering system in 1911, the Hotel Princess at 267 S. Clark St. got this as its new address.

331 S. Clark St. For this you have to use the address conversion guides in the Chicago History Museum, Building and House History section.

Both Curious City and I have done stories on Edward Brennan, the force behind the new numbering system, although only I present a compelling case for why he was history’s greatest monster.

I mean, I was super-sleepy the next day, man.

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10. This Uptown silent movie studio produced both early Sherlock Holmes movies and the world’s first pie in the face.

Essanay. You can find out about the Sherlock Holmes and watch the movie in the room where it was shot in an upcoming joint Atlas Obscura/Mysterious Chicago event. You can find out about the pie from me in story #602: Chicago, the Home of the Pie in the Face.

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11. Three werewolves from this area of the Baltic are killing time waiting for prey in a South Loop statue. One has a book.

Livonia. As in the Livonian Wolves in this Atlas Obscura entry. It’s a creepy myth of Christmastime and the fattest werewolf.

…

12. “Kitchen Klenzer” was advertised for this much in the storefront window in a 1963 photograph of a drugstore at Drexel and 47th.

Two for 21 cents. I mean, seriously, just play around with the Consortium site. You can find just, just anything there.

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13. Researchers found this species of bat living under the boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bonus points for finding out from a particular interactive display on a certain radio station’s website.

I was going for the little brown bat, as mentioned in the Curious City interactive display created by Erik Rodriguez of The Illustrated Press, but a sharp-eyed reader (hi, Joann) found in the accompanying article that all seven locally common species have been found under the boardwalk.

So if you said:

• little brown bat
• big brown bat
• hoary bat
• silver-haired bat
• eastern red bat
• evening bat
• eastern pipistrelle
• or the number seven

you should be good.

Anyway, thanks for taking/please forgive me for this quiz. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get more ‘tussin.

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