While I have no desire to actually write the adventures of Packy and Cracky the Gerrymander Twins, Their Friend TIFany, Layoffo the News Clown and House Speaker Mike Madigan, it is super-late in the day and I have to run to an interview for an actual story about life in modern Chicago.

So with your indulgence and forgiveness I give you Gubernatorial Corruption Charge Limericks. Answers will be posted on the @1001chicago Twitter account at 9 a.m. Friday, Sept. 28. Thank you for making it to 985 stories and may God have mercy on my soul.

…

Easy (recent convictions)

The appointment will drag. Oh, ya rich?
Then let’s see some swag for ya pitch.
I claimed truth as a tenet
But tried to sell off the Senate.
Bleep me, I’m Rod _____.

No one can fault me for tryin’
To keep death-row inmates from fryin’.
A bribe for a license,
Kids then died for my sins.
Off to prison for me, George _____.

Medium (less-recent convictions)

The bribery scam was an earner,
My race riot report a page-turner.
A rep as strong as Ajax’s
Took down by horse taxes.
Just call me poor ol’ Otto _____.

Take me off this list, you trash-talker.
My office was clean as white caulk, sir.
After politics tanks
I go into banks.
Seems you shouldn’t give loans to Dan _____.

Hard (accused but not convicted)

I was the favorite Democrat son
But my repute was ruined, so that’s done.
My crime, so banal,
Took scrip from the canal.
I’ve got a suburb named for me, Joel _____.

Honesty was what I hung my hat on.
Big piles of cash, my safe sat on.
I was not a barbarian.
As an octogenarian,
Who cleaned up state cash? William _____.

I had six months before charges — that’s all.
Hired eight of the jurors that fall.
My defense — oh this stings –
Was the divine right of kings.
The Klan calls me Lennington _____.

The Answers

Marriage, go this way. Birth and death, go this way. He shunts people to lines marked with barricades connected by ribbons made of seatbelt fabric and, when people complain about the $15 fee, reminds them how much worse it could be.

“In Wisconsin, it’s $25,” the man said over his shoulder to the line. “New York? $40.”

Whistles, groans, “hmmm” and “dang” rustled through the crowd as we waited for our turn at the front.

We live in public records. Every move, every mailing address or traffic ticket, every time we stand in front of a state official or rabbi and say we’re never going to split up and every birth, death and divorce is charted, quantified and kept on file for decades to come.

My task was a happy one, but personal. When I was called up as next, I stood next to a phone-flicking woman and a giggling, happy baby who turned unprovoked a moment later into wails and shrieks, as babies do. The new person’s records obtained, the woman made way for a stout, fussy white man in a suit seeking access to the death certificate of his client.

A woman behind the desk typed at breakneck or at least breaknail speeds. She never looked at me, just took my request, information, confirmation, signature, payment, signature and copies with machine efficiency. I could have asked for birth, death, life, marriage and it all would have been the same as the clock clicked on and the line advanced.

What is more life than this? What is more a symbol of our existence than this life under fluorescence in the office of the only local government official running a tight ship? Our loves and births are kept here. Our deaths and new humans.

We’re kept under fluorescent light in the bowels of government buildings. Behind barricades and ribbons we wait in line for a chance to pay $15 for a certified official copy of ourselves.

In honor of Mayor Emanuel, who has provided poetic inspiration before and upon whose missing finger I have waxed philosophic, I offer a farewell in the form most befitting his mayorality: A song listing his potential successors in the style of a 1990s cartoon.

If you are Rahm Emanuel, I wish you and your inevitable consulting agency nothing but the best as we try to fix what you left us. Think of us when you’re smoothing some deal for Ticketmaster, Sterling Bay or Elon Musk’s underground network of rocket cars.

If you’re not Rahm, please watch this video before proceeding or none of this will make sense.

…

The Mayoral Candidates of Chicago

(In the style of Animaniacs)

Willie Wilson’s there of course, John Kozlar’s a dark horse.

One platform I like is Ja’Mal’s.

Raise your voice soon for a vote for Joyce Junior

Has as much chance as one for Dock Walls.

McCarthy’s cop scene would sure sew up Mount Greenwood.

Brown’s a pro and might be a con.

One story might put fame on Lori Lightfoot.

Vallas’ platform’s just “not being Rahm.”

There’s Daley and Roney, Kelly and Enyia, LaRaviere and Neal Sáles-Griffin.

Those are just those who officially see a campaign but here’s who might, if’n:

So don’t he or do he, Luis asks of Chuy.

A bid we might not see, or yet he

Might decide to plunk in — so could Arne Duncan.

And what’s up with Bob Fioretti?

It wouldn’t quite stun me if Thomas Tunney,

The alderman for Wrigleyville,

Pulled a Preckwinkle and threw a new wrinkle

In the race, just like Quigley will.

There’s Chico and Boykin, Pappas and Mendoza, Pawar, Summers and LaShawn Ford,

Lopez and Hairston — heaven sure knows ya are already getting quite bored.

In terms of fiction, there’s some Twitter friction

I might want to add to this verse.

I’ll give joke campaigns a pass, like that of John Kass,

Because they actually couldn’t do worse.

I really just can’t with Chicago Party Aunt,

Whose one joke is [sex] [celeb] [dead bar],

But I would keep an eye on Art Institute Lion.

I think NORTH has a chance to head far.

And now we will see that it’s for you and me to keep tabs on every new player.

So follow the media (or just Wikipedia) and find out who wants to be mayor!

Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.

It was found carved on a small hunk of stone in 1889. It wasn’t translated until 1951, when a researcher poking around the Istanbul Museum looking for his next project opened a drawer and picked it out at random from the other pieces.

It’s believed to be the world’s oldest surviving love poem.

This is what happens when you toss sodium in a lake.

This is a clamshell found in Indonesia. It’s been dated at between 540,000 and 430,000 years old, which is about when someone carved those zigzags into the side of it.

The carver wasn’t human, at least not Homo sapiens like us. If the intent was what hopeful researchers believe, the zigzags were decorations created by a Homo erectus, making the shell one of the contenders for the oldest piece of art we know about.

This is a species of comb jellies called “sea walnuts.” These two are babies.

This is Chiune Sugihara. A Japanese official working in Lithuania under the Axis, he secretly issued travel visas so Jews could escape through Japanese territory. He spent 18-20 hours a day writing them out by hand, producing a month’s worth of visas every day.

As the consulate was closing, he was forced to leave Lithuania. On the ride to the station and from his compartment, he was still writing visas, throwing them to the crowd. At the station, he said to the crowd “Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore.” He wished them the best, then bowed.

As the train pulled away from Kaunas, he kept flinging blank paper with his signature and the consular seal out the window in hopes Jews would find them and forge visas.

He issued as many as 6,000 visas. As many of which allowed heads of households to take their families with them, we’ll never know how many lives he saved.

And finally, there’s a hexagon on Saturn. Like a cloud pattern that naturally formed into a hexagon. The storm’s been going since at least 1981. Between 2012 and 2016, the color changed from blue to gold.

This is Donald Trump. He’s a shitbag.

My blog has become more political lately, less about the people and places of Chicago, Illinois. Part of it’s the national heartbreak we’ve lived in since gamesmanship took the nation and the loser by three million took the throne.

There are still hundreds of stolen children imprisoned through our tax dollars. Teachers still have to train students in reading, writing and active shooter drills. We’re poisoning our soil and killing our air and seas in the name of jobs that simply are never coming back.

Our liar king just denied the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans. I’m sure in a few months I’ll look back on this story having forgotten that happened, future me incensed by what worse he’s done since then.

The other part of my political bent is a life that’s become busy and joyful, leaving little time for the 21 stories I have left to tell. Hellos to strangers, hidden clown art and odd spots to eat lobster become harder to manage when my personal world has gotten deeper.

But this is my reminder to you that we live in a universe of hexagons and heroes, of Istanbul 2461 and Chicago 2018. And this little man, so weak in spirit, so infantile in anger will be forgotten.

This is the farthest into the stars humans have yet looked.

This is a small man who will be a trivia question on future quiz nights, a space-filler on the back of the commemorative rulers they will sell at the presidential museums of greater men and women. He’ll hurt many before he slinks off, forgotten. But he will be forgotten, and our world of poems, stars and sea walnuts will live on.

Read about those shooter drills

Read about the upsurge in racism down my street

Read about the Cubs’ ties to the president

And now, the theater kids

What does it mean when you remember someone as young? How young? Younger than me? Younger than the composite age of my aggregate readership? Younger than my prejudices of someone too damn fool to listen to good music and respect their my-aged elders?

Sometimes, it’s easy to describe someone as young. Brian was young, too young to need the quad cane at least.

He looked about late 20s, early 30s, but the cane screamed older. It was one of those four-footed medical deals, the transitional step for grandfathers between limping and a walker. But Brian wore it well.

He needed it clearly as he hobbled across LaSalle downtown on a bright, sunny weekday when the employed scuttled toward destination and deadline.

Brian had nowhere to go.

He wore a Cubs hat and long black hair in a messy ponytail. His gait was looped and pained. His attitude beatific and open. He looked at me and smiled when we stopped at a light.

“I like your…”

Here he pointed at his temple, an indicator both that he liked my sideburns and had momentarily lost recall of the word “sideburns.”

I smiled and thanked him in that loud, broad way people use when they want to advertise to the world how open and kind they are. We walked across the street together, traded names and chat. I mentioned a few people who find my ridiculous ’70s muttonchops ridiculous and ’70s. He scoffed.

“You’ve got to live your…”

He lost recall of the words “own life,” but I knew what he meant. I walked to work with a smile on my face.

A few days later, I was heading home, the other end of the workday scuttle. No broad open smiles or beatific air, just frustrated, annoyed commuters smelling of sandwiches and sweat. As tired, annoyed and reeking of that day’s lunch as the rest of the train, I hopped off at my stop and hobbled home.

Steps from my door, a little girl and her mother walked by hand in hand. The little girl saw me and my bright blue plastic sunglasses. Her eyes and smile grew wide.

“I like your sunglasses!” she said, pointing to her temple to show me where the glasses would sit.

“Thank you!” I said in that overly loud sing-song adults use when talking to strange children.

I was 10 steps from my front door. I passed those steps with a smile.

It’s obvious why we don’t do this: It’s creepy as hell from anyone but an evident innocent. There’s a reason the train is full of people wearing earbuds that aren’t playing music. Unlike Brian, my words to a passerby would come off as condescending more than appreciative. Unlike the little girl, if I had paid compliment to a stranger of the opposite gender it would come off as more lech than charming.

But there are those who cast that open air, who simply feel like honesty. When those who can say something nice do, it adds a spot of light to finish the story.

Only the thinnest runners go for their lunch-break jogs in a light rain. Only the smokers with the biggest nic fits or the business types with the most important coffee meets head outside when the rain is cold and inelegant. Only the hardiest tourists who, damn it, only have one week in Chicago so we very much ARE going to drink craft beer under an umbrella along this “River Walk” thank you very kindly make good on their plans.

Only the homeless with the most hungered, crazed or hunger-crazed looks in their eyes ply their trade, exchanging piteous looks for loose change.

The streets are lined with loaner umbrellas advertising local hotels, and with the picket-line protest signs of the hotel workers from those same spots.

The laugh of adventurous paddle-boat riders peals and peels off the river. A Germanic-sounding man asks me how long it would take to walk from downtown to Chinatown while his unamused wife looks on. And there you are, dropping a fishing line in the water from the walking path under the State Street Bridge.

You’re tall and broad, handsome and well-dressed. Your windbreaker looks brand-name, as does your rod. I don’t catch a name on the plastic orange drum-bucket bucket holding tackle and, maybe soon, fish.

I ask about your catch as the rain hits steel above. You smile and say you just got here.

You come here “often,” you say as one or two of the thinnest of joggers in rain-slicked Lycra walk past. You answer all questions posed by a business-dressed white guy, even as you look toward dead water, anxious to get back to your task.

“Perch and catfish,” you say.

“I usually toss them back,” you say.

“No, but my grandma does,” you say.

I’m getting nowhere, and my story would be ruined by taking you too far from your goal. The story isn’t someone talking to me as I amble past in business dress.

The story is a man under a city bridge, culled from the crowd by light rain and commitment, spending a gray, wet, first-kiss afternoon doing what he loves.

A month ago, I was looking through an online collection of circus memorabilia, as one does, and I came across a sentence that smacked me in the face.

“Immediate below the poster is Panel G enclosing seven old handbills, some of which came from the ‘Sewer’, a basement rendezvous in Chicago for people of the stage, circus, ring, and entertainment world, from which Harry Hertzberg secured many interest items for his collection of show paper,” it read.

So there was a basement rendezvous (Bar? Speakeasy? Flophouse? Private club?) in Chicago called The Sewer filled with circus performers. Oh, I had to find out.

I reached out to the Hertzberg Circus Collection, now housed at the San Antonio-based Witte Museum of Texas history and prehistory, to find out more about this magical place that seemed to tick off my interests one by one (clowns, Chicago history, old-timey bars, things hidden underground), and I discovered…

Nothing. The collection curator was out on separate vacations both times I called. I have a Hail Mary email out there, so we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I reached out to other places, like the Ringling Circus Museum.

And the Illinois State University Milner Library Circus & Allied Arts Collection and Circus World’s Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center and the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Center’s W. H. Crain Barnum & Bailey and Joe E. Ward circus collections and Fédération Mondiale du Cirque Preserving Circus Culture and Promoting the Art of Happiness Under the patronage of H.S.H. Princess Stephanie of Monaco and online I searched the Chicago Collections Consortium and the Newberry’s inventory of the American Circus Collection and WorldCat and HathiTrust and Archive.org and Google Books’ collection of old Billboard magazines and I tried but kept getting dead links at the Chicago History Museum’s ARCHIE system and no matter what I did or where I went, I could find hide nor hair nor squeaky red nose of any basement bar frequented by clowns, lion-tamers and Pyro Sam the Human Ostrich.

“Regretfully we do not have anything in our collections relative to ‘the sewer’ and in fact prior to your email had never heard of it before. I conducted a review of our databases, and of our primary research files and regretfully could not turn up anything that touched on this. It does indeed sound like a fascinating topic and I wish you the best of luck with your research project,” wrote one circus archivist, summing up the general consensus among the circus researchers who did get back to me.

And that, my friends, is Chicago’s sewer clown problem.

No matter how many collections or resources across the globe are devoted to the art of circus, from your Kulturhistorische Gesellschaft fur Circus und Varietekunst E.V. to your Colección del Circo Josep Vinyas to your Mundijong Clown & Circus Museum in the Whitby Falls Coach House, something is going to fall through the cracks. Although even as I compile this list, there’s a part of me wondering if I should shoot an email to the Central Cultural Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, or the Showmen’s League of America offices in the West Loop, in general I have resigned myself to a life not knowing where, what or what took place at a basement dive called The Sewer where the circus people hung.

History unmaintained vanishes. The default mode is that the handbills yellow, the jokes get forgotten, the big top molders and the source documents develop dry rot. If people don’t protect, preserve and archive this history, it’s lost. Forever.

Old photos never die, they just fade.

Maybe my Hail Mary email will return dividends from Texas and I’ll come back next week with a probing historical look at The Sewer where Chicago’s clowns and acrobats let down their guard, hair and sequins for a night.

Or maybe I’ll get another apologetic shrug from an academic who lives in history, so knows how fragile it is.

But in the meantime, my thoughts for today’s Afternoon is that I’m glad so many people want to preserve the past, but I wonder what we already lost.

…

UPDATE: It took the Chicago Aussie Jack Brandtman all of a half hour to find this 1916 reference to The Sewer in the New York Clipper entertainment magazine:

Insane levels of gratitude and respect to Jack for the find.

Read about a Theater Oobleck’s modern circus show

And a Chicago-based circus for nerds

I did not make up “Pyro Sam the Human Ostrich”

And holy crud are there a lot of circus museums, libraries, archives and collections around the world

It wasn’t a typo in the first sentence

They have biker and shave-culture memorabilia on the walls and stacks of Hells Angels zines next to vintage ’70s Playboys. They have a “pint club” where you can pay $20 for a year of free beer, plus smiling, tattooed men who take as much time as it takes to make sure you’re perfectly happy.

No appointments, cash only. When you walk in, you sign your name on a chalkboard and they call you in turn.

This is how we get haircuts in 21st century America. And I wonder if the smiling man with the thick blonde ponytail, the man calling my name and brushing off my chair, knows we live in the city that shaped how the nation cuts hair.

In 1893, A.B. Moler opened the nation’s first barber college along Wabash Avenue in downtown Chicago. The first of what would be a franchised chain of barber schools across the nation, the Moler system was how we think of barber training today, and how the ponytailed man spreading an apron over me made the shift from operations management for supply-chain companies to barbering. Short-term, for-profit trade schools with students practicing on volunteer heads seeking free or cheap cuts.

Prior to Moler and his fast-growing chain of barber colleges, becoming a barber meant working an apprenticeship. Now instead of a five-year term sweeping hair, shining shoes and hauling garbage, potential hair-shorteners were trained up in two months on everything from scissor anatomy to human anatomy, with (eventually) tips on basic chemistry and contracting pores with galvanic current.

When that first school opened, two things were happening: the economy was tanking and barbers were trying to improve their lot.

When they weren’t surgeons, barbering was considered a servant trade — think “Barber of Seville” or “Marriage of Figaro.” Haircut? You had a guy for that. And in the U.S., that often meant a slave. Freed slaves would often carry these skills and their willingness to do work wealthy white people deemed low-class into their own shops. Soon immigration played, and between 1850 and 1860, immigrant-owned shops (mostly owned by Germans) surpassed the number of black-owned shops. But they failed to win over wealthy whites, instead scraping by working long hours churning out shaves and haircuts for far less than two bits.

In 1861 (and yes, this is relevant), The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies unified, making what we call Italy. And oh man, things got bad. Italians — many of whom already knew barbering — flooded to America starting in the 1880s, willing to work for cheaper rates, for longer hours, in worse conditions than the Germans.

In the 1870s, Barbers’ Protective Unions started popping up in cities across the nation. In 1887, a group of these small unions, which had been affiliated under the Knights of Labor, formed a nationwide barbers’ union, the Journeymen Barbers’ International Union of America. A year later the JBIUA affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. It boomed from 50 members in 1888 to 1,300 in 1891 to 11,600 in 1901. They sought better standards and better wages, and some later members would speak longingly of a national standard price for haircuts.

1893 brought both a national depression called the Panic of 1893 and the nation’s first barber’s college. At 435 Wabash (312 S. Wabash, roughly that big ugly red CNA building, under the modern street plan), A.B. Moler promised to teach a trade in months at a time when people couldn’t afford to take long apprenticeships.

In short, Moler offered a cheap crash course in haircuts, flooding the market with semi-qualified snippers at a time when the industry was looking to professionalize and unionize.

“Cincinnati is flooded with cheap shops, cheap prices and long hours,” wrote a 1915 letter to Journeyman Barber magazine. “This evil will never be eliminated until there is some definite action taken against the Moler Barber College and all its branches.”

“As soon as matters are settled in our new office at Cleveland, Ohio, we will lay before the Postmaster General all matters connected with the Moler system of Barber schools and will seek to have them denied the use of the mails for what we consider is nothing more nor less than a ‘bunco game,’” read an 1899 letter to The Barbers’ Journal magazine.

“Brother Anton made a few remarks about the Moler barber graduates and the way they hustle for Connecticut as soon as they get their diploma. These graduates do not have to pay any license fee in Connecticut until they have been in the State three years, and as a good barber from outside does not care to put up $5.00 when he can get just as good a job for nothing, the Moler graduate jumps in and gets a job — pretty soft for him,” Journeyman Barber, 1912.

“The profit of this excursion will be devoted to fight the Montreal barber school, a branch of the Moler barber school…” from 1905.

A barber battle brewed. On one end, the barber unions who saw theirs as a skilled trade and heritage to protect. On the other, a growing chain of chop shops churning out barbers who needed to get out there and make a living through the scissors as soon as possible. It’s the same argument over for-profit colleges today, from the shadiest Trump U. to Phoenix, DeVry or The Art Institutes (absolutely not the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but they really love when people confuse them). Are they providing low-income people access to a trade when the traditional route is too expensive, or are they scams taking poor people’s money and shoving them a diploma saying, “Yeah, kid, sure. You’re a barber (or designer or IT professional) now”?

The solution for barbering became licensing. Here too, Chicago was at the fore, with a JBIUA union rep so incensed by the “schemed system” that made students “believe that a six or eight week course would sufficiently fit him for a first-class position, or make him a practical and competent boss barber” that he decided to do something about it.

“In 1896 I visited the big school in Chicago to investigate their system — or lack of system — and I found it even worse than I had anticipated,” the rep wrote. “I then wrote an article for our Journal, describing the school and advocating laws to provide for examination and licensing of barbers. That was the beginning of the agitation for license laws.”

The unions fought hard to get states to make barbering a licensed, regulated profession, and A.B. Moler fought back, lobbying against licensing bills across the nation.

“The details of the fight would make too long a story to attempt to give in these columns, so I will simply say that the opposition came from Mr. Moler of barber school fame and A.W. Stark of Milwaukee, and though I despise these human parasites as I do a reptile, still I must credit them with conducting a shrewd campaign and striking at the right time and place,” ran one account of the behind-the-scenes battle at the Wisconsin state Senate.

Minnesota became the first state to regulate barbers in 1897. Other states followed suit and Moler lost other battles, although he managed to get on board with licensing and, by the 1920s, make it sound like he had been on board the entire time. (My guess is the chance to chart national standards that kept students paying for two years instead of two months helped change his mind, but I’m a romantic.)

The ponytailed barber and I talked about regulation, about how the shop with the rock ‘n’ roll overhead and Hells Angels on the walls is a place you can get a proper, official, Illinois-licensed shave (although no one would notice if a shop did unlicensed shaves, as he said there are only two swamped regulators watchdogging every barbershop and salon in the state). We chatted about the barber school that let him shift careers to find the one he truly loved. We chatted about license applications and fees and about how much it would cost to join the “pint club,” which I’m totally going to do, incidentally. Going to a real barbershop rather than a Hair Cuttery, Great Clips or other cheap churn chain is one of my affectations, one I don’t plan to lose.

But I didn’t know then I lived in the city that made it happen how it did, and wherever I go to get my ears lowered, Chicago shaped how it’s done.

Read about a Canaryville shop where Joe’s been cutting hair since the ’40s

Or the barbershop conversation about Chicago Man

Why I write about haircuts

Another affectation of mine

And Chicago’s equally weird creation of the ray gun

Around me, children ran and squealed.

“Most consumers are either hiding at home or toiling beneath the cruel yoke of their new alien overlords,” the video continued. “This has brought the economy to a virtual standstill, despite many stores aggressively slashing prices to bring in customers. While the invaders have assured world leaders that they will soon be leaving, lenders are reluctant to issue loans to business customers, whose profits keep dropping.”

The world is in crisis. There is life beyond the stars and it is malevolent. The fate of the planet is in one set of hands — mine. Now do I raise, lower or retain current interest rates?

Welcome to the Money Museum.

Set in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago along the LaSalle Street financial district where seven years ago the 99 percent chanted and squealed and Occupied, there is and was a children’s museum dedicated to the dollar. It’s free to enter, if the armed guard approves your ID and you get through the metal detector — precautions, I guess, against someone trying to pocket the giant acrylic glass cube of one million $1 bills.

From there, you enter a Wonkaverse of cash.

There are interactive games to play of spotting counterfeit currency, of deciding whether a bill’s too worn to stay in circulation or of learning trivia details on the sundry eagles, politicians and eyeball pyramids on our cash from the $1 to the $100,000 ($500, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 and $100,000 bills do exist, but were taken out of circulation in the ’60s. The $100,000 bill, which featured Woodrow Wilson, was only used to transfer money between Federal Reserve Banks and cannot be legally owned by collectors.)

Kids get to put their faces into the $2 or $100 bills, either through interactive display or by sticking their heads through a large cutout and having mom snap a shot. They can tinker with inflation to see how little a million bucks will be in a few years.

Another interactive exhibit runs you, the newly appointed Fed chairman, through such scenarios as alien invasions, colonies on Mars, the retirement age made mandatory at 35 and pop smash hit “I Ain’t Got Time for Cupcakes” turning the nation’s youths against the foodstuff, devastating the American cupcake industry in the process. In each case, you must decide whether to raise, lower or maintain interest rates.

There was history of course — a few displays on the birth of the Fed, some Hamilton-specific ones dappled with quotes from the musical — but the most eye-catching display had little if anything to do with cash. It was a ceiling-high Rube Goldberg device of colored balls running, bouncing, clinking, jostling and otherwise being shunted through a 3D maze of tubes, trails and xylophone keys. There were some attempts to make the Goldberg about the economy, but even if you color-code the box the balls were pulled from blue for the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing and have a little gobbling bank man at the other end of the path, the only lesson this particular exhibit taught is that brightly colored bouncing balls are fun.

And throughout the museum, free bags of cash as souvenir.

Yes, the cash was former U.S. bills deemed too torn, worn, graffito-tagged or otherwise mucked up to head anywhere but a Federal Reserve Bank shredding machine, but the approximately $364 of mulchy “Fed Shreds” I’m gazing at as I type these lines make a fine memento.

I came to shred the Money Museum with the joy and anger I felt across the street the few times I chanted and squealed and Occupied, but I ended up falling in love with the place. Its lessons for kids were about saving and fiscal responsibility, about how economic policy should be a more nuanced beast than “One Size Fits Wealthy.” The handouts at the end included a kids’ pledge to save X amount in a piggy bank each month and the most-recent AgLetter from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Public Information Center giving adults a rundown of recent economic indicators for the agricultural sector.

A tie-wearing hog named “Piggy Banker” led the savings pledge. In the ag sector, repayment rates for non-real-estate farm loans were lower in the second quarter of 2018 compared with the second quarter of 2017, marking the 19th consecutive quarter of deteriorating repayment rates relative to a year ago.

We live in a world of money. To pretend we don’t is to do the running, scampering, Mom-Mom-Mom-Mom-MOMMMMMM-ing kids skittering among cash a disservice. We can’t let them grow up thinking the world is just art, science and ballerina-princesses.

I hope what little information retained from a visit to one small museum on one small Tuesday somehow helps them to be smarter, to save and not take gambles with others’ cash. I hope they’ll learn to be frugal and kind so we never have to Occupy across the way, because that did not help. The people who know nothing but gamble everything still won.

As for the alien invaders vs. the Federal Reserve Bank?

“The committee agrees that lowering interest rates is the best chance to get the human resistance back on its feet.”

One of the scenes that told me Occupy was nonsense

And another one

A South Side bluesman’s museum to himself

A museum dedicated to the Pullman porter

Sometimes they’re dirty.

Sometimes they’re actually streets and once in a while they’re made of wood.

But I sing the alley electric.

Chicago came not to praise the alley, but to bury it. In garbage, in recycling dumpsters idiots keep putting plastic bags in, in rat patrol signs and plastic rat traps that appear to be Raid Hotels for the Templetons, Remys, Rizzos, ROUSes and NIMHbys of The Windy Second City On The Make, and, yes, a spot of pee when you’re coming back from the bars and home is just a liiiiiiitle too far away.

Chicago has 1,900 miles of alley, the city tells. For comparison, there are 4,000 miles of streets. If my math’s right, that means for every mile of street there’s 2,508 feet of alley. For every foot of road, there’s 5.7 inches of dumpster and rat trap.

We are the alley capital of America, sayeth a 2015 Curious City I would love to summarize here but even if you add a bunch of dumb jokes to someone else’s story it’s still plagiarism in my book I’m talking to you Jezebel and Gizmodo and that whole crowd.

But I praise the alley not for facts or figures but because the kids down the block had their dad spray paint a pentagonal home plate for Wiffle ball. I praise it because of the basketball hoops on odd garages and the old man down my block who spends weekends with the garage door open, tippling light beer and tinkering lovingly with his classic car.

I praise the alley for every hidden place it reveals, and for keeping our streets from being lined with garbage. I praise it because, dang it, that is in all cases the fastest walking route and at least the most interesting on bike.

A man was stabbed to death in the alley across from my office. He tried to take that shorter, faster route late at night and his family will pay for that forever. A secondary road map designed to hide all that’s ugly will catch ugly things. Rats crawl in alleys. The homeless die there. The same dark corners that preserve old painted signs and graffiti that glimmers with shine and promise can hide other things as well.

But people die in the streets too. And blaming an action on a feature of infrastructure incorporated into the city’s DNA since I&M canal commission hiree James Thompson platted an alley behind every not-yet-Chicago road in 1830 (OK, I’ll summarize the Curious City a bit) is a spurious bit of puff. Blaming a murder on an alley would be like blaming my neighbor kids’ love of Wiffle on the structure. An alley is a place both are made easier, but not the cause of either.

So I praise the alley and watch for the dark corners. I avoid the neighborhood pee and the downtown cigarette butts flicked from lips of office drones. I cut through on bike and foot and watch rats skitter by, knowing their equally diseased cousin the pigeon prowls the open air of more public avenues.

I like alleys because they feel like secrets and like the other half of what we are. The streets are what we try to be when we want to feel pretty. The alleys are who we are when we’re at home.

Read about a cabbie’s lies

Read about a Beverly bookshop

And about the time I found “The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book” in the alley behind my apartment building

Remember Templeton? “Charlotte’s Web”?