Above, there are floors and floors of shopping for brand-name luxury.

Above, there are perfume counters and ornate stone and bronze fountains.

Below the downtown Macy’s (but the locals call it Marshall Field’s) glass meant for light sits in darkness.

Beneath the luxury store, past a bookshop section, a sports bar called Infields and by the glass back areas of the bedding section, there is an entrance to the Pedway, Chicago’s underground walkway system. The Pedway’s a hodgepodge path cobbled together of the different basements and subbasements of various office buildings, malls, government towers and subway systems.

Linked only by a title, the different juts of Pedway vary vastly based on who owns that particular chunk. Different hours, different levels of cleanliness and security.

Different decorations. And in one of the dingier sections of the Pedway, where a few random beggars sometimes amble by and blue walls are spattered along the bottom with something staining white, that’s where the stained glass museum lives.

In that spot below Macy’s, by that bookshop, bedding section and sports bar with a few lonely daytime drinkers, stained walls house a small exhibit of Victorian stained glass. It’s a hidden tidbit for the knowing, and a pleasant surprise for those caught unaware mid-shortcut.

It’s a collaboration between Macy’s and the Chicago Cultural Mile Association, the 22 backlit glass panels are what’s left of a now-dead Navy Pier museum of stained glass. Here they sit where office workers hustle, bums amble and dust collects in lagomorphian heaps far beyond “bunnies.” These are full-on dust rabbits, dust Nuralagus rex.

It smells like urine in the corridor, and I wonder if the white stains are from soap suds sloshing something far nastier from the walls.

The glass is beautiful.

Intricate 1800s fabrications inspired by poems and nature. A farmwoman stands in one, beatific painted face like the Mona Lisa, her dress a crackle of glass bits painstakingly assembled by Belcher & Co., a group of artists as dead as the Nuralagus. Others have curling floral bouquets, nature scenes of lilypads and reeds, Arabesque patterns as bright and geometric as the etchings on a Mosque. They are gorgeous and they are glorious and they are wasted here in a dark corridor.

The lightbulbs behind several had burnt out, keeping with the scene of art ignored. Art meant to crinkle sunlight sits in a basement corridor full of dust rabbits and the scent of urine.

Am I feeling the sadness of the place, or my own? Would on a better, brighter day I see this as a hidden treasure solely for the enjoyment of the knowing?

Or would I still see it as art meant for light kept in darkness, among dust and damp and walls spattered with something white?

The wife, her father and I had agreed upon a suitable location for dinner and then strode further down the basement. Wordlessly, he turned. Wordlessly, we followed him down the basement path.

With the expert nature of a downtown dweller, he led us through revolving doors and past closing government offices. We went by barber shops and dry cleaners, past empty shoeshine stands and stores for chintzy Chicago memorabilia before popping out feet away from the destination we had planned in the city below.

We took the Pedway.

The Pedway is Chicago’s hidden neighborhood, a network of interconnected basements and tunnels that spread beneath the Loop, providing rain-free workwalks for the savvy commuter and retail venues for those looking to capitalize on the captive customer base.

Rather than a unified system, it’s a mishmash maze of different owners, hours and styles. Now you’re walking through a 24-hour, well-lit strip under a mall. Now you’re eyeing corners through a rotting municipal corridor that closes at 7. Now you’re in an office building basement, walls lined with photographs of the over-town. Now you’re outside blinking in the sun unsure how you got there.

It’s like any other neighborhood. There’s a shopping district as the path veers under the Block 37 mall, various dining strips in the food courts by the Metra and the State of Illinois offices. There are transportation hubs as it winds past and through various subway stops and the South Shore Electric. Government services for city, county, state. Courtrooms, Starbuckses and paths between.

You can get a haircut there, shop, bank, work out, turn corridors and hallways and pop up at restaurants or businesses across the downtown. My friend Margaret runs walking tours down there, helping provide the neighborhood a small tourism industry. Check out some art at the Chicago Cultural Center or the small stained glass museum next to the Macy’s, and get a drink at the sports bar next door.

There’s a Skid Row of beggars at that turn underneath the Macy’s. There are corridors where the tunneltops drip and the blind corners take a gambler’s courage. It is a neighborhood down there, with all the good and bad that connotes.

I don’t know how to end this story of feet and commerce skittering beneath our city. I don’t know how to bring to light the feeling of vertigo from realizing we live in a town that, from the tip of Sears to the lowest underground substation and watery sub-sub-sub-tunnels, has height along with its width and depth.

It charms me and it scares me. I’ve made my livelihood in the Loop on and off for 15 years. It was unnerving to be lost downtown, blindly following my father-in-law down twisting paths knowing I’d be an expert 20 feet above.

The Pedway’s a mall, walking path, slum and neighborhood. But it’s also a reminder that, no matter how much you think you know, there’s always a level beneath.

…

Speaking of hidden:

Bozo’s big top is a WGN storage space

Wooden streets

Alleys that aren’t

Chinatown tunnels that probably never existed