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.

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