Nor is it necessarily charbroiled, parboiled, batter-dipped, smashed, skillet-fried, filleted, sous vide’d, sautéed, shwenkered, spatchcocked if such a thing can be done with ground meat, griddled up, braised or poached in a light crème sauce.

The perfect hamburger is, however, served by a woman whose phone rings while you’re talking.

This particular woman was gorgeous and sexualized to the point of caricature, but that’s not needed either. She was nice, though, which is. In prep for the night’s tips from the drunk and rapacious, she spent her late mornings in cleavage-pushing belly shirt and paint-tight Capris with a trickle of rhinestones up each side.

“That was my mother,” she said, returning for more tales of my one-month-old. “This technology! You’re in one country, someone is in other country, you can talk to them!”

“What country is your mother in?” I asked, perfect hamburger dripping onto my plate.

“Moldova,” she responded, fielding a question about time differences before walking off to finish her lunch and marry ketchups.

The downtown bar’s a holdout. That’s the term, I guess, for any place in River North not crisp with mirrored glass and 9- to 99-story elevators.

It’s a bar not dappled to impress, but to give rich and poor downtowners alike a burger, coffee and fries during the day, then get them drunk as hell at 5:00:01. Different sports were on the TVs that covered every surface not spackled with liquor merch the bar got for free or old photos, clippings and other yellowing ‘80s memories.

My perfect hamburger was on a bun with tomato, lettuce and chopped white onions they added without me asking for them, which was nice but not necessary for the perfect hamburger.

It’s also nice but not necessary for the perfect hamburger that it’s consumed near a man complaining about his bookie.

“My problem is I get in too early,” a pasty butterball in a Sox cap — me in 10 years if I don’t stop eating hamburgers for lunch — said to the bar manager while pointing at a Sun-Times sports page. “Like Saturday, when I went four for four — I told you I went four for four? — I should have called and canceled everything for Sunday. I would have been up 400 bucks.”

Next to him on the bar was a similarly large man with a similar-looking paper having a similar-sounding conversation in Spanish with the line cook.

As the man in the Sox cap talked, the manager, a short middle-aged man with a tucked-in plaid short sleeve and thinning slicked hair, got up and wandered to the window. A clapping, screaming, hooting, sign-wielding protest mob materialized on the corner. They were part of the hotel workers’ strike that’s been sloganing up downtown for the last few weeks.

The woman shuddered behind the bar, not the shudder of someone who disagrees with their cause, but the shudder of someone who has, through no fault of her own, worked long shifts in earshot as they yelled the same chants for hours at the hotel kittycorner to the bar.

“I don’t know why they’re walking around,” she said of the strike’s move from protest to parade.

My perfect hamburger was good, although the perfect hamburger need not be good to be perfect.

The perfect hamburger’s not grilled, broiled, spatchcocked or even meat between two bun-halves. The perfect hamburger’s not a hamburger, but a time place moment combination of Sox caps, bookies and rhinestoned booty pants that will never happen again anywhere.

This was good, but that didn’t matter. It was perfect.

Meet River North’s friendly neighborhood porn shop

And where you can find some sweet clown artifacts nearby

And an Australian at a bar miles away, who tries to impress alone

“I just liked the antique aspect of the sewing machine. One day I’ll have it oiled and fixed.”

“I remember when my mother first originally gave me this plane. The look of excitement and glee she had on her face was unexplainable.”

A metal airplane decoration. A Pyrex dish. A grandmother’s sewing machine and the “misty, moist memories” from a hose used in a project’s garden. This is the story of public housing.

For the story’s what, when, where: “History Lessons: Everyday Objects from Chicago Public Housing” is a temporary exhibit designed to perk up interest in the impending National Public Housing Museum, set to open in 2019. The free exhibit will run through July 30 along one wall of a shared arts space at 625 N. Kingsbury.

The final museum won’t be there, but in the last surviving building from the early public housing projects called the Jane Addams Homes.

The teaser exhibit “History Lessons” is about 15-20 minutes of diversion if you’re quick and joyless, but lingers on internally more than any collections of odds, ends and old junk by rights should.

“The driver and I got a reputation. We could strap and band and bundle and deliver 25,000 brights a day to all the buildings,” one caption over an old set of bricklaying tools read. “We did that for a year and a half until they got the Stateway Gardens built. Now it’s gone. I thought we did a beautiful job. In fact, I thought all those projects were well built.”

“With the Raiders she didn’t have to be on or be a leader. Here she could just be Marion,” read the caption for housing activist Marion Nzinga Stamps’ motorcycle jacket. “She was usually so domineering. Here she was just a woman–with a bunch of alpha males. They would buy her drinks and cater to her. This allowed her to be a femme fatale.”

“There is something about wearing a hat that demands respect,” read the caption for a section of wall exploding with ladies’ church hats.

As I walked through the tiny collection, alone but for the keyboard tapping of employees of the four nonprofits that share the arts space, it kept hitting me that this was just… stuff. These were boring, everyday, household things. Pyrex dishes and old tools. Toy planes and biker jackets.

The stories they told — collected “in workshops led by Audrey Petty and Nate Marshall, and as told to Richard Cahan” — are what gave these dishes and jackets life, what made this collection an exhibit.

If this is the exhibit, I can’t wait to see the museum.

Read stories from more small, weird Chicago museums:

• The Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture
• The National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial
• The Chicago Maritime Museum
• The American Indian Center
• The Perry Mansion Cultural Center
• The Swedish American Museum

It was me and two other fledglings covering it, a man and a woman. I remember them as kids and I was a kid at the time, so they must have been absolute infants. They stumbled politely over questions, careful not to offend since they had to see, work with and get access from these people day after day, week after week. They pussyfooted over questions, but I could say something they couldn’t.

“Paul Dailing, Chicago Tribune,” I said. Everyone turned to watch me ask the question everyone had been dancing around.

And that’s it. That’s as close as I got.

Today’s the Chicago Tribune’s last day at its beautiful gothic-inspired horrorshow by the banks of the Chicago River. Orange crates have been packed, tears have been shed, reporters working there got a night among the stars with a party and some domestic wine sipped amid the building’s crown.

I know that because I’ve seen the pictures they’re posting online. I never got there.

I was a stringer for the Trib before I got my first full-time job with a newspaper. “Stringer” is an ongoing freelancer relationship. I was given a beat — a few small suburbs too inconsequential to staff but too large to ignore — and paid a two-figure income per government board meeting I covered. I spent more on gas and lost time at work than I made per story but goddamn it I was working for the Chicago Tribune.

I figured I’d get to the beautiful freakshow downtown eventually. If I worked my ass off and Journo-Santa saw I’d been a good boy, I’d get to the riverside explosion of fake flying buttresses that buttressed nothing, carved heraldry that never signified a clan and the other faux-gothic, faux-European, faux-fancy pomp of 435 N. Michigan Ave.

But I was wrong. I’ll never get to work there. They sold Trib Tower to developers, who plan to turn the 93-year-old building into condos and offices. The lobby carved with the First Amendment and laudatory quotes about the power and primacy of the press will be where some millionaire picks up her mail, some tech startup CEO poses for selfies or a Trib Tower Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream employee pauses for a mote of inspiration mid-lunch break.

Today’s the journalists’ last day in the temple of journalism, and they’re mourning it better than I could. Blair Kamin made me sigh. Rex Huppke made me laugh. The Trib Editorial Board managed to be self-serving about it, which is fitting. Mary Schmich was poetic about it, which is also fitting. John Kass managed to be self-serving, name-dropping, self-aggrandizing and get in a couple swipes at liberals and Barack Obama about it, which is also fitting but doesn’t earn a link because screw that professional angry grandpa.

So the Trib’s mourning what the move means for the Trib, which is right and proper. I have nothing to add. This brief post is about what the move means for all of us who never made it through those doors.

The Trib was and remains problematic. Its leadership is reactionary and retrograde, but its staff turns out moments of beauty and brilliance, even if every exposé or photo gallery is inevitable grist for the Ed Board’s mill for right-wing talking points. But it has a power, scope and majesty that still inspires.

It inspires the pixel-stained wretches to keep stringing, keep slogging away at little dailies-turning-weeklies, to keep honing that story and to rewrite rewrite rewrite until, Journo-God be praised, our words add a dash of poetry. Our photos convey emotion with a tad more clarity. Our editing gets tighter. We work and work until we get better in part because, yes, we want to walk through those doors on Michigan someday.

Space is important, both in what it is and what it connotes. Trib Tower casts a message to the skies about what journalism means. It says journalism is powerful. It says we are majestic. You should respect us. You should fear us.

An office space in an office building, even a nice one, says we are interchangeable. It says the only industry to get a name-check in the First Amendment might as well be a data center, or a law firm, or the corporate offices for a fast-casual dining franchise.

Data centers, law firms and fast-casual dining for the family on a budget are noble pursuits, as good as any other office-dwelling trade. And I don’t begrudge the world for rolling eyes at the castles news barons past built for themselves. Fake buttresses and faux-heraldry are overwrought egotism.

But I do mind when the news industry itself says we don’t deserve beautiful places. It’s telling all those fledgling kids starting out the best they can hope for is making cash for some owners who consider condos a far better use of beauty. It says get as good as you want to, but you’ll be in the same cubicle in the same office block no matter what.

I went to the Trib today, sat outside and watched tourists take photos of the castle. I don’t think they knew it was the site’s last day as a beacon for journalists across the Midwest, a bit of hope that there was an up to go to.

I watched tourist, tower and waving flag from across the street. That’s as close as I got.

Buy your tickets now at Dabble.co.

The corruption tour, for those of you who don’t know, is my yearly wander through downtown Chicago taking tourists through the spots where corruption happened in the city.

Bribes, shady land deals, kickbacks, bad-faith contracts, systemic racism and just plain being a jerk in office have done more damage to this city than any Valentine’s Massacre or thrill-killing U of C grads, so why let the Capone tours have all the fun? I lure the punters in with promises of Blago wackiness and leave ‘em with a hefty dose of civics. It’s fun.

Each year, the tour gives half the tips to a local nonprofit journalism group. In part it’s a way to give back to this city, in part it’s to allay my guilt at making a personal profit off Chicago’s legacy of corruption, in part it’s a way to casually mention I do accept tips.

The first year, the money went to City Bureau. Please donate to them.

The second year, ProPublica Illinois. Please donate to them too.

This year the money will go to The TRiiBE, helping them provide a voice for and change the narrative of black Chicago. Donate to them, donate to them, donate to them and save some money for Injustice Watch, which I’m planning on giving the share of 2019 tour gratuities to.

I like The TRiiBE because they’re writing stories no one else is, and giving a community historically underrepresented in Chicago journalism its own voice and platform. But I’m not the best person to talk about the work they do. They are.

So hopefully, you’ll join me and wander among the exhibits that make up the museum of corruption we call Chicago. I’ll keep a spot for you.

It’s a little bit of rubble picked up off the ground, unwanted by all but me. I saved some handyman the trouble of sweeping it into the trash. It’s an ugly bit of rock, an inch and a half of concrete with some real stone running through. Jagged and broken on one side, it’s still in the perfect shape of a corner on the other three.

It’s sitting on a bookshelf in my apartment now, next to two ocarinas, a framed autograph of 1982 Nobel laureate Bengst Samuelsson and a similar hunk of the old Chicago Sun-Times building. That one I got because I worked for a riverboat company that used to pump out its sewage into the Sun-Times press room line. While they were demolishing their old brick of a building along the river to make way for Trump Tower, I hopped inside one day and grabbed a piece.

Now I have a piece of the Tribune in honor of its demise.

In June, the Chicago Tribune newspaper will set up shop in One Prudential Plaza, abandoning its home of 93 years, the self-declared “most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.” That’s going to become condos so millionaires and billionaires can buy themselves a slice of authenticity to change their socks in.

I have no illusions about the paper. It’s Republican-leaning even to this day. Much of the news is aimed at the suburbs. Its editorial board is reactionary and cowardly. It employs amazing journalists and then gives higher platforms and paychecks to Kass, McQueary and anyone else willing to hit the two notes of “people leaving Illinois” and “Democrats’ fault” over and over again like the world’s most tedious ocarina solo. It’s called “tronc.”

But it does beautiful work, when the ed board lets it. They exposed the unfair property tax assessment system that punishes people of color, and are up for a Pulitzer for their troubles. One of my favorite pieces of Chicago journalism over the last few years was an amazing photo essay following a child who had been shot, humanizing an issue too often covered in tallies. They hire amazing writers like Chris Jones, Blair Kamin, Clarence Page, Eric Zorn, Mary Schmich, Peter Nickeas.

They have documented this city for 171 years, 93 of which were spent in this stately tower downtown. Critics of the aging building argue it’s full of rats and cockroaches, but that won’t be true until June.

The rats want the sign.

It’s not enough to buy the building, selling of years of journalistic history condo by condo to the highest bidder. Los Angeles-based CIM Group and Chicago’s Golub & Co. are suing the Tribune, arguing they have the right to buy the illuminated gothic “Chicago Tribune” sign looking out on the river and keep it there, not as a beacon of the power and prestige of the news, but as decoration and selling point, a bug zapper luring in millionaires and billionaires with the kitsch of having a funky-cool sign for their downtown digs.

The real estate companies want to pay $1 for it.

The case is going through the courts, but in the meantime here’s my ruling: Millionaires and billionaires, no. You can’t buy the sign.

You get the building, you get the lovely spires and the lobby carved with quotes about the freedom of the press and the utter necessity of free speech. Sure, go on. Grab your mail there as you head up to to watch Netflix in your underwear in the newsroom and make cold cereal in an old darkroom. Knock yourself out.

But you can’t buy the sign. You can’t use your cash to force out the people who gave that name authenticity and meaning, then demand you get to call yourself what they were. You can’t gentrify the news.

My use of “can’t” isn’t a command. If I had power to force billionaire corporations to do the right thing, believe me that saving a particular piece of riverview property for a separate corporation would be very low on my priority list. “Can’t” is me telling the millionaires and billionaires what they’re trying won’t work.

If they win, which they might, they’ll have spent $1 to make a sign worthless.

I don’t give a crap about the succession of tycoons and corporations who have owned the company. I care about the ground-level employees, the photographers, writers, editors, pressmen, newsboys who worked to make that name worth something. Right-leaning, flawed, imperious, beautiful Chicago Tribune. Without the people who made the name worth whatever it’s worth, the building’s just a bit of stone, a trinket and memento sitting on a shelf.

Enjoy your purchase, millionaires. Enjoy shunting journalists south so you can play newsman in their leavings. Enjoy your $1 court win and wear the name on the sign like a child wears a novelty shop fedora to play reporter on Halloween. Like the child with the hat, the name’s too big for you. Unlike the child, you’ll never grow into it.

Visit one of Chicago’s few remaining newsstands

Break the fast with the Jeri’s colloquium

Palm Sunday in Belmont-Cragin

A springtime dance with a city isn’t your normal nightclub shimmy. It’s a complex, choreographed number set to the tune of car horns, train rattles and the few chirping birds giving this whole “spring” thing a tentative go.

We dance among each other, bowing and curtsying out of the way. We stand and sit to give others seats on trains. We hustle up the tempo to sashay just a touch faster past the ones whose role in the dance is to beg for change. We stop and pirouette when encountering an old friend on the sidewalk, a momentary pas de deux before rejoining the grand ballet.

And we dance among ghosts, if we know enough.

Downtown, we dance with the lionized settlers and demonized natives on the bridge carvings we’ve walked past so often they’ve vanished to our eyes. Our morning commutes bend and blur with the invisible 1940s workmen who painted the now-peeling signs for long-dead companies that still haunt some buildings along the train route. The invisible architects who lined the river with ornate ’20s masterpieces promenade with their coke-fueled 1980s peers and whatever the hell they were thinking.

Our partners in this morning ballet aren’t limited by place or time. The titans of industry with busts shaped like Pez dispensers by the Merchandise Mart are as much a part of our mornings as the woman whose last-minute demi-tour saved her from spilling Starbucks on the stroller. Our references blur, one morning jogger becoming another and another until we just see the tight-clad athlete as an avatar of every jogger we’ve come across anywhen or where.

To the tune of birds and morning construction, we dance our way past battlefields and gangland slay sites. We dance our way in rising sun past where long-forgotten drunks kissed and canoodled under lamplight. Someone was born here. Someone died here. Someone fell and skinned their knee and promptly forgot about such a boring incident in their life.

But it happened here.

Our morning dance with ghosts and peers is forgettable too. Our brains aren’t built to recognize the common, just to note the differences so we’re primed for action when a saber-toothed tiger pops out. So even as I write about this morning’s walk, I know the memories of sun glinting off the water will mesh with all the other times I’ve seen that river. I’ll forget if I ran into and caught up with Tom on a Monday commute or a Thursday lunch run. I won’t recall whether I stood by the bust of Du Sable today or if this was the day I sat and watched the water from beside the Apple store that looks like a MacBook.

This morning’s dance will remain as forgotten and forgettable as every other morning spring birds chirped in sunny skies.

Read more on those chirping little things

Read more about the common

“Yeah,” I said, tossing my coat on the chair next to my desk. “Do you know what that’s about?”

“Guy got stabbed in the neck. I think it happened by Mother Hubbard’s because I was walking in and that’s the only part of the sidewalk that got washed.”

I hot-watered my instant coffee in the breakroom, then walked back to Gene’s desk and told him The Story.

…

A few minutes later, coffee left warm on my desk.

The woman in the passenger seat of the news truck was beautiful and bored. The beauty was intentional, both a coiffed and made-up result of her profession and the pre-existing genetic condition that gave her a shot at the job. The boredom was an unintended side effect of waiting for her moments on TV to talk about the killing.

She flicked through a phone and kept glancing at the dashboard clock. I liked her immediately and almost felt bad when I made the “Please roll down your window” hand-crank motion to get the startled newswoman’s attention.

Almost.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry.”

In a stumbling, high-pitched nervous breakdown of a voice, pausing for endless apologies and reassurances, I told her communities don’t like it when TV crews do live remotes. She recited back that they don’t like doing them. I told her I was sorry she had to be the one to hear this. She nodded sympathetically, waiting for my words.

I leaned over slightly, wrung my hands and told her The Story.

…

Much earlier.

Years earlier.

So much earlier I was still watching TV news from a Bucktown rat’s nest with only three channels on the rabbit ears. As I lazed on a couch I haven’t owned in a decade, keeping the TV going for some background noise as I didn’t flick through a phone because phones didn’t do that then, a familiar street flashed on the screen.

It was a live remote, one of the “Send a 20-something pretty pretty to a crime scene to say the same stuff they’d say in the studio” features that glut up the 22 minutes of murder porn that compose local TV news. I’d seen a hundred thousand stand-ups like it, would see a hundred thousand more.

She was talking about a horrific sexual assault. A woman was closing up a shop for the day, a man asked at the last minute if he could use the bathroom before they closed. Terrible.

It’s a journalistic tenet that, unless relevant to the story, you don’t identify rape victims. And, sure, they didn’t say the name of the woman as they stood outside of and shone cameras into her place of employment. But I knew that shop, was a frequent-enough visitor to know the staff by face if not name. And I knew only two women worked there. One was the owner. They would have said “owner,” so I knew in a moment who had been assaulted.

They had outed a rape victim in the name of a live remote.

…

The TV newswoman waiting to tell the local morning newswatchers of the greater Chicago area about the neck stabbing didn’t get it. She didn’t get it and I expressed it so, so poorly.

She didn’t get the anger I felt seeing a sexual assault victim’s identity shat out into the world in order to get slightly better background visuals. She didn’t understand that people don’t like our shops and bars shown as killing fields because putting a beautiful woman on a public walkway looks more Action Jackson than having the same woman recite the same words in a studio. She didn’t get how we in the community feel when they pop in to show suburbanites our neighbors’ blood, then skitter away, not caring or thinking about the human beings they just exposed.

She nodded, and her eyes got suitably wide when I said the word “rape.” But she nodded in commiseration, as if she felt the same way.

As if she were the one this was being done to, not the one doing it.

She was a nice woman, tried to make this stumbling, high pitched fool of a man feel better. She told me the victim this time was just passing through, wasn’t a friend or workplace neighbor.

“Probably,” she added.

I told her it didn’t matter. We went back to our lives, neither the wiser for the conversation.

More irresponsible TV news

More pooling blood on a sidewalk

A man hand-building an Englewood art gallery

A woman who smells magic

A century-old flag shop and the most famous rear end in Chicago

Unshaved, thick glasses, chainsmoker skin, he sat behind a raised booth in a Blackhawks Stanley Cup championship hat and smiled professionally at me.

“It’s $2 to come in and if you buy anything, we take that off the price.”

He was chipper and kind, like a proud barista. I asked if I needed to check my bag.

“You can just leave it in the corner. There’s no one here but one guy in the booths.”

In River North, in a strip developers moved heaven and earth to get fancy, among cocktail bars and restaurants where food is called “dining,” there is a squat, brown building with a crackling mosaic on the sidewalk outside. The mosaic brags of days when fine terrazzo tiles could be purchased at this establishment, but for the last as-long-as-I-can-remember, it’s been a menacing 24-hour porno shop I quickened my pace whenever I walked by.

The developers moved heaven and hell, but they couldn’t move this squat little porno shop.

“I’m surprised this place isn’t a trendy bar by now,” I said to the man.

He laughed.

“It helps when you own the building.”

A question I should deal with moreso than with the other 850-whatever stories I’ve written is why I’m here. After years of walking by, why on a whim I went in. It was what you expect, a clean, well-lighted place with racks packed to breaking with DVDs and walls lined with meticulous doodads for attachment to various bits. Overseeing it all was a seedy-looking guy who was as bright, pleasant and professional as a law firm receptionist.

“Oh, are you the owner?”

“Naah, I wouldn’t want the headache.”

But why am I here?

I have no interest in trying to justify or normalize the content of each DVD in the tight stacks ceiling-high. Some of them were quite indefensible, using race as fetish or lined with Dixie flags fetishizing racists.

The walls were lined with abuse. To some of you reading this, it was all abuse. To some of you, some of it was. But some of it was abuse, for certain. Picking any video up would be a moral Russian roulette. You could guess and hope that a video you grabbed involved fully informed, fully sober men and women acting out fantasies without regret, but the shoots that left the participants crying would look the same in post.

Two young guys came in. The overseer turned to give them the speech about $2.

“We just cruising,” one said.

The three chatted for a moment. They talked about how the oldies station just went to classic hip-hop. It could have been a talk at a Starbucks, or at a bookstore where the characters in the books get to keep their clothes on. It was simple, unashamed chit-chat over commerce.

Then the young guys went back to the booths.

So why am I here?

I’m here because this is here. I’m here because this site is a stab at charting the Chicago that is, not the one that should be.

I’m here not to foist my own suspect morals on a man whose job is to give people what they want, nor am I here to lionize a small business owner fighting the trends that want his shop gone, nor am I here to praise and normalize the abuse that powers the whole thing.

I’m here because a porn shop with a room in the back for people to touch themselves in is as much a part of our lives as the trendy bars along that strip or the corporate chain coffeehouse where I’m typing this up before work.

Should it be? That’s for others to figure. It is, and I write what is, even if I made the thing two dollars richer in the process.

I thanked the man and wished him a good morning. He cheerily wished me the same. I think we both meant it.

Read a three-parter on a fantasy-fueled con game

800 Potawatomi warriors danced through the Merchandise Mart, across the old walking bridge that predated the abandoned train track now permanently slung at attention, south past glass towers of law firms and global investment banks, stopping for special performances across the river from the Starbucks and east along Lake Street at the Franklin Self Park, Ronny’s Original Steakhouse at the Thompson Center, and the 7-Eleven at Dearborn.

All were entirely naked, except a strip of cloth around the loins. Their bodies were covered all over with a great variety of brilliant paints. On their faces, particularly, they seemed to have exhausted their art of hideous decoration. Foreheads, cheeks, and noses, were covered with curved stripes of red or vermilion, which were edged with black points, and gave the appearance of a horrid grin over the entire countenance. The long, coarse, black hair, was gathered into scalp-locks on the tops of their heads, and decorated with a profusion of hawk’s and eagle’s feathers, some strung together so as to extend down the back nearly to the ground.

Thus spaketh future Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice John Dean Caton, who watched from the second floor of a hotel just north of what’s now an OK Starbucks along the river.

Not a great Starbucks. An OK one.

In August 1835, the Potawatomi left Illinois. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago, forged in lies and liquor, had given them two years to get the hell out of town.

Although a some individual Potawatomi joined Sauk leader Black Hawk’s uprising in 1832, the tribe en masse had kept out of the conflict, even sending a delegation to Chicago in May of that year to assure the Americans the Potawatomi were on their side. But two days after the delegation, a small band of Sauk crossed the Iowa-Illinois border into American territory and attacked a powerful U.S. detachment of 275 men under the command of Major Isaiah Stillman.

How’d it go? Today it’s known as the Battle of Stillman’s Run.

To save face after the humiliating defeat-and-retreat, an officer fabricated a report that it hadn’t been a small Sauk party they scampered away from, but instead they had been “invaded by a powerful detachment of Indian Warriors of the Sac, Fox, Winibago, and Potawatomii and part of the Kickapoo Nations.”

I can’t claim the officer’s lie was a turning point or if, coupled with rumors of Potawatomi involvement and the generally worsening blood between the tribe and settlers, it was just a convenient excuse. Either way, the U.S. government was done with the Potawatomi. After the Black Hawk War was quashed in August 1832, Congress appointed a commission of three to deal with the Potawatomi and “extinguish Indian title within the states of Indiana, and Illinois and the Territory of Michigan.”

The trio negotiated a deal at Camp Tippecanoe, Indiana, in October, getting all the Potawatomi land in Illinois, plus sections of northern Indiana and Michigan. Part of the deal included merchandise valued at $45,000 paid to the tribe immediately, with another $30,000 in goods to be negotiated by treaty the next year at, you guessed it, Chicago.

Pushed and prodded west over the next year in a forced migration that — like the others — was plagued with disease and incompetence, with resentment growing among Potawatomi who didn’t recognize the deal their leaders cut and settlers angry them Injuns won’t go away so the Whites could farm and build canals, the procession arrived in the future City That Works in the autumn of 1833, months behind schedule and hungry for that promised $30K in goods. A cold winter and the torching of Potawatomi crops by Black Hawk’s army meant the settlers were able to hunker down and starve out the tribe members who didn’t recognize the Camp Tippecanoe treaty, so for many early Chicago whites, this forced delegation would be the last Potawatomi they would ever be.

Chicagoans marked up goods as high as 50 percent for the Potawatomi. Prostitution was rampant. Settlers and French traders flocked to the encampments to get the Potawatomi drunk and take them for all the money they had left from the Camp Tippecanoe payout, along with every single possession they owned.

They had brought some whiskey and given them which soon made them drunk, then some directed their attention while others stole all their goods even taking their last blanket. Many who had 3 or 4 blankets the day before yesterday were naked. They will give anything they have for whiskey and as soon as they are drunk they are stripped to the skin by the whites. Such infernal villainy would make the Devil blush.

– Treaty observer Henry Van Der Bogart.

The sale of alcohol to the Potawatomi was illegal, but the tribe was there to negotiate a treaty. The government found a drunken negotiation partner to be a pliant one and turned a blind eye to the sales.

The sin may lie at the door of the individuals more immediately in contact with them, but for the character of the people as a nation, it should be guarded against, beyond a possibility of transgression. Who will believe that any act, however formally executed by the chiefs, is valid, as long as it is known that whisky was one of the parties to the treaty.

– British traveler Charles J. Latrobe.

Three U.S. officials signed and 77 Potawatomi leaders put X marks on the Treaty of Chicago on Sept. 26, 1833. The refugees from Indiana and other out-of-town points dispersed as soon as they got their payments, eventually leaving only the Potawatomi originally from the Chicago area. The treaty gave them two years to get out.

Their lives in the settlement were spent as prey of bunco, greed, and alcohol, but on an unnamed day in August 1835, the final 800 Potawatomi left Chicago as warriors, putting on what they knew would be their last war dance on their native lands.

Caton continues:

The IBM-turned-AMA building on the Chicago River, the blackest glassiest boxiest box of all the glassy black boxes of Chicago architecture, had poured out its workers.

All the buildings had, of course, but the American Medical Association headquarters building spewed most effectively onto its own plaza. Between Miesian glass and swishing brown river, the workers poured from River North and the Loop offices puddled.

They puddled to look-not-look at the sky.

The eclipse has been almost laboriously documented in that way the internet has of snapping onto a thought and worrying it like a hyena on a carcass. We know it happened. We know it was amazing in the path. We know it was still pretty cool where we saw it.

So this story isn’t of watching the sky, but of watching the people watching the sky. As they looked up through slate-black paper sunglasses or down into box-made pinhole cameras, we’ll look at them.

Here were the photographers, not so much staring at the eclipsing sun as trying to document that they did stare at it. They flipped through filters, glaring at their phones at juuuuuust the wrong shot. In desperation, some slapped their eclipse glasses over the cameras’ lenses, flicked fingers to zoom in in in, then glowered that the sun still was off afar.

Others were the photographers of each other. They glanced at the sky, glanced at themselves and then started the long and arduous process of making sure it would be documented forever that they looked at the sky on this day. Group shots of office teams. Individual shots of self against sky; checking, moving, wandering, wavering to ensure their selfie-turned phones didn’t block away the spectacle that they were ostensibly there to see.

Others socialized. I liked them. Some brought their dogs. I liked them more.

But a few stood stone-silent, entranced by the colossal dance in the heavens. No words, no chatter. No selfies, group shots or even dogs. Just people staring at the sky through thick-tinted glasses, finding silence and wonder in what they saw.

These were the ones I liked most.

Staring at the sky in darkness, five years earlier