Behind the door behind the counter behind the bulletproof Plexi, a woman worked to make my sandwich. I was left to poke around the empty pickup area of Dan’s Soul Food and Bakery on 79th in Ashburn. 

The soul food joint was split in two. The lefthand side as you looked south from the St. Rita’s High School lot was the dining area, where black families sat in for a Sunday morning meal. The righthand side was the area to grab food to go, where I sat alone one April morning amid plastic plants and signs advertising Sprite, coffee and Bob Marley’s 1984 compilation album “Legend.”

Every square micron of the counters’ sides had been covered in pictures and prices of soul food fare, but the Plexiglas windows were where smaller fliers lived. A few signs asked people to consider whether their words were nice, kind, true before speaking them. Another sampling throughout the store advertised “Very soft and competitively priced” toilet paper “manufactured by BLACK college students in Indiana.”

“Circulating our dollars among ourselves will reduce violence dramatically,” the sign read, making me wonder if I could pull off buying a roll without looking like I was committing charity.

No talking on the phone while ordering, a hand-scribbled piece of paper demanded. Corinthians 15:33 a few times. A few printouts of the Illinois General Assembly’s resolution honoring Moorish American Week 2012.

I puttered among these things, leafed through the Bible tracts and waited. But mostly I thought about the woman making my sandwich, and the look in eyes when she saw me. It was suspicion. Not like there was any particular malfeasance she suspected me of, but trying to figure out what game I was playing by being a white man in a black space. “Trying to explore different communities for a news essay blog” was not her first guess.

But the moment passed and human concerns took over. Cash. Change. Having to make a pickup catfish sandwich at 10:30 in the morning when they were mostly still doing breakfast in the dine-in section next door.

…

I was alone by the Eugene Sawyer Water Purification Plant at Rainbow Park Beach, watching cold April waves crash along the shore. The fish sandwich was, quite simply, the best I had ever had. Despite the length of the drive to the lakefront, the sandwich still steamed when I opened it by the water.

It occurred to me that this otherness I felt at the soul food restaurant was momentary and by choice. I felt alien and eyed, but got a warm smile and hot sandwich for my troubles. I felt for a quiet 10 minutes how people of color are made to feel every minute of every day, and I did not care for it.

I thought of a friend of mine, a PhD who gets followed by jewelry store security because of the color of her skin. The color of mine gives me unearned respect and trust. We both get eyed with suspicion and curiosity when we’re in a place we’re not deemed to belong, but our ratios are off. She gets the suspicion. I get the curiosity. Even in discomfort I come out on top.

As I sat along a cement wall with the taste of fish on my lips watching the waves crash and the view of downtown to the north, I wondered if I had ever learned a damn thing in my life.

More thoughts on boundaries

Scenes from the Back of the Yards swap

The wise men of the diner counter

Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

It’s been lovingly repaired, restored, captured in a moment of time as an image of something half-falling, the old textured plaster preserved in decay.

It’s a touching detail, really. A nod to the decades this South Shore bank fell into disuse and disrepair, but one made into something lovely. Its age and wear is the beauty.

It’s as good a symbol as any for the Stony Island Arts Bank on the border of the aged, worn and disrepaired neighborhoods of South Shore.

The bank is, was, what-have-you, a bank. Opened in 1923 as the Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank, it closed in the ‘80s, shuttered stone columns and neoclassic design on a slip of empty lots and strip malls.

In 2013, artist Theaster Gates bought it from the city for $1, then spending $4.5 million to convert it to a gallery, exhibit space and research library of black culture.

It’s still a bank. It’s just one that’s moved on from money to house something valuable.

The main room echoes under the preserved plaster, the tap tap of shoes on floor and the chatter of a bubbly guest and understanding staffer. It’s currently housing an exhibit of the 1950s-1970s street portraits of Ghanaian photographer James Barnor.

Up a floor is the first level of research library. You can still hear the bubbly guest, but now it’s amid a two-story room walled with books from the collections of Ebony and Jet magazines’ publisher. This room is behind glass, a man tinkering with research on a wide-screened Mac desktop computer. Ladders lead to platforms lead to more ladders, the room’s so tall.

On one side is a room of what look like card catalog cases but are filled with glass slides from the University of Chicago’s historical photograph collection. They tempt, but you’re not supposed to pick through them without a prior orientation.

On the other side is a room of black history texts and yearbooks from DuSable High School. This book on jazz was last checked out by a DuSable sophomore in 1979, the card taped to the inside of one book says. A freshman took this civil rights book out in 1978.

Beyond that, the collection requires prior appointments. There’s a collection of historical images and artifacts depicting the black stereotypes of each area. “Negrobilia,” the bank’s website calls it.

The vinyl collection of the “Godfather of House Music,” Frankie Knuckles is upstairs too.

There’s not one story in this recovered bank. There’s every story here, preserved and stored behind thick bank walls and under plaster preserved mid-crumble.

Visit the Stony Island Arts Bank

Learn about a very different cultural archive

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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The driver leaned out the window by the intersection with Patton and stared.

A tow truck driver stopped in the middle of the street, not even waiting for the intersection. He stopped by the train tracks that split the east- and westbound lanes of “Honorary Emmett Till Road.” He stared too.

They both drove off as a tall, muscular bald man crossed the tracks south so he can turn and look too. He stood by two women who had gotten out of a car by the Family Dollar to gape. One of the women pulled out a phone to catch it all on video. The Metra van returned, cruising slowly from the direction it left toward before circling around to stop by an empty lot to stare again.

The six women in orange continued to dance on the roof.

Over their orange leotards (or salmon? coral? I’m not good with colors), the women wore layers of pastel mesh netting, oranges and reds and in one fetching case a bright blue you could follow as their fevered choreography whipped them into a crowd of red-yellow. Over that, they wore a loose net of ropes.

In ropes and tutu, they danced on the roof of a South Shore body oil shop on a strip of BBQ joints, beauty supply shops and shuttered dollar stores.

They danced for the crowd gathered then and for one laughing woman earlier who stood by the Family Dollar doing swoops of emulation.

This was the Wake Up Waltz.

The Wake Up Waltz was a series of choreographed dances that ran from May through early June at public spaces in South Shore, Uptown and Logan Square’s Haas Park. The morning public dance to brighten the day of commuters and other passersby was the brainchild of artist and performer Josie Davis.

“I came down here and started talking to the Chamber of Commerce and they pointed me to Robin Boyd who owns the Scentuary,” Davis told me as we walked with my waiver to Boyd so I could join the dancers on the roof of her store. “Robin’s a great conduit or liaison for the community down here.”

But permission to run a ladder to a rooftop and six paid professional dancers acquired is not enough. The program took about a year to organize, with sponsorships, foundations, community involvement and the paperworking muckymuck that doesn’t seem apparent as the orange women whirl.

Davis, a New Jersey native, started on the project after she moved to Chicago from Argentina.

“I was inspired by the architecture and I just had the idea for doing this work and stuck it out to make it happen,” she said.

Each site — South Shore, Uptown and Haas — had its own choreographer. For South Shore, it was ice skater Katherine Hill who created the dance that scattered the women over the Scentuary roof.

“Concert dance movement, modern dance and ballet, you’re seeing it in the rehearsal space and on the stage. It’s so rarely out in the open,” Hill said. “Your hip-hop is all over the Internet and music videos and is so readily seen by your community, so it’s really exciting to be able to bring a different movement where people can see it.”

After an hour, the dance broke up for the day. As the women laughed and tried to change out of orange and into street clothes away from the eyes of the passersby and me, dancer Aerica Siegel, 22, talked about the short time commitment and modern movement that drew her to the Wake Up Waltz.

“Also,” Siegel said, smiling a bit. “Dancing on rooftops.”

Callie Croom, 23, dances with Elements Contemporary Ballet, which is off right now. She wanted some pick-up work and this, as she said, “really fit the mold.”

“I think the way that dance is going, it’s not going to be in a theater exclusively for much longer, so I think this is a great way to start, on a rooftop especially,” she said.

And where is dance going?

“I don’t know, but I want to be wherever it is when it goes there,” she said, as the wind over the South Shore roof ruffled her orange just a little bit.

Look at photos from the waltz

Read about the Wake Up Waltz

Read about a very difference dance