How a river is a community

Why the heart of Chicago lies in the mouth of its river

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I like to joke sometimes about the year I spent working as a bridge troll of sorts by the Chicago River.

In 2015 I worked at a museum inside an old bridge tower beside the Michigan Avenue bridge in downtown Chicago: the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum. The bridge tower (or “bridgehouse” in Chicago-speak) houses the controls and massive gears that lift the bridge whenever a tall boat needs to pass through. Inside the museum you can see the gears (and watch them move when a bridge lift happens) and learn about the construction of the city’s unique bascule bridges and about the history of the Chicago River.

Working there not only taught me more about my home city than I ever learned from years of living there or working elsewhere, it redefined my understanding of community.

For six months, from early May to Halloween, I spent five days a week greeting visitors to the museum, leading them up and down the five levels of stone stairs, telling people from all over Chicago, the Midwest, and the world about the river and bridges. I sat at a small desk looking out at the still-a-work-in-progress Riverwalk and the curiously clean blue-green river water as it flowed under the lower deck of the double-decker DuSable Bridge. Or I sat at an even smaller desk just inside the dark, easily overlooked Michigan Ave. street-level entrance and watched the glimpses of tourists rushing past the doorway. Other times I stood guard in the brisk spring/fall cold or sweated through the midsummer humidity beside the gears below the bridge, ready to answer questions by visitors. Or on the highest level in the tower, peeking out the rectangle windows at all the Mag Mile-headed shoppers, Loop office workers, CDOT guys, and assorted downtown characters crossing the bridge below. Some days I led small groups up and down the Riverwalk and across the lower level of the double-decker DuSable, working in stories of Chicago political and architectural history with that of the river and bridges.

The bridgehouse itself is a protected Chicago landmark over 100 years old. Same for the Michigan Ave. bridge, which was christened the DuSable Bridge in 2010 to honor the city’s first non-Native resident, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, whose homestead was located kitty-corner across the river from where the museum now stands. DuSable himself built his homestead in an area long settled by Algonquian tribes like the Potawatomi (who DuSable, a Haitian immigrant, married into). This means the museum/bridgehouse is right at the heart where the city was born and grew.

In the old days, the bridges of the Chicago River used to open dozens of times a day to let all the river traffic go by—especially ships coming and going between Lake Michigan and the waterways that link the Chicago River to the Mississippi River downstate. These days, the bridges only go up once or twice a week in the spring and fall to allow sailboats through. The age of industrial shipping on the Chicago River is mostly over—it’s a leisure vehicles’ ride now.

Part of this transformation has been due to the Riverwalk, which has been bringing people back to the river downtown for purely recreational reasons. I remember working in a building right on the river for a few years well before the Riverwalk, in the old red-brick traffic building between Lasalle and Clark. Back then there wasn’t much space to walk along or sit down and just watch the water and boats drift by. The river “banks” were almost all concrete blocks, walls, and tunnels, an unwelcoming place with barges parked along the walls and sheets of ice locked here and there in the winter. The building and dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 2005 by Wabash was one of the first signs of the new look to come.

Another big part of the transformation has been advocacy groups devoted to cleaning up the Chicago River after decades of industrial dumping and pollution going back to the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouse days. One of these is Friends of the Chicago River, the environmental nonprofit that runs the museum. Friends has been working to advocate for a cleaner, healthier Chicago River and river ecosystem since 1979. They work with the city’s schools and park district for environmental events and education, lead canoe trips, and help reclaim habitat for the remaining animal species in and along the river. I think what their work and advocacy comes down to is raising awareness and appreciation for the Chicago River as a place of community.

In Chicago, the word “community” is usually reserved for the city’s neighborhoods, meaning everywhere away from downtown. Downtown Chicago, and especially the Loop (so-called for the loop the el train makes around the central commercial district), was considered a place for work, commerce, and entertainment. The first settlements were there (hi, Jean Baptiste!), but it wasn’t long before most city residents made their homes beyond the central city, in the neighborhoods that sprung up west, south, and north of downtown.

For years, growing up in the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, I’d go downtown to hit the stores on State Street or the Mag Mile, or to visit the skyscraper landmarks and big-name museums, or drop a bomb of money (and sense) at events like the Taste of Chicago or the Old St. Pat’s Block Party. But after I started working downtown, I stayed away outside of work hours as much as possible. To me, downtown was a place to work—not to form community bonds and get to know the neighbors.

And the river—it was a kind of smelly, concrete-lined thing. There were nicer, greener sections of it in the neighborhoods. But I never thought of the river’s importance, about its past or future.

I had a connection to the river through my paternal grandfather, who witnessed the Eastland Disaster in 1915, in which more than 800 people died when an overpacked boat headed for an excursion out on the lake capsized in the river near the dock at Clark Street. But that event only underlined in my mind that the Chicago River was a distressed and unwelcoming place, rather than a natural feature that could be friended and made friendly again.

Working in the bridgehouse changed that. Between the exhibits and the familiarity that came from seeing the river up close every day, and how it changed with the seasons, weather, and time of day, the river started to become a place I could better read and understand, like you would a friend.

Likewise, downtown Chicago, a loud, dynamic, clanging concrete jungle of a place that I associated with strangers and stressed workers, started to reveal itself as just another neighborhood. It only took a couple weeks to identify now-familiar faces and voices, boats and barges, street performers and city staffers. And let me tell you, when summer really gets under way in Chicago, and tourists start arriving downtown en masse for a revolving door of events like Lollapalooza or the Air and Water Show, you really count on the familiar to stabilize your day and keep you from feeling overwhelmed by all the change and strangeness.

On the Riverwalk, there were fellow Riverwalk workers (from pop-up bar and restaurant servers to the cleaning and security crews), the captains and crew of the tour boat companies across and upriver from the museum, the husky bargemen striking hero poses on the giant barges that occasionally made dramatic sweeps down the river to much fanfare from onlookers, the skater kids and parkour people who I had to chase off the museum’s benches and landmark walls from time to time, and the 24-hour party people in speedos and bikinis flying by on boats with names like The Summer of George and Veuve Clicquot.

Since 2015 was the year Trump announced his candidacy for president (complete with racist, anti-Mexican sloganeering), and the Trump Tower was just across the river from the museum, I increasingly found myself leading tour groups into the heart of protests along the river. One man showed up frequently that summer wearing a lucha libre mask and the Mexican flag, inviting people to pose for selfies with him giving the finger to the Trump Tower in the background.

Up on the Michigan Ave. level, there were the Bucket Boys and a Motown group that often played on the plaza beside the bridgehouse marking the site of Fort Dearborn (the sculpture on the bridgehouse depicts the 1815 Battle of Fort Dearborn, but wrongly suggests that the battle was Europeans defending their home from Native Americans rather than the other way around), the Fannie Mae ladies at the store kitty corner from the museum, the eternally tourist-besieged waiters and cashiers at the Corner Bakery across from the Fannie Mae, the tellers at the bank where we made museum deposits twice a week (and traded Blackhawks talk), the bus guides hawking their theme tours (oddly, at an office podium right there on the corner), the young kids selling candy for their sports teams and older kids selling their demo CDs to anyone who’d listen, and a CDOT worker who used to carry a folding chair with him to pop a squat during bridge lifts, as if he was at Wrigley Field catching rays in the bleacher seats instead of the busiest intersection in the city.

The Michigan Ave. entrance was also a desired spot for street people and Streetwise sellers seeking temporary shelter. One man, a disabled vet named Rabbit, used to wheel his chair into the entrance to say hello to us museum staff and help out offering directions to the tourists who asked about a thousand times a day. (“Excuse please, do you know the way to Willis Tower?” “Willis Tower, you say? No.”)

Rabbit was one of several people I remember most. Sitting at the Riverwalk entrance, I came to memorize some of the commentary by the tour boat guides as they drifted by several times a day. One Shoreline guide even had a rap to explain the design of the Chicago flags waving from the DuSable Bridge. Like clockwork, he’d launch into it just as his boat was passing the museum and about to cruise under the bridge: “I so often get asked about the bars on the Chicago flag, I made up a little song about it. Folks, let me break it down for you. (beat) The Chicago flag / Has two blue bars / And four red stars…”

I came to rely on how long we had before closing time by the appearance of one of the Mag Mile’s statue guys—a man dressed in silver clothes with silver face makeup who stood frozen for hours beside the landmarks further “up the road.” In full costume, he’d cross the lower level of the bridge, a hard day’s statue work done, usually mid-afternoon.

It was also on the lower lever of the bridge that I came to discover the performance art of Vincent, a downtown legend whom I’d previously spotted along the Riverwalk—simply because you kinda can’t miss him. Sometimes known as Fashion Man or Suit Guy, Vincent is a club DJ turned computer programmer and longtime Marina City resident famous for his beautiful, bright-colored, tailored silk suits and bridge waving. The subject of a 2008 documentary and columns by Chicago journalists from Roger Ebert to Neil Steinberg, Vincent started a routine years ago of standing out on the downtown bridges and waving at the people on the tour boats as they passed under. Eventually he started adding moves like spins, finger-raining, and coat twirling. His suits range in beach ball technicolors from canary yellow to pin-striped turquoise to minty lime green. Once he went out on the bridge for a show, he might be there for almost an hour. I know, because I had a prime view from the cashier’s desk at the Riverwalk entrance. Even in the documentary about him, Vincent’s reasons for his bridge shows are something of a mystery. I honestly came to see him as a pure outsider/guerilla performance artist, someone who performs and perfects his art, wherever and whenever he feels like it, just for the joy and freedom of it.

As the Riverwalk expanded and came to completion, and grew more and more people to it, I sometimes wondered if Vincent was still going out on the bridges as much. Maybe there’s too much going on there these days for even someone like a man spinning around in a technicolor silk suit to be noticed. Back in 2015, along with all the human community, there was wildlife returned to the river downtown. A beaver lived at Wolf Point at the confluence of the main stem and the north and south branches—an inspiring sign considering how they used to flourish in the river before European hunting and trading and industrial pollution almost wiped them out. My museum co-worker and friend Rebeca, who lives downtown and used to walk her dog Lucas along the Riverwalk daily, would tell me about the birds she spotted, like a black-crowned night heron. Meanwhile, everyone feared the possible Asian carp invasion, and one solution that year was to fish ‘em out of the Illinois River before they made it through the Des Plaines River to Chicago and cook and serve ‘em up like salmon patties.

But since then, a high-rise has gone up at Wolf Point, driving the beaver away due to construction noise and invaded habitat, and recreational boat traffic has increased dramatically. The community of wildlife may have fled for the branches north and south. Though Chicago still fears the coming of the Asian carp.

Since COVID and the abandonment of downtown by office workers, who have yet to return at the level of pre-pandemic, I wonder if the community I encountered on the Riverwalk in 2015 has survived. With outdoor events like Art on the Mart, the Riverwalk has been an oasis for people who’d still rather not risk indoor activities. Are as many boats running these days? Have any animals returned? (Last winter, I remember walking down an eerily empty sidewalk on a weekday in the Loop and noticing how much the pigeons seemed to have the run of the place, right down to flying at human head level over the sidewalks like they were having the best, most carefree time of their lives.)

“Chicago is here because of the river.” That was a truth I’d hear again and again working at the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum. It grew up as a city because of the river’s goldmine access to the Great Lakes (and through them, to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic) and the Mississippi River (and through it, to the Gulf of Mexico). The river made and shaped the city, and the city in turn remade and reshaped the river. It’s the heart of the community, always and forever.

Connections: Wanna see what it’s like to be inside the bridgehouse when the bridge is going up? Here’s a great video, with the gears in action and all.

Wanna see Vincent the Suit Guy in action too? You can watch the documentary about him, Vincent: A Life in Color by Jennifer Burns, in full on YouTube. His life story is really interesting, and yes, there are shots of him spinning on the bridge in his technicolor suits.

In news related to my previous post, on ageism, I did a little interview with Patricia Corrigan for an article on menopause for Next Avenue. Patricia reached out after fishing for menopause stories from women online and reading my Poetry Potluck piece. The article was one of a series for Menopause Awareness Month, which is in October.

I also mentioned the Art Institute of Chicago and School of the Art Institute’s workers’ union in my last post. Since then, there’s been a lot of outrage about AIC’s firing of its docents to initiate a new art education program with a more diverse set of paid workers. The Chicago Tribune wrote an awesomely blistering editorial that cut to the chase and called the action ageist and hypocritical. ArtNet wrote a piece suggesting the outrage is just right-wing anti-woke backlash. I’m with the Trib on this, and I think the ArtNet article author is entirely myopic about the prevalence of ageism and also misses some crucial points about art world hypocrisy and economic inequity. I think I’d believe AIC’s defense that they’ve got equity in mind if I didn’t know, thanks to those heroic AIC/SAIC union peeps, that the president of the museum makes nearly $1 million a year, that the museum in 2020 reported nearly $1.5 billion in net assets and received an endowment in another billion, plus a total operating surplus of nearly $69 million for the fiscal year, and that the museum administration wasn’t fighting the AIC/SAIC workers’ union very attempts to the extent of sinking funds into hiring an anti-worker PR firm. An organization truly so concerned about equity wouldn’t fight their workers’ call for fair wages and better treatment. And how is it that a museum that, in my lifetime, goes from charging a suggested donation fee to visitors (as a teen, that meant I could pay just 50 cents to go in the museum if I wanted), to charging admission but having a full free day every week, to charging $20 to $25 a head for most visitors with just a measly few hours of free admission one weekday evening, to a couple weeks here and there with some free days for Illinois residents and JUST NOW IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2021 be getting around to finally planning on paying their docents? Where has all this increase in admission fee money been going all this time? Oh yes, see the part above about the president’s million-dollar paycheck. So I really think this firing of docents thing (and giving them a whoppingly stingy two-year free membership) is all just smoke and mirrors equity. They’re doing something in the name of equity (getting rid of the old people) to make it look like they’re doing something in the name of equity. Pay no attention, meanwhile, to the workers revolting behind the curtain.

I published a culture piece last week in National Catholic Reporter about COVID, Dante, the afterlife, and Dinty Moore’s (editor-in-chief of Brevity) terrific new memoir, To Hell with It. Moore’s book questions whether belief in hell is worth the spiritual suffering and insecurity, and good-naturedly ribs Dante’s influence on people’s perceptions of the afterlife. Moore sent me a lovely note thanking me for the review. This made up for the dragging on Twitter by the “trad Catholic” crowd, who had a mini-conniption that I (or Moore, or NCR, or anyone) would question dogma even a little or have a little fun with Dante or compare this COVID nightmare to past plagues and something of a hell-time. I hope you give it a read, no matter what the right-wing goofs think. It’s worth checking out at least for the amazing William Blake illustrations of The Divine Comedy that the NCR editors wonderfully paired with the essay.

Finally, I also reviewed a book about Irish Catholicism and the abuse crisis, Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World, for America magazine’s fall literary review issue. This is a great, honest book about the changes in Ireland over the years and what the future of Irish faith (if it survives at all) could be. The best thing about this review is it unexpectedly reconnected me with a long-lost mentor—more to come on that…