Rust Belt Chicago by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9977743-7-5
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2017-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF CHICAGO (HAYMARKET BOOKS, 2017).

PAUL DAILING

hen I was a kid, I thought Chicago was a perpetual carnival.

It was a place where the Cubs lost and the Sox won, but I didn’t care because the Sox were pooey dumb-dumb heads who smelled like poo. And I loved the Cubs.

I loved the Cubs because of ivy and piss troughs, because of Ryne Sandberg, Mark Grace, and Andre Dawson. I loved the Cubs because the Cubs meant a two-hour drive out of my hometown to that place I thought was a perpetual carnival of sports and fun and a pre-1:20 lunch at that novelty fifties diner downtown where the waiters were paid extra to be sassy.

My hometown was not a carnival. It was the worst city in America.

That’s not me saying that. That was Money Magazine’s yearly ranking of the nation’s 300 largest cities. Year after year, that damned magazine would look at our shitty schools, high unemployment, high crime, and low prospects and name us the worst place to live in the nation.

We lived at the bottom of that list so long, The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn did a snarky segment congratulating us when we moved up to number 299.

Not Detroit, not Flint, not Gary, or East St. Louis. Rockford, Illinois, was the worst place to live in America.

“Rockford, Ill. — so named because it was founded at the site of a ford across the Rock River — is a pleasant, tree-smothered city 90 miles northwest of Chicago,” Life Magazine wrote about us in 1949.

“A hardscrabble town in the middle of America, the place is not much more than an intersection of interstates and railway lines,” Rolling Stone wrote in 2008.

We never really recovered from the factories closing. A Chrysler factory in nearby Belvidere is still a major employer, as is Woodward Governor, which makes airplane controls. But the furniture companies and — this was the big one — screw factories linger on as shadows of what they were.

In the early eighties recession, Rockford’s unemployment hit 21 percent, the highest in the nation. The New York Times did a story on us.

The Times came back in 2011 when we hit 16 percent, the highest in the nation during that economic slowdown.

“Parking meters line the streets of the shopping district. A fleet of cabs lines up at the station to meet the seven daily passenger trains. On Saturdays farmers pour in from the surrounding county to shop while their children go to the movies or roller-skate at a rink across the street from C.I.O. headquarters.” — Life, 1949

“Finding a meaningful target to blow up in Rockford isn’t easy.” — Rolling Stone, 2008

But then there was the carnival.

Two hours away there was a red and blue Terra Magica at Clark and Addison. Smiling men tried to sell T-shirts and tickets the moment you stepped off the Red Line and everyone was, whether the team won or lost (but usually lost), happy.

When Harry Caray thrust the mic out the press box window in the middle of the seventh, we all sang with joy.

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