Conscious Choice: Why I Live in the City

May 1998

Why I Live in the City

by Mary Wisniewski Holden

Ever since our children were born, my husband and I have been under pressure from our parents to sell our house and move to the suburbs. Sometimes, as I push the double stroller around broken liquor bottles and giant, unrepaired holes in the sidewalk, I wonder why I choose to stay in Chicago. When I read the police blotter in the community paper, I wonder what’s the point anymore?

Why do I cling to this ideal of living in a dynamic, heterogeneous community, when living here can get you killed? What’s the point of having easy access to live theater and ethnic groceries, when the kids can’t play alone outside? They don’t like ethnic foods anyway, and we only go to the theater a few times a year. I’m not poor — so I’m not stuck in a ghetto and condemned without trial to drive-by shootings and dreadful schools. But I’m also not rich, so I don’t have the option of the finest private schools and frequent vacations at a solar-powered hideaway in southern Michigan. I’m no longer single and irresponsible, so I can’t check out the bands at neighborhood bars or loiter for hours in bookstores and coffee shops. All I do at the beach is chase the kids to make sure they don’t swallow something hazardous.

Why am I here? What would be wrong with having a yard with enough light and space to have a vegetable garden, except that I would have to go back on my adolescent decision to live in the city?

It helps to remember why I came to this decision, to think back on the roots of a loathing I share with a few other children of the suburbs, who grew up, came to Chicago and decided to settle here. I didn’t always dislike the suburbs — it was a feeling that began developing when I was nine, and increased exponentially. It is a feeling that has gone beyond a youthful desire for what is fashionable and dangerous and connects more to what the suburbs have become than to what they were when I was young.

Back before high-tech industry began carving out spaces for itself in the cornfields in the collar counties, many of the suburbs were "bedroom towns." People worked in the city and went home to sleep. If you wanted to go to the theater or do any serious shopping, you had to go to Chicago. And that was just fine. The roots of the oldest bedroom towns lay in rural small-town life. The town where I grew up had been a real town before it was a "bedroom town". It had a main street with a few blocks of lovely old houses clustered around it; some newer but still-decent houses of different ages in the circle beyond that; and beyond that, farms, swamps, and prairie.

I had the good fortune to live on a dead-end street at the edge of town. At the end of my block were several acres of prairie with Indian grass and cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace. There were red-winged blackbirds, garter snakes, and grasshoppers, and in the spring there were puddles of tadpoles. Every spring, the neighborhood kids would gather Tupperware bowls of tadpoles, take them home, and watch them turn into toads. Every summer, we would go into the wooded alleys that lay between cornfields on one side and houses on another and pick blackberries, or hold mock wars.

This was a diverse landscape. Within a mile of my house, I could reach not only prairie but cornfields, cattail swamps, carefully-tended gardens, a functioning downtown with minimal parking and a train station, businesses run out of people’s houses, a small plastics factory, and a drive-in hamburger stand. There were a few haunted houses, a few old farmers who had horses grazing on their lawns — and more than a few marginally-employed types who had pick-up trucks in their driveways, chickens in their yards, and dirty, vicious children. There were also some rich families with blond-brick houses set far back from the road, who drove Cadillacs to church and had clean, vicious children.

There were no tract houses and no stripmalls. There was a small library, where a goal to read every book was difficult but not unreasonable. It was a good place to grow up.

I also had the good fortune of spending a lot of time in the city. My grandparents owned a two-flat on Winchester, just north of North Avenue. My grandmother watched us there while our mother worked at the local savings and loan. We would roam about with my grandmother, who bought us pickles out of the open barrel at the deli and tamales from the street vendors. At every corner she would meet some babushkaed and wrinkly person with a shopping cart, and they would gossip in Polish while my sister and brother and I ate our tamales and looked at the bums and el trains and friendly stray dogs. The city held a tremendous fascination for us, and all three of us younger children ended up in cities. (My three oldest siblings, who lived in the city when they were younger, now live in suburbs.)

Still, after a trip into Chicago, my brother and sister and I were happy to be back in our own house, where we could catch lightning bugs in the summer, or skate in the winter in our flooded backyard.

My affection for the suburbs began to wither when the prairie and farmland at the end of our street was marked up with orange plastic flags on wooden stakes. We children knew what was coming — I remember going with a neighbor kid to make a raid on the development site, pulling out all the orange plastic flags and breaking the stakes over our knees. It didn’t do any good — the first monstrosity to go up was an immensely ugly, windowless senior high school, which was quickly surrounded by an immensely ugly housing development with an ersatz English country-home name, a name about as genuine and appropriate as the faux-Irish names they give to theme-bars and restaurants. Each house in the development was one of five variations of the "I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-colonial" suburban style. They were all made of high-grade plywood, or corrugated cardboard, and many buckled noticeably when it rained. I hated to be a snob about the houses; people need a place to live. And I could have forgiven, in time, the broken prairie, the crowded horizon, and the smallish, enclosed yards.

What was unforgivable was how hideous it all was — not just the development in my town, but proliferation of similar developments taking place then (and now) all over the suburbs. Driven by a quest for a quick buck, these developments offer little access to public transportation, few parks, few bike paths. It is impossible to walk to a store or to work from one of these subdivisions — and who would want to anyway? The houses are so dreadfully similar it would be like walking in a cheap cartoon with the background repeating over and over.

These large, vulgar, anonymous houses invariably feature winding staircases made of popsicle sticks and more rooms than a typical family could ever need. They are shoddy and graceless, and they support a lifestyle hysterically out of kilter with sustainable living on a fragile planet.

Then there are the stores. Thousands of outlets, fronted by huge desert-like parking lots, link up to each other in strings of more stores than you would need in a lifetime of normal shopping. But we aren’t expected to want normal shopping anymore, we are supposed to "shop‘til we drop" — which I take to mean "drop dead" after a life of meaningless consumerism. Somehow, it does not strike people that these malls are ugly. Douglas Copland in Generation X referred to this phenomenon as "The Emperor’s New Mall" — the belief that shopping malls exist only on the insides and have no exterior. As a teenager, I learned that if you didn’t have a car and enjoy hanging out at the mall, you were dead socially. Because there was nothing else to do.

Of course, even if I had wanted to hang out in the mall, I didn’t have the spending money to do it right. Our little town had grown wealthier, as well as more homogeneous. Many of the pick-up truck families moved out; their tiny houses now sell for nearly $200,000. People of color continue to be rare. My family didn’t really belong there either — we had got a house cheaply because of my mother’s link with her employer’s mortgage department. I spent my adolescence counting the days until college, and counting out change for Metra trips back to the city.

The people who created the suburbs where I grew up trusted to cars, commercial forces, and absurd zoning laws to create their communities. They got blobs.

Of course there is much to admire in the‘burbs.Today’s suburbs are far more ethnically and economically diverse than they were in the‘70s. Many suburbs boast beautiful and thriving downtowns. A majority support good public schools and enjoy relatively low crime rates. A few even manage a sense of community. The inner-circle cities like Evanston and Oak Park and the outer ones like Aurora and Elgin are so self-sufficient they hardly count as suburbs at all. Some of the outer suburbs are like my old town used to be; they still have their charm — and might hang on to it.

Still, even in the best of the burbs, the interesting things and people often are far apart, and you have to spend time on one or more of the main thoroughfares to get anywhere. Let’s face it, Golf Road, Army Trail Road, and Route 53 (for example) contain some of the most vulgar stretches of asphalt you’ll find anywhere in the United States. Getting stuck in a traffic jam on one of these strips is extremely depressing. And strips like these are increasing. There are always plans for more highways, which at great public and environmental expense can create more suburbs, so it can go on and on until we link with the Quad Cities.

Overall, there is something barren about many of the suburbs, something in the way they developed that makes them hostile to a sense of place. People in a city or an old-style small town are linked by sheer proximity to each other and to the places where they shop, work, and worship. Members of a farming community are linked by their shared livelihoods. Suburbanites connect at stoplights, malls, and over fences.The sparks that naturally emanate from human beings, the sparks that make things happen and create societies, tend to fizzle out in immense parking lots and wide lawns. So instead of combining the best of the city and the country, today’s suburbs often combine the worst, mixing congestion with isolation and commerce with cultural deprivation.

Certainly, Chicago was created by commercial forces — you know, Hog Butcher to the World, blah, blah. But the city held a vision, too. After the Fire, civic leaders planned parks and boulevards. Philanthropists supported buildings like the Cultural Center and entrepreneurs founded institutions like the Symphony Orchestra and the Art Institute. Despite the slums, the shameless demolition of some of its best buildings, and the creeping infestation of strip malls and superstores, Chicago is still a beautiful city.

But when I had to leave it for a few months to stay with my parents, I found that except for the lake I didn’t much miss the tour guide attractions. If I wanted to see the Art Institute, it was about as easy to take Metra as the el.

I missed the people. In the suburbs, almost everyone I met had the same background, the same frame of reference, and the same general economic status. I missed walking down the street and hearing three or four different languages. I missed making my way to a destination without getting honked at for the eccentric act of walking. I missed having things to look at: a fortune-telling parlor, a junk shop, a grand old Catholic church, a storefront evangelical church, a Polish bakery run by lovely women with red hair and drawn-on eyebrows; a taco place run by a somber man with long mustachios and a big straw hat; corner groceries with widely-varied spellings for tomatoes and lettuce; stained-glass windows in an otherwise decrepit building.

Even the lampposts in the city are interesting, plastered all over with signs advertising boxing matches, new plays, and ways to find easy money and easy love. I missed the layering of city life, where a storefront may house a campaign headquarters, which may have once housed a church, and before that, a dance school, an anarchist society, and a shoe store. In short, I missed what I used to love about my old hometown: a diverse environment.

There is much diversity in nature, and I think our aesthetic sense craves diversity, as it craves form. A subdivision God would have created one type of grass, and maybe a half dozen styles of trees and flowers. But in nature you see millions of different species, the diversity that is so necessary to the working system. I’d like to live in the country some day, but I don’t want to live an ersatz country life. And since my present situation keeps me from buying a farm, I must take my diversity in human form, by living in the city. You often hear the phrase "urban jungle," usually in a negative way. But a jungle is a wonderful, terrible place; injured, yes, but still infinitely diverse and open to the development of new species, new forms of life, new ways of adaptation. "Undeveloped" areas have a great diversity of plant and animal life. Cities have a great diversity of human life.

I’m trying to raise my children to be compassionate people. It is difficult to learn how to be kind to the poor and the lame and the stranger, if you rarely see them. In my neighborhood, you can see them. You want to know who is the least of our brothers? There he is — drunk and smelly on the curb. What are you going to do about it?

Here in the city, "immigrants" and "welfare mothers" and "homosexuals" are not only abstractions sneered at by a thin-lipped politician, they are people in line with you at the grocery store. They are the lady complaining because the person in front of you has too many items and the man who returned your daughter’s lost doll. They stand next to — and talk with — the "fur coats" who live at the lakeshore and the yuppies who cluster in townhouse rows. They are, all of them, your neighbors. And that’s an advantage even the wealthiest suburban school districts can’t buy.

A city, like a jungle, is a laboratory for life. It is sometimes hard to love Chicago, with its higher crime rate, visible poverty, segregation, struggling schools, closed factories, and shameful politics. I’d feel better about living in the city, or anywhere in the United States, if there weren’t so many guns. I am sorry that my children don’t have a big yard, and I’ll have to figure out an alternative to the local public school. But I think by living here, my children will learn something valuable about how to live in a shrinking world. One thing is sure: they’ll learn how to live with difference.

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