Blinking blue lights

This article will appear in the upcoming Skeleton News.

Before I left to live in Buenos Aires I visited Chicago to meet with a cousin of a friend to discuss the prospect of obtaining employment at a school the cousin ran that certified people to teach at English-language institutes. This was December 2006. The cousin was on sojourn from Argentina after his porteña girlfriend had grown bored and dumped him, and it turned out that in his absence the Buenos Aires local government reclaimed the building that housed his school, which led to its consequential nonexistence.

We went to a Blackhawks game and afterwards to the cousin’s apartment in Pilsen, one of the many traditionally immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago that have recently become target destinations for high-rise condo development at the dramatic expense of its current residents. Pilsen is predominantly a Mexican neighborhood at the moment, and the cousin, my friend, the cousin’s roommate, and I ventured to a local bar where we, the only patrons, could down preposterous numbers of Negro Modelos and tequila shots and talk Spanish with the bar man and his wife. I sat agog most of the night listening to the cousin’s roommate recount the story of her Bolivian girlfriend’s murder in Costa Rica, which included a gripping segment in which nearly the entirety of the town in which they had lived together blamed the roommate for the killing. I noted her situation and any remotely resembling it on my list of things to avoid in Latin America.

On the way to the bar, the cousin pointed out a tall white pole with a blue light flashing on top, and explained it was one of many police cameras set up around the city in high-crime locales. If there’s any of these in your neighborhood, he said, you’d be best off to watch your step.

I moved to Chicago one week ago today. I live in a totally refurbished apartment with high ceilings and hardwood floors in the heart of Humbolt Park. A street pole with a blinking blue police camera stands at attention around the corner from my building.

This is not the only evidence at present that suggests I live in ‘the hood.’ The police are plenty busy around here. I watched them pick up a crackhead down the block on my first day in the apartment and on the second my landlord, a photog for The Trib, said he’d spent the morning shooting a corpse-adorned crime scene two streets north of the house. The reason I can afford to rent the beautiful space I do on a paltry journalist’s salary is that Humbolt Park is dangerous, but much less than it was in the very recent past. Five years ago, a person of my complexion and appearance would have been seriously ill advised to venture down Evergreen Avenue after dark, even though most of the violence was/is gang related and has nothing to do with whiteys from Wyoming like myself. Sure, you can get robbed anywhere in the city, but skinny pale bulls eyes are even more tempting when they’re wandering alone through impoverished areas that are already prone to violent crime.

Today I can look out my window and see people who would make my mother nervous if she encountered them on the street, but other than avoiding dark alleys I take no real action to protect myself, because I don’t feel the need to. I’m keyed into a relatively safe role in the cycle of gentrification that’s been spinning Chicago into something totally different since the height of White Flight, and I suppose I am playing my part to perpetuate it — even while I exploit it.

After World War II, the nation’s economy boomed, Detroit put an equal amount of effort into producing civilian cars as it had into making army trucks, and the cash-flush middle class roared in their Chevys and Fords out into the vast suburban expanses. At this pre-civil-rights-movement point in history, the drivers and their wives and children were white almost without exception. This opened up a housing vacuum in the inner city, which was filled by blacks and immigrants who, in their poverty and general societal position as those who rich whites shit upon, lived in and among these urban leftovers as they transformed into the storied ghettos that became icons of racial and economic inequality throughout the last half of the 20th century.

But something has happened in the past decade or so: Rich whiteys have realized that the suburbs suck. They are utterly devoid of culture and character, they represent the vapid materialism that has made the rest of the world think of America as greedy and obese, they nourish no sense of community whatsoever, and now that gas prices are quadruple what they were ten years ago and the economy is in the toilet, Friday-night jaunts into the city for a good time are becoming financially untenable. What is there to do but dump that six-bedroom stucco mansion now that the kids have gone off to college, pack all you would be able to fit into a well-lit loft, and head for life as the urban elite?

First they filled up the places where rich whites who never left already lived — downtown and the north side, in Chicago. But then there wasn’t enough space, property got pricey, real estate agents looked for alternatives and developers smelled opportunity. They sniffed around, and stumbled upon bohemia. It turns out that among the immigrants in the dangerous neighborhoods lived artists and people of all shakes who were dedicated to one sort of interesting unprofitable venture or another and took advantage of the cheap rent in the ghettos to set up communities of their own. They opened up lively cafes, galleries and shops, played in bands whose music made the nightlife exciting, wrote and painted and created until a glimmer of life shone outward from these blighted neighborhoods and attracted the attention of even those yuppies whose senses had been most dulled by years of painfully boring suburban existence. They began frequenting these bohemian enclaves, slumming among the hip. Coverage of the going-ons in these areas moved from the alternative media into the mainstream. Everyone took note. The buzz reached the ears of the corporate world and suddenly GAPs and a Starbucks sidled up beside underground record stores and vegan eateries. Developers bought dilapidated buildings and replaced them with housing that rivaled the luxury of the fanciest suburban home. The police were sent in to protect the new wealth, and the gangs were driven out. The cost of living raised and the artists couldn’t afford rent. They moved on to the next neighborhood, which was still unsavory enough to keep apartment prices low, and began to build their bohemian communities anew. The hoards continued to flood in from the suburbs to fuel the cycle that would begin and begin and begin.

I had a fantasy once that this cycle would spark some sort of revolution. Gentrification would push the gangs and the artists further and further out from the center of the city until they had nowhere else to go. In their final refuges on the outskirts of the city they would organize. The artists and gangs would come together — the first providing the knowledge of the history of social and cultural revolt, and the second would bring the weapons. Put under enough pressure, they would begin to fight back together against the developers and the police with all means and tactics and reclaim the neighborhoods they had been forced to abandon. Then I began to look at the model of most contemporary European urban areas. White Flight never happened in Europe — the suburbs never caught on as desirable destinations. The upper class has made the centers of cities its strongholds and the poor and immigrant communities have been relegated almost entirely to the fringes, where they have little access to commerce centers, jobs, hospitals, and public transportation. Every few years the Paris suburbs burn with flames ignited by Arab immigrants, fanned by the general dispossessed. The police crack down, politicians make promises of reform, and everything stays the same dismal way it was before.

Perhaps this is all those of us who follow this pattern around America cities can hope for — a few car fires that remind the wealthy that we’re still around, and a state of general neglect. As the cycle continues, I will either move further out where the rent is cheap or make enough money to live in a less-interesting neighborhood. The mansions in the suburbs will be subdivided into multi-family homes, whose occupants walk an hour each way through the Illinois winter to their jobs as servers and cooks in chain restaurants in mini malls. The rest of the homes on the block I live on now will be remodeled and filled with venture capitalists. The streets will be safe for white children to ride their toy bikes up and down, and in December the blinking blue lights that alert criminals that the eye of the law is upon them will serve as top ornaments for extravagant fake Christmas trees that will be fashioned limb by plastic limb to the poles that I was once warned acted as beacons to alert me that I should probably be watching my back.