City Slicker

I am a dying breed.

I was shocked to discover this since I didn’t even know I was part of a breed, much less one relegated to history’s scrap heap. I got clued in to my slated-for-the-big-dirt-bath status five years ago, when my wife was working for Orlando public radio. She was volunteer coordinator for an on-air news reading service for the blind. One of her volunteers was an old gent from our hometown of Chicago.

My wife recognized this guy as belonging to a type — genus Chicago-Irish. This is a very specific type: urban working and lower middle class Micks; staunchly Catholic and Democratic (but not necessarily liberal) devoted to Hizzoner, the REAL Mayor Daley, and their neighborhoods; down to earth guys living in brownstones where the women ruled from the front parlor. It’s a culture my wife and I recalled from childhood – not old country Irish, but not homogenized suburbanite either. It was an urban culture that crumbled with the 1950’s white flight to the suburbs.

But even in the suburbs where I grew up, vestiges of that fading society lived on. Because when I was a child, the entire world was Catholic. It was a fairly diverse Catholic World, to be sure, confined not just to Chicago Irish Catholics, but embracing displaced urban Italian, Polish and German Catholics as well. Every family had tons of Catholic kids. My parent’s compliment of seven offspring was considered small potatoes by comparison. And St. Raymond’s Catholic Church and school were a few short blocks away.

Indeed, my generation might be the last one that located themselves in the Chicago area by parish. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, in the older neighborhood folks I had a living link to that big shouldered Chicago that was the “hog butcher for the world”. http://www.bartleby.com/165/1.html Hell, I even knew people who used to work in the infamous stockyards exposed in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”.

It took a chance meeting with a retiree in Florida to give my wife and I this epiphany: We’re the last generation with a link to that world. Perhaps I romanticize too much a lost city that prompted Rudyard Kipling to say after an 1889 visit:

"Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again …It is inhabited by savages."

I must be pretty comfortable living among the savages, since I’m an urban dweller to this day. Granted, Charlotte is a small city, but many Carolinians avoid downtown like the plague. They act like I dwell in nest of gang bangers and crack ‘ho’s, haughtily informing me that they stick to the suburbs. I have to tell them that this town ain’t big enough to have proper suburbs. I agree with poet Andrei Codrescu that cities — particularly older cities like Chicago, where the skyscraper was born — are not sterile constructs opposed to nature:

“This kind of city accrues a nature to itself over time: doors are trees, street corners are hot springs, manhole covers are arroyos. Forms become organic through use.”

The last time I visited America’s preeminent city (and much as I love Boston and Los Angeles, that honor has to go to New York) there were plenty of organic forms on display. For starters, I saw the largest rat I’ve ever seen in my life lumbering through Central Park.

True to form, New Yorkers were rude. I would have been sorely disappointed if they weren’t. At the Port Authority I asked a lady at a ticket window how to get to the nearest taxi. She gave me an incredulous look and replied, “You waaaalk. You fuckin’ waaalk!”

For the record, I knew I had to walk. I just didn’t know which way. I wasn’t upset by her reply though. In fact, I was laughing. I’d met my first rude New Yorker after less than five minutes in the city. It felt like the NY Tourism Council had set up this encounter just for my benefit.

Then there was the Haitian grocery store clerk who lit into a patron with no provocation at all, spewing a stream of invective laced patois that I could still hear from the street as I left the store. At the time I felt the proper tourism billboard should read “Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you, and fuck you too…Welcome to New York”.

But as Lou Reed sang, “Those were different times” I’ve not been back to post Giuliani NY, but I pray that Times Square has not become too Disneyfied. It would be a shame if the (somewhat grudgingly) admired leader who emerged from the ruins of 9/11 is remembered mainly for turning a once vibrant part of Manhattan into a blanched dead zone where white bread suburbanites take a tour of a virtual city.

Speaking of 9/11, it will be interesting to see what New Yorkers have to say about the upcoming Republican National Convention to held in the shadow, so to speak, of the fallen trade towers. Symbolism is important to an administration who’s only real accomplishment is an unnecessary war for the greater glory of Haliburton, a president who likes to play soldier, and starry-eyed right-wing dreamers. I can’t say how this crew will play in mid-town Manhattan come next summer.

But the New York I knew would tell them to stick it up their ass.
 
¶ 8/14/2003 :: E-mail Pat