Day or night, it was an amazing vista, the ever-changing skyline of one of the world’s great cities…Chicago. From 2000 until we sold our condo at 15^th and State Street in 2018, it was our view, and it never got old.

Our condo started out as a weekend retreat for my wife and I, a bit of “alone time” from our three children who were hovering at various heights of finishing their educations, finding a life partner, and launching. An excellent time for a weekend getaway address; I heartily recommend it for those of you in that life-stage.

The South Loop was beckoning, in its early stages of gentrification. The Printer’s Row area, in particular, was jumping. I knew and had worked the area selling typesetting there in the 1970’s. Back then it was dirty, scruffy, and industrial, and I could never imagine wanting to live there. It was printers, lithographers, typesetters, and related print trades, all thriving, and unable to see the dawn of the digital age and of the Internet that would render their products and services obsolete. Many of the buildings still bear the names of the companies that built them.  Our building was built as a frozen food warehouse for Meadowgold Butter. Old time Rock Island Line riders recall seeing that big butter sign for years.

What these buildings had in common was that developers bought them at the low end of their value, gutted them to remove all traces of industry, and built out condos or apartments that appealed to both “fifty-somethings” like us, or parents of students enrolled at more than a dozen downtown colleges. Views were important, but so were amenities. In-building restaurants, workout rooms, party rooms and decks drove the buyers in big numbers.

I remember feeling blessed to be able to afford such a view. Business was good. We loved walking all around downtown, the art fairs, new restaurants opening almost weekly, even the Catholic parish of Old Saint Mary’s, once the ugliest church in town at Van Buren and Wabash, now reborn in splendor at 15^th and Michigan. At the invitation of the pastor, Maureen signed our names onto the concrete floor underneath the tile of the sanctuary, so I guess we were among the first there.

We loved showing off our view to anyone and everyone who wanted to come downtown. It even gave us a little bit of a “cool factor” with our friends, most of whom lived in the burbs, and perhaps thought of us as adventurers.

My mother sent us a card when we closed on the condo, congratulating us on our “additional home” as she put it. It had us wondering what “additional” meant. Were we showing off, was it something we did not deserve? But when her sister Evie came to town, she could not wait to get her down there, to showcase her “successful” kids. Ah sisters. Do they ever stop competing?

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The Lights………

I remember watching a violent summer storm as it swept through downtown. Bolts of searing white lightning struck the huge white antennas on top of Sears tower. The lightening seemed to strike every 30 seconds or so. And when it did touch, the blinding white streak lingered two or three seconds, as if it took a little time to offload its raw energy into the building.

One of my favorite summer activities was helping to land commercial aircraft as they reached for O’Hare. Their lights would appear in the west, seeming to drop from the blackness above them, as if they were parachute flares fired from some celestial mortar.  

They would form a yellow-white necklace of lights, five miles apart up there, but appearing to be part of the same string from my balcony. The string would head east over the lake, then slowly turn north, then west, and begin to descend out of sight somewhere on the north side.  

I knew those pilots needed my guidance, which I freely offered, wineglass in hand.

In the early years, before the architectural explosion stole our view to the northeast, we would watch fireworks weekly throughout summer. It got to the point where you sort of took it for granted. Afterwards, we discovered that the glass exterior of Trump Tower acted as movie screen of sorts, and we watched real-time reflections of those same fireworks. 

Lights could be funny at times. Our bedroom was a partition walled room, about eight feet high in a twelve-foot-high loft. The north facade was all glass and when a southbound Rock Island train came by at night, its oscillating  headlamp raced above our heads and made crazy lighted patterns above us.

Two mornings  a year, in January, when the sky was clear and the conditions were right, a beam of blinding light from Trump Tower pierced right through our condo. It lasted only a few minutes, but it was like trying to look into the sun itself. 

The office lights at night in the skyline told a different story.  The unseen workforce of cleaning workers would turn whole floors on or off as they labored all night.

The Sounds……

The South Loop seemed loud at first, then a bit quieter, and then your mind tuned the sounds out altogether. The Orange and Green Lines of the CTA shared elevated tracks across State Street. They rumbled and squealed by almost as frequently as that “El” in the Blues Brothers apartment. And the Red Line ran silently under our building on its way to Cermak and the south side, or downtown and to the northern city limits.

Throw in the parade of firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, street traffic below us and commercial aircraft above us, and you had a perfect storm of noise. Only we stopped hearing most of them after a while. They blended into our unconscious as loop dwellers.

And I recall the deafening silence that followed 9/11 for several days: an eerie and mournful absence of life and activity.

The wind…….

There were many times we could observe “lake effect” snow clouds high up and out over Lake Michigan, held offshore by winds aloft and destined to be dumped on unlucky Hoosiers to our south and east.

The cranes also acted as wind indicators, at least on the weekends. The crane operators unlocked the cranes when they were not lifting, and they tended to rest in the path of least resistance from the wind. So, if all the cranes on a Saturday were pointed east, you knew the winds were out of the west. An expensive weathervane, to be sure. 

Cranes were also indicators of both atmosphere and finances. From 2001 until 2008, one could count at least a dozen construction cranes from our deck. We watched as our original view all the way to the colorful lights of Navy Pier slowly vanished as the cranes spun their webs of glass and steel into taller and taller buildings.  And in the spring of 2008, when everything crashed into the Great Recession, the cranes went away. By 2015, they were coming back and are adding to their number to this day. 

The people…….

Life in an area so densely populated as the South Loop is a daily immersion in the diversity of the city itself. Your fellow building occupants, the building staff,  pedestrians who share the sidewalks and parks with you, shopkeepers, eatery staffs; White people, Black people, Asian people, Muslims, and Hispanic people, all interacting every day.  Medical workers, office workers, first responders, salespeople, educators, and retail workers were your neighbors, and the racial stereotypes of your old neighborhood did not apply much. The black man down the hall who played classical piano was a surgeon. The gay couple upstairs were successful realtors. The Korean woman who ran the in-house cleaners read classic literature when not waiting on you. If nothing else, it helped to keep your mind free of first impressions and faulty stereotypes.

These are among my favorite “people” memories of the South Loop….

• Thanksgiving dinners in Tapas Valencia Restaurant The owner of this “small plate” restaurant in our building sponsored a free turkey dinner for the needy each Thanksgiving. The needy came in many varieties: the obviously poor, large immigrant families, the guys from nearby Pacific Garden Mission, women from battered women shelters, and some folks who could clearly afford a meal, but just wanted to share the day with someone. The restaurant managers, Jose, asked the residents to volunteer to wait tables, bartend, and buss tableware. We worked under the supervision of the young people who waited on us every time we ate there, which was often. It was a day of reversed roles for all involved, and it was fun.

• Our condo balcony was right near the larger building patio, or party deck. If a wedding reception were in full swing on the big deck, revelers  were only fifteen feet away and would invite us to join them. I am embarrassed to say how many times we accepted.

• One summer day, we witnessed the unusual sight of dozens of people walking on the elevated tracks, accompanied by police and firefighters. Behind them was a vintage  “el” train, circa 1940’s or 50’s. As it turned out, the people were “train buffs” who had paid for a special ride on the old train. When it broke down above 14^th street, they had to walk to the Roosevelt stop. When we encountered them on the street level, they were in “train buff heaven.” They were absolutely thrilled.

• Early Saturdays in May and again in October, the bridges went up to accommodate the Lake Michigan boaters on their way upriver, whose tall masts needed the clearance. The annoyance of the less privileged in their stalled cars inevitably degraded into group horn honking, growing in intensity as the time passed.

• Public disturbances were common and came in several varieties. First, real protests for almost any cause you could think of, attended by a patient, if somewhat bored, police force, protecting their 1^st Amendment right to peaceful protest.  Megaphones were your first clue.   

• Columbia College art projects could easily be mistaken for a riot. My favorite was the twelve students dressed as a single caterpillar, slinking down State Street. The third type were Indian weddings, usually near the Hilton. The key players were the guests, often more than 150 of them, chanting, ringing bells, and clapping as they circled the hotel several times. The object of all this craziness was the groom, wearing colorful Indian garb and sitting astride a white horse, gilded in gold. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there. 

• The homeless, were, of course, everywhere. For a time, they lived near the south branch of the Chicago River in a small tent city. They could be found in every park, especially in warm weather. As it turned cold, they sought the overhead cover of viaducts from 18^th Street to Foster Avenue, far to the north.  It was good to see the cops checking on them near the river each night and to read of a remarkable dentist who shelled out $200 each night to bring them McDonalds coffee, burgers, and blankets. 

The beauty…….

There was so much of it…….

The great skyline itself at sunset and after dark as the lights came up, Maureen turning our little deck in to a blazing garden each summer, the rebirth of the River and the coming of the Riverwalk, concerts in Millennium Park, the art fairs, and so much more.

By 2018 it was time for us to go: our ages, the need for more space, proximity to the kids and grandkids, lowering our financial load as we contemplated retirement and, yes, personal safety, all factored in. And it was good to begin again, this time in the peaceful and quieter southwest suburbs.

Chicago gets a bad rap in the world’s press, but it is one of the world’s great cities, and for a time we lived right in the middle of it. Our South Loop years were among the best of our lives.