Take the Cannoli (10 page)

The first person to grasp the significance of this place where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan was Louis Joliet. Joliet was a twenty-seven-year-old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquette on a canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed the river some 130 years before. On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River, and then the Des Plaines. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this spot where the river meets the Great Lake—just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker.

And Joliet then had a vision. His map of North America, an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674, is concerned with one thing, and one thing only—water. His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi. Look close and you can see what he saw: From Lake Michigan, there is only one point—the future site of Chicago—that connects to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi. This is what Joliet knew, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and
thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers. He wrote, “We could go with facility to Florida in a bark, and by very easy navigation.” Thus Joliet's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy: Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring.

I like to picture Joliet sometimes, walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go-cup in his hand from either the Starbucks on the south side of the bridge or the Starbucks on the north side, spitting coffee-laced saliva into the Chicago River, knowing it'll float—with facility—all the way past New Orleans and to the ocean from there.

The first person to get cracking on Joliet's dream was Chicago's first permanent settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a trader who moved to the north side of the river in 1779. That was in the middle of the American Revolution, and a century after Joliet paddled by. Du Sable's mother was an African slave and his father was French. He was born in the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola. Which connects the land around the Michigan Avenue Bridge all the way back to Columbus. Hispaniola, much to the dismay of its inhabitants, happened to be the place where Christopher Columbus dropped off forty of his Spanish raper/pillagers on Christmas Eve 1492 as he headed back for Spain, where he reported that the people he called Indians “had very good faces” but “could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.” Of course, certain settlers at Michigan and Wacker who met death by tomahawk in 1812 might have begged to differ with that assessment.

Du Sable built a small wood cabin on what is now the site of a thirty-five-story office tower called the Equitable Building. With his Potawatomi wife, Catherine, du Sable's marriage bed was itself a map of America—the mixing of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes.

Chicago schoolteachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident, du Sable, was a black man. And just think, it only took 204 years for the town to elect its first black mayor.

The United States declared war on Great Britain in June of 1812, partly because of boundary issues here in the Old Northwest, though the news didn't reach Fort Dearborn until mid-July. Just as the soldiers and their families were evacuating the fort on August 15, hundreds of Potawatomi Indians descended upon them and killed them, burning down the fort. Today, the site of the fort is weirdly commemorated with little bronze markers embedded in the sidewalk at Michigan and Wacker, so that the tourists may dance around its former perimeter as if learning to cha-cha-cha. A wildly racist relief sculpture on the southeast corner of the bridge depicts the defense of Fort Dearborn. A soldier from the fort is battling off a savage Indian brave while a mother and child are cowering behind him, basically waiting to die. And underneath that is a plaque that says the people of the fort “were brutally massacred by the Indians. They will be cherished as martyrs in our early history.” What it doesn't say is that those Indians had not technically ceded their rights to this land and they were allied
with the British in a war declared by the United States, but it looks like the city ran out of room to put that on the plaque. When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scalped human remains, which still lay there.

Walking back onto the bridge, if you look downriver a few blocks west, you can see the site of the old Sauganash Hotel. During the first half of the nineteenth century, at the Sauganash, Chicagoans seemed to be playacting the juiciest bits of the country's spanking-new Constitution every night. In his book
City of the Century,
historian Donald L. Miller writes: “At the Sauganash and its neighboring hotels, men and women of every color and class were welcome; and whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizers. Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian braves spinning the white wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Sauganash to the frenzied fiddling and toe tapping of [hotel owner] Mark Beaubien, or Indian and white women drinking home-distilled liquor straight from the bottle. To add an edge to the evenings, local white traders . . . would put on feathered headdresses and spring into the crowded tavern with war whoops and raised tomahawks, scaring the wits out of tight-buttoned easterners.”

Could there be a more lovable historical yarn than that? That anecdote is endearing, not just as a metaphor for the best American ideals—the picture of liquored-up ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the Fort Dearborn massacre to scare the queasy Easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound
into a practical joke. That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.

The festivities were brief. The ladies of Chicago wouldn't be dancing with Indians much longer because there wouldn't be any Indians left to dance with. The City of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833, the year the Potawatomi chiefs stood near the site where the Equitable Building stands today and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson, who found time in his busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole to have the Potawatomi removed west to what U.S. government surveyors had called land “too poor for snakes to live upon.”

Three years after the Potawatomi signed away their land and the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Joliet had envisioned a century and a half before, to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The Illinois and Michigan Canal took twelve years to build, dug almost entirely by hand, mostly by Irish immigrants, who crossed an ocean and the prairie for the privilege of keeling over with a shovel in their hands. They did not die in vain. The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet imagined. So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to city of over a hundred thousand in just twenty-five years.

Thanks in part to one particular innovation born next to the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago was not the only city in America to experience
a population boom in the last half of the nineteenth century. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper Works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history. Before McCormick it took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat, and with the reaper it took ten minutes.

Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could use less labor in less time and produce more crops on more land. By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the march of progress is necessarily benign, especially if you're one of those urban workers—just ask the dead of the Haymarket riot who laid down their lives just fifteen blocks from here for the eight-hour workday, or read Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
about what the meatpackers went through on the South Side, or listen to the words of Cyrus McCormick himself, who, along with merchant Marshall Field, secretly bought Gatling guns for the Illinois National Guard in case of “what danger, if any, was to be anticipated from the communistic element of the city.”

By the Civil War, most of America's grain from the West and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan, all within a five-minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. It could have been this very spot the poet Carl Sandburg was thinking of in his famous poem “Chicago.” He called the city “Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.” The reaper works on the north side of the river was the Tool Maker. The Stacker of Wheat was in the giant grain silos on the south side of the river where the giant Hyatt Hotel stands. The Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler was over on the train tracks next to the silos. And you can spot the big shoulders attached to roughly nine out of ten men walking by.

It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner, and there's no telling of that history without the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the old Sauganash Hotel where the Indians and drunken ladies used to dance.

And the Chicago Tribune Tower, standing on North Michigan Avenue a stone's throw from the bridge, not only campaigned for Lincoln, its editors talked him into running for president in the first place. Lincoln was considering going for vice president. Maybe.

As a subscriber who reads the
Trib
every morning, it is difficult for me to get all misty-eyed with idealism over the paper's current state. Let's just say I identified with the guy I saw not long ago on Michigan Avenue, at the height of the Age of Lewinsky, grab a
Tribune
vending machine and wrest it from its moorings in the sidewalk, slamming it to the ground. But the
Tribune
's heroic past is another story. Every time I'm about to cancel my subscription just to save myself from recycling, I remember that Abe Lincoln subscribed, and throw yet another fat Sunday edition on top of the little
Tribune
tower in my apartment.

The
Trib
's great editor Joseph Medill helped found the Republican Party to advance the antislavery cause. Medill was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a
Tribune
editorial in 1856, “We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the
Tribune
with antislavery matter to the exclusion of other topics . . . we plead guilty.”

Medill and company's friendship with the president wasn't necessarily always in their favor. At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president's new request for six thousand more Union draftees from Cook County and Chicago—this after the area had already given up some twenty-two thousand men. According to writer Lloyd Wendt, after Medill asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincolnesque biblical wrath, scolding, “It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home, and raise your six thousand extra men.”

Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers. And, reporting the news of the president's assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the
Chicago Tribune
simply reads, “Terrible News.”

The whole city burned to the ground, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the city became the place where every major architect in the country, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Mies
van der Rohe, worked on reinventing what a city skyline is supposed to look like. Montgomery Ward—just a few blocks down Michigan from the bridge—and Sears and Roebuck revolutionized consumer merchandising, with mail-order catalog sales. In 1920, Al Capone came to town, the same year Prohibition went into effect. One year after that, Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci, a member of the Dion O'Banion gang, chased by police, drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass. He jumped the gap, only to crash straight into the other side.

Decades pass. Manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy—now it's all banks and advertising agencies and law firms, skyscrapers instead of warehouses. Railroads give way to the world's busiest airport, on the north side of town. Only an eight-minute walk from the corner is the site of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, the place, you could argue, where modern televised democracy begins, since that's the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues but because he looked so ghastly sweating under the lights. And just a short walk from there is the building where Hugh Hefner ran
Playboy
magazine during its heyday.

As long as we're on the subject of the decline of Western civilization, the second floor of the NBC Tower, tucked between the Equitable Building and the Tribune Tower, is where
The Jerry Springer Show
is taped. It just wouldn't be the haunted landscape around the Michigan Avenue Bridge if some symbolic television apocalypse did not happen here each day. The constant profanity makes the show into
an unintelligible barrage of bleeps. Watching it is like listening to a constant storm warning, which is exactly what it is.