Welcome to my blog! We begin with the customary explanation of its name.
Before I moved here, people told me, "You're gonna love Chicago -- the food, the architecture, everything about it. It's not all filthy and mean like New York. And sure, it's in the Midwest, but it's cosmopolitan." I.e., no need to buy suspenders and ConAgra stock.
About 60 percent of this was true, including the cosmopolitan part, but I was in for a shocker when I got here and saw things with "Prairie" in the title. I was like, what, I live on the prairie? Prairies have howling blizzards and Michael Landon. The prairie is where you die from diptheria on the Oregon Trail (as played on the Apple 2e) and prairie dogs pop out of holes in your dirt cabin floor.
Yup, it's the prairie all right
So I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel like all's right with the world and Chicago is just a remote outpost of the East Coast Megalopolis that is my native habitat, and other times I feel like the city is just an encrustment on a sprawling, alien continent.
The city is laid out in a perfect grid; after an hour here, I was no longer able to get lost (except in the suburbs). One of the streets north of us goes east to the Lake and west to Montana. It's as if the grid was formed along with the Earth, and the city just showed up with an asphalt truck and paved it over.
Did you ever read the book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions"? It's this book, I guess you would call it Euclidean political satire, written a hundred years ago when presumably readers were more bored and less repelled by nerdy puns. Anyway, Flatland was Chicago before they built Chicago.
Grids Gone Wild
Unfortunately, people here are so inspired by their grid-making success that they have applied its theories to every object made since 1906. This is called the Prairie School, aka the Chicago School.
Imagine your city burned down to the ground, five square miles of it, and you got to rebuild from scratch. And somebody says to you, "OK, you can do whatever you want, but you can only use horizontal rectangles. No colors, just brown. And nothing flammable, just bricks and cinderblocks. Hey, what the hell are you doing with those red bricks!" That's what everything looks like: squat, brown, and rectangular. Much like public school architecture circa 1960.
Here's a page with lots of pictures, mostly Frank Lloyd Wright stuff, and
here's a row of these houses (which, by the way, you get historic tax credits for restoring).
I actually don't think these houses are ugly all by themselves. But fill a whole city with this style, add some bare trees, clouds and gray slush to the picture and damn, it is a bleak, depressing school of architecture. But see, that's the whole point -- the architecture's supposed to be "naturalistic."
What I find truly over-the-top is that the Prairie doesn't stop at the front door. I saw this glossy interior design magazine and it was brown wood, brown furniture, rectangles everywhere. You're supposed to buy accessories to match. It's like some kind of Hell constructed with me in mind.
I should probably stop now before you grab a pike and start marching. I'll leave you with these two conclusions for today:
1. I love Chicago.
2. Frank Lloyd Wright was my nemesis in a previous life.
