Dispatch from Chicago

On the mystery of the Great Lakes and the half-life of Midwestern empire

A bar in Chicago where they still let you smoke inside.

I thought to share through this newsletter some brief notes from a short trip to Chicago and Michigan—highly impressionistic reflection on the psycho-geographical puzzle of Lake Michigan and on the power of its metropolis, the product of nothing more than a few days’ visit and a little bit of reading.¹

Out from the forests and farms of half-frozen northern Michigan. Rural country here feels different in its pattern of settlement from out in the Far West. There, outside the cities and the suburban zones, rural settlement generally takes place against a backdrop of true rugged country, alpine or desert, with a few hardscrabble towns here and there. (My friends and I used to play the “population versus altitude game” driving through rural Western towns, each of which sports a road sign listing these two statistics. Altitude usually wins.)

‘Up North’ as they say in Michigan, things are different—it’s certainly rural: the largest city across a vast northern swath of the lower peninsula, Traverse City (emphasis on the first syllable), boasts a population of 15,000, and yet a scattering of little towns, a thousand here, a thousand there, adds up to half a million all told across the area. On the Lake Michigan shore it’s rich countryside, home in warmer seasons than this one to Chicagoland vacationers, and in general I don’t see Trump signs in anything near the quantities of Ohio or downstate Illinois (though I last traveled to these places in 2020).

The upper middle classes here and in Chicago vote Democrat, obviously, but I think it’s fair to say they seem to do so somewhat less zealously than on the coasts, and there is a sense of a greater degree of equipoise or hesitance around political topics.

The lake itself: a great puzzle that seems to hold the mystery of the Midwest within itself. At the risk of appearing to exoticize the putatively un-exoticizable Old Northwest, I find that for a far Westerner like me—even to a far Westerner who has spent formative years in the Northeast—the lake is difficult to understand.

I know the Pacific in its brutal, grandiose simplicity. With great crashing waves, cliffs and sea-stacks, it says in no uncertain terms: Here ends the continent. And I know the Atlantic—an altogether gentler, negotiated surrender of land to sea, always with the valuable intermediary of some mitigating marshes or barrier islands, bays or convoluted peninsulae. That’s why they call it the Eastern “seaboard.” It’s not much of a coast as such, after all, just a swath of land that sort of deteriorates into sea—and no one would ever dream of talking about a “Western seaboard,” a term that would outrageously calumniate the sublimity of the country’s left littoral. The reports I have from my reliable far Western contacts who have traveled to Maine are to the effect that even those craggy shores, so touted in the East, are tame and gentle in comparison to Big Sur or the forlorn majesty of the Oregon coast.

I know the Atlantic and its adjoining flatness—the initial landing strip for settlement from Europe—and its geographic gentleness reflects, to Western eyes, the softer contours of the Old World across the water. It all makes sense to me.

Then how to make sense of these “great inland seas,” as Melville calls them? How to reckon with the scale of these bodies of fresh water whose extent can’t be grasped by the naked eye? I’m happy to grant infinity to the oceans, finite as they may technically be. But the Great Lakes are certainly more finite, in that they don’t mark the end of any continent but are rather simply enormous intermissions within one, and I feel accordingly that I should be able to comprehend in a glance their extent. Standing on a high bluff above Lake Michigan on a clear day, I feel entitled to be able to see the Wisconsin shore. But you can’t.

In fact, on the flight back to Chicago, I got my revenge on these lakes. From my side of the plane, there was the Michigan shore, and there on the other side, you could just discern the coast of Wisconsin. Aha! Got you.

There’s some analogy here to the great empire that Chicago maintains over a vast Midwestern hinterland—an empire whose contours and even whose continued existence often utterly escapes the notice of coastal types like myself. The bitter fate of many American cities during the twentieth century, even after the efforts at rehabilitation over the past several decades, has removed many of Chicago’s old competitors from the field entirely, demoting most notoriously St. Louis and Detroit to shorthand for collections of still-flourishing suburbs.

Max Weber said of Chicago that it was like a man whose skin had been removed and his entrails set to work. (This remains true and is the city’s most striking and noble quality. The violent jubilation of the El’s crashing roar puts to shame the meek clacking of a J train in New York City.) It might be said of the unlucky cities in the Middle West that their entrails were rather torn out, leaving them transformed in the most violent way into cities on the heartless model of modern Los Angeles, with decay where their great advantage—prosperous neighborhoods within the urban core—had previously been.

Chicago has not come through this trial unscathed, as a short drive through the empty lots where townhouses once were on the West or South Side is enough to show. But it has remained on its feet, kept a national and international relevance and extended its regional preeminence, in part through sheer bulk and density and in part through successful public works projects like O’Hare.

Meanwhile, the contemporary cultural landscape of the U.S., with entertainment headquartered in L.A. and print and digital media in New York City, with the largest capital accumulations concentrated on the coasts and a population continuing a decades-long rebalancing towards the Sun Belt, it’s natural for there to be a running debate over the scope of Chicago’s continuing influence, once conducted largely between locals and boosters who make the case for its place in the first rank of cities and coastal snobs who ignore it or cast it into the second rank. Looking at a table of the largest cities in the country, after the first half-dozen the list is dominated by fast-growing cities in California, Texas and Florida.

Chicagoland: map and territory

Much of the original vocabulary used to describe Chicago’s character and rapid ascent, and which hangs around in the way the city is described in historical and promotional material, sounds odd to someone from the West Coast.

In this language, Chicago is the “city on the make” (Nelson Algren’s term)—the city of breakneck growth, the city where boosters’ speculative claims come true beyond even the boosters’ wildest imagination. And that was true—in 1893, when the world’s fair on whose splendor the whole city is still somehow coasting took place. But the Second City’s second century has been far more static than its first, and the arena where booster dreams come true, at least in the popular imaginary, has moved to California—next, in the visions of the tech captains, to the “upstart” cities of Miami and Austin.

But conversely, there’s also an image of the Far West as the land of infinite, regularized civilizational horizontality imposed on the land: Baudrillard’s L.A. as a cybernetic carpet, a human circuit board in the desert basin; those popular photos of highways in Nevada or in the Californian Mojave stretching out to the horizon. But these are the exception to the rule. In the Far West flat land is everywhere at a premium, and all the major cities besides Denver confront major and in many cases insurmountable geographical obstacles to their growth. L.A. is vast, yes, but one is reminded constantly that it is finite simply by looking up: at the mountains that are visible from most parts of the city.

In contrast, the flatness of the prairie and the lake is such that with Chicago’s rigid street grid—far more totalitarian in its regularity than the pell-mell sprawl of L.A.—that looking down any avenue one can see it recede to an otherwise featureless horizon. Even in a plane nothing meets the eye besides Chicago and its lake, meaning it is truly possible, unlike L.A., to conceive the city as infinite in its extent.

It creates an eerie effect to regard those unique lampposts they have in Chicago, that rise straight up and then bend 90 degrees to extend out a third as far. Rows of them at regular intervals along the highway or the lake recede to the horizon. And my friends there too complain of the seemingly infinite extent of the Chicago suburbs when seeking to escape to the woods of Michigan or Wisconsin.

As much as, say, Robert Caro talks of the New York suburbs as infinitely sprawling in his book on Robert Moses (for whom he blames this), this is only half true. True, in the sense that the New York metropolitan area is much harder, and takes much longer, to escape than anywhere in the West—which is a source of frequent complaints from Westerners in New York. But untrue in the sense that New York’s island setting and general geographical situation constrains it, providing only a few places for suburbs to be located. Long Island is convenient enough, if a less than ideal shape, while much of surrounding New Jersey is swampland, and further inland and in New York it gets hilly. Chicago, on the other hand, is simply free to radiate out in concentric rings from the shore of the lake.

Complementing the resulting impression of infinity is a sense of bounty in the core urban environment that is nowhere to be found in New York City. An enormous drive-through McDonald’s that takes up an entire block in River North is one example of a distinctly heartland type of bounteousness one might struggle to find in Manhattan. (A friend who lives there likes to say that Chicago might not be the largest city in America, but it can be thought of as the largest American city.)

Beloved restaurants are large, sometimes on multiple levels, another marked contrast from New York City, where every bar and restaurant often seems to be twenty feet deep and two feet wide. New York nightlife is lived in narrow little strips.

Like the lake Chicago appears infinite within a certain bounded domain whose finitude is not entirely discernable to those within, and yet easily susceptible to an unjustly deflating assessment by outsiders.

That is a part of the secret of Chicago and its lake, I think, but the whole thing certainly eludes me after this short trip and I think any longtime resident would be able to tell from these words that I have not been initiated into the true arcana imperii of Chicagoland. And I have not been able to shake a vague impression that somewhere in the hulking Art Deco warehouses, in the neo-Gothic halls, in the enigmatic decorative elements on the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, there is contained in this captaincy of the U.S. region most famed for mysteriouslessness a secret key to the riddle of the trinity of lake, prairie and city—steaming, roaring, lucid city.

A few mundane notes

This newsletter will be updated only occasionally but you can read my work on Latin American politics at Americas Quarterly, where I wrote most recently on a right-wing conference in Mexico City; and at the New Statesman, where I wrote recently on why Americans die so fast and offered recommendations to read Bolaño and Chateaubriand.

1. This is a subject I want to return to later in more detail with a view to the potential decline of the U.S., which proved itself capable of world empire during the twentieth century, but has not proven is whether it can reassume a less powerful position without internal catastrophe. Unreassuringly, the twentieth-century history of American cities presents many scenes of brutal, ugly decline rather than gentle, managed decadence. Looking ahead, I think the Rust Belt merits close study—not only as casualty of neoliberalism, but as one possibility for the future of America writ large, a very different possibility than one might get from listening to the prophets of America’s future in, say, Silicon Valley. Chicago might appear in such a study, despite its many and conspicuous challenges, as a relative success, having achieved a certain stability as many of the lesser stars in the Middle Western urban constellation went dark. What is its secret?