Another Walk

Yesterday I cut short my walk, partly because the mud made my chosen route along the west side of the lake unpassable, but also because I haven’t done much exercise since I had the little adventure with the mariachi tuba people, and I wasn’t sure if I was in condition for it. I needn’t have worried. I woke up without the fatigue that says you’ve had the kind of workout you need to rest from and proceeded to put on real shoes for real walking.

Not that the sandals I was wearing yesterday aren’t good. They’re Tevas, and even if they don’t look all that different from dollar store flip flops, they have amazing support. The first time I wore them I was so excited I walked 6 miles in them without breaking them in first. They’re that good. It’s just that yesterday I was dressed for stopping at the office, and today I wanted to dress for the possibility of mud, tree branches, and things that will scratch your feet if they’re not covered.

Part of my walking routine is to vary my routine. Yesterday I walked to the lake approaching from the south, today I would approach from the west. My destination: the defunct Nike missile base on the north side of the lake.

The first part was a little short cut through an alley….

…to pick up a trail…

that parallels another trail beside the railroad right of way.

From quite a distance I could hear the sounds of little league–after all, it’s Saturday.  Ah, how I remember my brother’s little league games…but wait, these are girls.  Yes, I remember a famous lawsuit that established equality for girls’ sports–a lawsuit that happened the year I graduated–too late to do me any good. These girls aren’t learning embroidery like I did–they are active. Their fathers are very much in evidence, too, refereeing, taking photos. I remember when my father used to take my brother to the ballpark to practice throwing balls.  Did I ever learn how to throw a ball? I must have.  How?

At one time I was bitter, but now, well, I spent some time watching this group, I admit, but my life has had its own twists, with sports, and in my relationship with my father.  It is what it is and I savor what I have had.

One orange sock:

then the Ford plant….

and some Fords waiting for new owners….

It must be transportation day, because here comes a train engine running backwards as they do when they pull a heavy load…

I love trains–”Indiana Harbor”.

The quarry..seems to be some sort of gravel pit…

and the cottonwood trees in the distance hint at the swampy ground below.

In the distance, cottonwoods–in the foreground, sweet smelling white alfalfa.

How can you tell it’s a cottonwood tree from so far away?  Easy.  The sound of the leaves in the wind. Here’s 40 seconds of the sound of one cottonwood tree in the wind:

You can also be pretty sure that when you see a cottonwood tree, there is a source of water nearby.

This has gotten to be  pretty long post and we’re not even to the lake yet.  Did I mention the destination was the lake? Here’s a quick picture of the lake yesterday when the sun was out:

and one taken today after the thundershowers:

But it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

Happy Mañanitas to You

This is the song the Mexicans in Chicago sing for birthdays, saint days, and the December midnight celebration for the Virgin of Guadalupe.  It’s called mañanitas, or little morning songs.  It is supposed to be sung outside someone’s window on their birthday or saint day.  The transcription, including accents, is the way my students wrote it on the blackboard.  The translation is my own with a few cultural hints from the students.

Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David,

Hoy por ser tu cumpaños (replace with “santo” for saint day)  te las cantamos a ti.

Despierta mi bien despierta, mira que ya amanacio.

ya los pajarillos cantan, la luna ya se metió.

These are the little morning songs that king David used to sing,

Today since it’s your birthday we sing them to you.

Wake up my love who is waking up, look, it’s already daylight.

already the birds sing, the moon already went down.

Que linda esta la mañana, en que vengo a saludarte,

venimos todos con gusto y placer a felicitarte.

De los estrellas del cielo quisiera bajarte 2 [dos],

una para saludarte y otro para decirte adios.

How beautiful is the morning, in which I come to greet you,

We all come with pleasure and delight to greet you.

Of the stars in the sky I would want to bring down two for you

One to greet you and another to tell you goodbye (because I sing outside your window and you don’t come out to thank me.)

volaron 4 [cuatro] palomas por toditas las cuidades,

hoy por ser tu cumpeaños te deseamos felicidades.

Ya viene amaneciendo, ya luz del dia nos dio,

levantate de mañana mira, que ya amaneció.

four doves fly (in the four directions) towards all the cities,

today on account of being your birthday we desire your happiness.

Already the daybreak is coming, the light of the day you gave us (for being a special day),

Get up and look at the day,  that is already dawning .

I ain’t got nothin’

What is my goofy neighbor upstairs doing now?

Car horns at 11:30 at night on a Wednesday? Not good. The noise and yelling on the street continues for the second time tonight.  Reluctantly I take my camera to the door. It’s a fine young man getting out of a car with a bicycle.  I wonder whatever could be he looking for this time of night?

Something is thrown from the upper window and the bicycle guy retrieves it.

“Sh*t! I ain’t got nothin!”

[Inaudible]

“Gotta go, she’s videotaping.”

The car goes in one direction and the bicycle goes in the other.  Incense-like  fumes waft through my heating vent and I gag.  Again I crank up the high-cfm fan and blow the fumes out the screen door.  Such a nice young man on the bicycle, although he did have a bit of a potty mouth.   I wonder why he was in such a hurry to leave.

I started this blog to write about Arabs–so how is that working out for me?

What’s Wrong with Chicago Housing

“What’s wrong with Chicago housing.” I was told in the staff room, “is that the landlords can’t get rid of tenants.” A friend of his had a tenant who owed a year’s rent. Legally there was no way to get him to move out. In the end the tenant asked for ten thousand dollars to leave, but settled for five thousand. The landlord considered it money well spent.

Can this story be true?

I had just described my latest housing woes. If a tenant is making noise after ten o’clock the police will respond. Apparently repeated police calls can get the landlord in trouble, so the rumor is the landlords can’t do anything about a tenant until the police have been called. And it’s not considered good form to call the police until you have talked to the landlord to try to resolve it. But these new tenants make noise during the day, when I’m trying to read or prepare for class, and the tenant in the back who works night is trying to sleep. (As soon as she is out the door, the rest of her family thinks it’s party city–but that was last month’s battle.)

My coworker’s friends could find me a good place to live in the same neighborhood where I work, he assured me. (as usual, click to enlarge)

There are people who would rather leave their buildings empty than rent to the wrong people. A tenant who can pay their rent on time every month is in demand and can find a good situation.

How much? Less than four hundred a month.

And for $400 I could get what, a one bedroom? More than that. I might even become part of an extended family and be invited to parties. (And what do you bet I could get close to becoming bilingual?)

Back at the homestead, one of the other tenants told me she saw the new upstairs tenant–the one causing my current woes–sitting around on the stairs with a bunch of gang-bangers. She says she’s upset–her kids don’t gang bang. There are already gang signs in the alley that weren’t there two years ago.  Now what?  Add to that the beer bottles on the front boulevard and under the porch and the funny incense smell wafting through the building. Mene, mene, …

Last week the landlord assured me he was writing “quiet enjoyment of premises” into all the new leases. But realistically does it matter?  Can a tenant only be evicted for criminal activity? Or at all? Or does a landlord just have to fill an apartment without any regard for what the tenants are like? Should I just be grateful this one doesn’t have eight visitors every hour who stomp up the stairs and stay for five minutes before tromping down the stairs again?

This week I have called the landlord several times already to complain about the noise level from the new tenants upstairs, but today around ten I was awakened with what sounded like a tuba solo shaking every room.  Um pa. Um pa. Sticking my nose out the door I could still hear it from outside the building, but there an entire mariachi ensemble, not just the base line, could be distinguished.  Could this be captured on a little digital camera?  Here it is:

…tekel,…
Update:  Curious, here is a conspiracy video with lots of scary low bass notes. And there’s always Holst’s Planets. The Mars movement has some good bass notes; YouTube doesn’t do it justice though. This recording is quite bad, in fact it’s not so much a recording as a digital version, but the low notes have a remarkable vibrational effect.

New update:  My new neighbors are now quiet–after I played the YouTube for the landlord!! Let’s hope it stays that way and that I don’t have to move.

Six inches above flood stage

Today river water levels in Chicago are back to normal– they peaked Friday night.  In some places there was an inch or two of water over the roads, and everyone had to get through single file. This is what they looked like on Saturday on the way to work, with rivers levels cresting six inches above flood stage.  Torrence Avenue south of 106th is still a bit wet, but drying out.  Two lanes are open.  Wolf Lake is not all that wet, even if the entrance has water over the road. The ground may be  spongy, but the picnic tables are still above water lever. The stupid, idiotic, ever-pooping geese are happy.

Days and Works

This post was inspired by a blog that showed the toilets on a Disney cruise ship.   A blogger on another thread on another blog had designed the toilets, and there the toilets were for all to see because a passenger had thought to take a photo of them on her honeymoon.   I’ll never find that cruise ship blogger again, but she and her friends were in the midst of a blogging challenge to take photos of one day of their lives.  Their project was to take a picture no less than every two hours throughout the day, and then to take photos on a working day as well as a non-working day, to give an idea of both work and leisure.  It sounded kind of weird at first, but then I remembered that that is what history is made up of.  It’s not the battles and the generals, it’s how the ordinary people lived day to day that most fascinates the historians, from Heisod on down.

So here is a day in the life.  It starts out in front of the computer with a cup of tea next to the mouse.  Then a bus ride through a Polish neighborhood on Chicago’s farthest south east corner traveling north through a Hispanic neighborhood (with firetrucks at the bus stop). I stop long enough to visit a library and an elementary school classroom used for adult education, then get back on the bus for a ride through a Hispanic neighborhood.  At the end of the bus line, I walk further north though the Hispanic neighborhood and then a black neighborhood, crossing a train track which is a bit of wild forest in the middle of the city–a sort of  stopping by woods moment–and am rewarded by a commuter train passing through.  Finally I arrive at an auto shop with a blue crenelated roof. Then I do some errands: the drive-through cash machine,  the dollar store to pick up coffee cups for class, a gas station, the Arab neighborhood for bakery goods, cheese and tea, and the Salvation Army store for used books that cost a dime (and I find another Sayers mystery). Finally I end up back where I started, with a glass of tea next to my computer mouse. This time I have a traditional Palestinian date bread from the Arab bakery heated in the toaster oven to go with it.

So what is there to reflect on?  The neighborhoods may look dismal to some.  They are among the poorest areas in Chicago economically.  The murals.  Some of them remind me of the Minneapolis Seven Corners neighborhood in the 70’s.  The blue on black background of the mural with a man with camera is actually a map of the neighborhood.  In a closeup view of the rows of circles you can see an angel wrestling with a devil.

Some of the buildings interest me very much and are fun to look at, but of course in Europe everything is much more interesting and older besides, and restored and finished to within an inch of its life, so I don’t know if there is much in them that is unique.

The Chicago brick, perhaps.  One building in the commercial district is apparently being demolished, the brick stacked on scaffolding to be very carefully salvaged.  Chicago brick is famous.

If I could travel back in time to when I was a sixteen year old growing up somewhere outside of Lake Wobegon, studying high school Spanish and peering at the outside world from my protected bubble, this is the exactly the kind of gritty ethnic environment I would have romanticized.   It doesn’t seem terribly exotic now.  Maybe I’m due for a change.

Weather Button

WGN, Chicago’s Channel 9, has easily the best–and probably most expensive–weather graphics of all the local television stations.  A huge amount of complex information can be grasped with just a glance.

Chicago Imagebase

The University of Illinois at Chicago has a collection of historical maps, drawings,  and photographs of the city of Chicago pertaining to architecture, urban planning, and the Chicago Fire.

The Chicago Imagebase Project, a core element of the Metropolitan Chicago Infobase Project, was started in 1995 at the Art History Department at UIC. The department began the project in response to a particularly pressing need of most art history departments: the necessity of making available to students for study the images shown as slides in the classroom but not readily available in the textbooks used for the course. In the past this function has been accomplished at most universities by duplicating slides and placing them in locked, illuminated cases accessible to students. Not only was this time consuming and expensive, but it was also inconvenient for many students and the prolonged exposure to light was bad for the slides. Putting slides up on the Web was a very attractive alternative, one that has been pursued by slide libraries around the country.

… Because the Art History Department at UIC is a national leader in the study of the built environment, a subject that brings together the study of architecture, design, landscape, urban photography, etc., they decided to concentrate on images more specifically related to the Chicago area. They also realized that the images could be used for much more than just teaching. An aggressive program of identifying, digitizing and putting on the web visual images of Chicago that were hard to locate or difficult of access- fire insurance and other maps and aerial views, for example, two of the richest sources of information about most cities- could be a powerful tool for scholars and a useful service for the general public.

Fire insurance records have provided historians with much information about Chicago.  The old fire insurance maps have a charm about them you don’t find with modern street maps or heaven forbid, google maps. Imagine handling this map, reminiscent of the maps in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago:

Also worth looking at are the images of Chicago’s downtown Loop from the late ’70s to the early ’90’s photographed by Bob Thall.

It’s unfortunate that the website isn’t linkable–everything is in a format that is accessed from the table of contents, so you can’t bookmark or link to a particular page, but the table of contents makes it fairly easy to navigate the site.

Gang Signs in Hegewisch

This is a new one on me. Gang sings written in snow on car windows. These are all within a block of an elementary school and appeared this afternoon after the snow stopped.

This same block was hit with gang signs last spring. I’ve included a couple of photos of gang signs from garages in the alley that have been there since then. Most of the spray paint from stop signs, etc. has been removed, but there are still a few left on private property .

Chicago’s increasing violence–the latest “white alert” lockdown in a south side school

Up until now, all I knew about school violence was from reports in the newspaper. Today, while at a meeting in a school building, an announcement came over the PA system that we were in a Code White. All the doors were to be locked and no one was to leave.

I visit schools fairly often, and lately have noticed signs of increasing security. Visitor passes. Notices about color code alerts. Police presentations to parent groups about gang activity. Doors locked where they weren’t locked before.

And lately, in this area at least, violence seems to be especially targeting schools. So far this year, 20 school children have been killed in gun violence. In April alone, threats have been received at Rotolo Middle School in Batavia, South Suburban College in South Holland, St. Xavier University in Morgan Park, (prompting more school closings for the surrounding Mother McAuley High School, Brother Rice High School, Queen of Martyrs Elementary School and Evergreen Park Southwest Elementary), Sandburg High School in Orland Park, Malcolm X College on the West Side, and St. Charles North High School in the western suburbs.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999, Virginia Tech in April of last year, and the five deaths last month at Northern Illinois University.

Our group was eventually permitted to leave the building under escort, but not without some worrisome moments. Some of our group still had pre-school children in a daycare area of the school who continued to be held in lockdown.