Kathleen Bartels, Vancouver Art Gallery director. Sadhu Johnston, deputy city manager. Mike Shiffer, senior TransLink planner. Chicagoans (is that the right word?) all. So I finally decided to come here and see what inspired them.
What do I see?
– A city hall that looks like the world’s biggest secure bank, a massive building with four-storey-high columns filling up a whole downtown block. No doubt about where the power sits here.
– A city transit system that is premised on the idea of allowing people to travel around on rail tracks at second-storey level. Like our SkyTrain, Chicago’s El isn’t buried, but gives people a great visual tour of the city. Including a big loop of elevated rail that encircles the downtown, though they have giant metal trains, not like our little Playmobil SkyTrain system. Amazing to think of putting something like that into Vancouver downtown streets — people would go nuts. Incredible noise and shadowing underneath, but it’s unique.
– Incredibly cheap transit. A three-day unlimited pass is $14; a monthly pass $86, only $5 more than a one-zone pass in Vancouver, but with a vastly bigger range and frequency of service.
– A city that seems to be able to combine old and new harmoniously. There are glass towers, forests of them, especially along the lakeshore, but they’re interspersed with grand old plaster-festooned apartment buildings. In most of the city, acres and acres of pleasant sidestreets with brick houses, duplexes and (like where I’m staying) fourplexes built out at a steady two, three or four storeys, pressed close together but every one with a small pocket yard, filled with flowers these days.
– At first glance, lots of interesting public art. The “bean,” of course, the metallic blob in Millennium Park that is a tourist magnet, because it reflects the city and everyone around it in endless combinations.
I’ll spare myself some scathing blog comments (maybe) by noting that I’m aware of Chicago’s difficult history of corruption and racism, so I don’t imagine it’s perfect.
But wonderful to feel yourself in the middle of a thriving city that seems filled with confidence and beauty. A stark contrast to our brief two hours in Detroit, five hours away. The empty downtown had big beautiful buildings, but was completely empty, except for one lonely tour group, on a Sunday. Outside the downtown, the occasional brave loft development, but many crumbling, abandoned-looking buildings and empty, shelled streets.
The most encouraging sign of life: the people who jammed into the cafe we stopped at near the Motown Historical Museum, a post-church crowd dressed for Sunday service, piling in for a big feel of fried chicken, waffles, and collard greens. As we were leaving, a young woman who’d parked her car behind ours in the lot next door stood up to move it so we could get out.
“How could you tell it was our car?” I joked, since it was obvious that we, the only white family in the joint, were likely the owners of the rental car with the Quebec licence plates. “Oh, I could tell you weren’t from around here,” she replied seriously before reversing her car so we could squeeze out.