Take underground Wacker Drive. Before the city started to allow movie companies to shoot films here, Chicagoans who knew about this splendid shortcut between the Near North Side and the Near West Side kept it to themselves. It was a good secret.
Today, every action film shot here seems to include an obligatory car chase down Lower Wacker Drive, and now, so many outsiders and amateurs know about it that it has been stripped of its secrecy status.
That leaves us with the Chicago Pedway, perhaps the best-kept secret left us.
The Pedway is underground Chicago, so secret that you can get lost in it even when you follow the signs. It is also sweet home Chicago at its grungiest, as earthy as a Berwyn bungalow or a guy named Al.
Literally, it is a series of tunnels, basements, steps and escalators, elevators and public lobbies that permit Those Who Know The Secret to go from the north Loop to the southwest Loop in year-round comfort, unbuffeted by winds, hail, rain or snow-no small thing in wintertime Chicago.
But the literal description of the Pedway does not show the magic: It is the Starship Enterprise by way of Bart Simpson, a golly-whiz Chicago trip in the heart of the city that is both very familiar and very weird.
And very easy to get lost in. This is because of the Chicago System of Signs, a unique Chicago contribution to the world in which no direction is ever made clear for fear outsiders might glom onto the secret.
A map of the Pedway shows that it is theoretically possible to take it from the Hyatt Regency Hotel-at Wacker, east of Michigan-all the way to the First National Bank building, with intermediate side trips to the State of Illinois Center and City Hall. But a map is real only in a two-dimensional world.
Welcome to the real Chicago Pedway.
Start by asking directions. Of anyone. At any time. Whatever you are told will probably be wrong. This is either on purpose or because no one in Chicago for more than five minutes wants to be taken for an outsider or a tourist.
The Pedway map (the Pedway was officially dedicated by Mayor Daley in 1989, and there is a plaque down there somewhere attesting to this) says the City-County building at Randolph and Clark is in some vague way connected to the State of Illinois Center across the street.
While the Pedway is mostly underground (when it is not passing through a lobby or running up the stairs or something), it is at lobby level in City Hall. Well, that`s not the whole truth either. If you strike out along the north corridor from the center of City Hall, you are headed toward the SOI Center across the way. The easiest way to get there is to keep heading out the door at street level, look both ways and then jaywalk across the street. But in case it`s raining, the Pedway does exist-tucked on the side, over by the office doors of the county treasurer, down those stairs and through a door and . . . .
Actually, I couldn`t find the Pedway connection in the Hall, so I went across the street to see if I could find it from the other end. The information clerk in the lobby of the SOI Center said there was no map of the Pedway, so I went downstairs to the food court and found a sign pointing north that said ”The Pedway” (heading toward City Hall and the 203 N. LaSalle Street building).
I followed the arrow and ended up in the lobby of the building north of the SOI Center. City Hall is south. I went back to the basement food court of the SOI Center, found the same sign, followed the same arrow and ended up back in the 203 N. LaSalle building.
This time, a cleaning lady, who had noticed me on my first go-round, stopped dusting the escalator and asked me if I was lost. I told her I was looking for City Hall on the Pedway. She spoke assuredly with a heavy accent: ”Oh, no. That`s closed now.”
Well, simply put, the Pedway cannot be found by following the arrow. Just ignore the signs in the SOI Center and explore every basement corridor until you find it. Then proceed with caution.
There is a definite South Side feel to the Pedway, and that is probably because it has its origins in the old underground Illinois Central Station that sprawls beneath Michigan Avenue from the Cultural Center at Randolph and Michigan to the Police Auto Pound No. 1, east of the IC tracks (where your car will be stored if it gets towed from the Loop or Near North Side).
The station serves the South Side, south suburbs and northern Indiana
(through the South Shore line).
The IC Station (or the Metra Station in officialese) was never high fashion. An amiable sleaziness was always nipping at its edges, like the raucous old Bomb Shelter saloon that resembled its name and whose denizens, waiting for trains with nervous sips, were usually bombed.
The Bomb Shelter is history, but other station saloons have sprung up to replace it, along with non-health-food shops fat with doughnuts and a flower stand dedicated to commuters who want to buffer the fact that they are coming home late.
For tourists and other outsiders interested in exploring the Pedway, it is best to remember that it is open only until about 6 p.m. each weekday and is closed on Sundays.
The Pedway is easily entered at many points along its subterranean route. One of them is the stairs on the southwest corner of Michigan and Randolph. Down these historic steps walked lengendary reporter Jake Lingle on the last day of his life. He was on his way to watch the horses in old Washington Park racetrack and was allegedly shot down by associates of Al Capone. Jake and Al had been pals, but it was said that Jake had taken advantage of their friendship.
So much for history. The most interesting length of the Pedway is all underground-between the Cultural Center basement and the escalator leading up to the City-County building.
Walking west from the IC Station, the Chicago System of Signs comes into play again, telling you that you are heading for City Hall. But before you get there, the signs stop and the escalator brings you up not in City Hall, but in the lobby of the county side of the building (the County Building and City Hall are the same building, divided by that north-south corridor that allegedly leads to the Pedway extension to the State building). Confusing? It was probably planned that way.
Marshall Field & Co. has gone out of its way to decorate its basement-level shops and eateries that line the Pedway route, and the class shows. One of them is a nice bar-and-restaurant with historic photos on the wall. It is called Hinky Dink Kenna`s, after the legendary 1st Ward alderman who also ran a sleazy saloon in the south Loop.
The place has music after working hours, but most of the Pedway is shut down at that time. So after Field`s closes, you can get to Hinky Dink`s via the stairs that lead down to the Washington Street subway station. Clear?
Two subway lines intersect the Pedway, and you will know them by their distinct smell. Most of the Pedway smells sweetly of fresh-popped popcorn, fried doughnuts and meals-on-buns. The CTA subway link-connecting the Howard line with the O`Hare line by a walk-through-looks and smells like a urinal in a sports stadium.
Go west of the Dearborn Street Station and you are under the Daley Center, which is called the Civic Center to confuse outsiders and new intowners. The Pedway branches south here toward the basement of the Brunswick Building across Washington Street and also continues west to the County Building side of City Hall. (The City Hall side is further west, as any of the county officers at the information desk will tell you-as long as you try to look like a taxpayer and voter.)
The whole Pedway experience is enlivened by musicians who tootle against the sound waves crashing into the Pedway walls. You can buy a lottery ticket or a glazed doughnut in the Pedway, get your shoes repaired, go out to lunch and not wear an overcoat in winter, experience a wonderful unreality, unfettered by meaningful signs, erring taxicabs or even traffic lights to jaywalk against (the above-ground Chicago Loop pedestrian tradition).
It is a carnival and quite wonderful, all of it, egalitarian Chicago, a rub-shoulders-with-reality kind of magicland that mixes commuters, common folk, beggars and musicians. It is the way the above-ground Loop was in an era before boring modern buildings muscled up the streets with sterile lobbies and grim security guards.
Enjoy it now as Chicago`s new secret tourist attraction. Inevitably, like Lower Wacker, it will be discovered by the movies one day, and both ends will be blocked off so that Nick Nolte will be able to chase a serial killer from the IC Station to the County building for the benefit of a wide-screen movie audience.
When that day comes, we`ll just have to come up with another Big City Secret.
Ten to one, it`ll be underground.
