Next year, the city of Chicago will formally, ornamentally recognize the stunningly obvious: North Halsted Street is a gay stronghold. I know this will come as a shock to those visitors to the area who thought it merely a hang out for hirsute women. To all you Cubs fans who thought those guys you saw as you were driving home were firemen practicing upright mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I’ve got startling news.
All manner of objections have been raised to the North Halsted Street improvement project. The project involves widening Halsted Street north of Belmont Avenue and, most colorfully, placing a rainbow sculpture at Belmont to inform travelers that they are entering a reduced-estrogen environment.
It announces the neighborhood’s inclusion and declares its weirdness at the same time.
Some people support the project because it is an official city acknowledgement of the gay community, that it puts gays on a par with Ukrainians, Irish, Poles and Greeks. Others object to the project for the exact same reason.
As the debate trickles through the streets of Chicago, one treads mined social ground. If you are too forceful in your support of the “Boys Town” project, you risk the opprobrium of your religion; too strongly opposed, you may never again get good decoration advice.
I take a middle position, what I call the 232 solution, named for the famous UN declaration: self-determination for North Halsted based on the principle of land for peace. The gay community can do whatever it wants with the area as long as Richard Simmons is brought there and never allowed to leave.
But seriously, and I mean it now, I oppose what the rainbow statue represents, namely the Disney-fication of the planet. The basic idea here, as it is with the ersatz Greek columns at Halsted and Van Buren Streets, is to let those too stupid or too drunk to figure out where they are know what kind of liquor to expect from the neighborhood bars. This takes a lot of the sport out of city life.
Back in the old days, you’d stumble into a neighborhood, ingest whatever was available for purchase and then deposit your scent on any available lawns. If you left the ‘hood with roughly the same number of teeth as you entered with, the residents were declared friendly and your scent was recognized by the gang from your neighborhood as a sign that this area was OK. If it was not, then your teeth scattered on the pavement were a warning.
There is something discomforting about this whole business of allowing images to define our experiences before we have actually had them.
But if it is inevitable, let’s roll with it. Maybe there is other public art that would give visitors a sense of the neighborhood they’re entering.
The entrance to Old Town at Burton Place and Wells Street could have a statue of an aging hippie rolling her own — but instead of marijuana, she’s preparing a joint of Geritol.
Upon entering Bridgeport, where the necks are as red as the socks are white, you should roll or walk over a speedbump. The bump should be sculpted to resemble the prostrate bodies of whichever minorities are currently in disfavor, which at this point would be … all of us.
The corner of Michigan Avenue and Oak Street, the beginning of the Magnificent Mile, should be heralded by a statue of a bulbous, 20-foot high, Buddha-like figure, collapsed in ecstatic exhaustion on the sidewalk, a half-eaten piece of Eli’s cheesecake in one hand and half-full Marshall Field’s bag in the other. It would be the tomb of the unknown shopper. Who knows, maybe the model for the figure could be gay.
