Goodnight Chicago

As they say, some personal news!

I was at the Union League Club of Chicago leading a panel discussion on my book about Chicago neighborhoods when my phone buzzed to voicemail. It was my realtor, and a text from her flashed onto the screen a few moments later. Setting the glowing rectangle aside, I willed myself not to look at it until the talk was done. I already knew what it would say. The offer we’d put in on a house had been accepted. At 56, for the first time in my life, I would be a homeowner. We were moving to Waukegan.

Waukegan, for non-Illinoisians, is a small working-class city an hour north of Chicago, twelve miles south of the Wisconsin border. It is the city you come to once you’ve passed through the ritzy North Shore suburbs that stack up along the west rim of Lake Michigan – Wilmette, Winnettka, Highland Park, Lake Forest – and once you’ve gotten to the other side of North Chicago’s Great Lakes Naval Station. It is a majority brown and Black city, with a growing population of recent arrivals from Mexico and the Americas. It is the county seat of Lake County, with a corresponding concentration of government offices and courts housed downtown in murky government-issue architecture. It was the home of favorite sons Jack Benny and Ray Bradbury, whose Green Town of Dandelion Wine fame is a romanticized Waukegan and whose literary legacy is celebrated in the names of a park, a street, and an arts festival. It is a Rust Belt city, where the Outboard Marine Corporation, once the largest manufacturer of pleasure boats and outboard engines in the country, dumped toxic concentrations of PCBs into the lake for decades before shuttering its plant in 1998 and declaring bankruptcy two years later. It is home to the restored Genesee Theater, a really nice city field house, and five Superfund sites.

There are all sorts of active and reactive reasons why this is the right move: Our landlord wants to rehab our apartment and gave us til the fall to get out. Housing prices in Chicago are out of control, and Waukegan’s are not. We’ve been talking about moving somewhere with easier access to nature for a while, and it’s close to the lake and the forest preserves, and to Wisconsin family as well. It’s on the Metra! The house is sweet, with not one but two sun porches and a stunning red maple in the yard. There’s a very good Middle Eastern restaurant on one corner, and a 70s-era family grocery on the other. It’s also move-in ready which we would not in a million years be able to find on our budget in Chicago but which we realized was important, as there is a long list of other things we’d like to do with our limited time and money besides rehab a house. Did I mention it’s affordable? 

There’s plenty I will miss. I love living a stone’s throw from Humboldt Park and the Bloomingdale Trail, and I take for granted easy access to the circus gym and the dance studio, not to mention the medical care that has been the scaffold of these past few years. But these things can be reinvented, and the city’s just a train ride away. Maybe this is just the Chicago version of moving to the Hudson River Valley during the pandemic?

I’m a little worried about the hit to my professional identity, which has been grounded in the city for decades. I’ve been an editor at three Chicago newspapers and written for many more. I edited two collections of essays about the city and watched them become canon: texts for teachers of place-based writing, blueprints for running tours of Chicago, entries on ten-best lists. In my current role as the regional trade editor at the University of Illinois Press I am in ongoing conversation with Chicago writers and thinkers, talking through book ideas, fine-tuning proposals, editing Chicago stories line by line. I don’t want to lose that, and I’m already strategizing ways to keep these relationships vital.

But what closes my throat and tears at my heart is the idea that I am knowingly pulling at a thread in the web of community in which I’ve been embedded for 29 years.

I moved here Memorial Day weekend of 1995 from Brooklyn, long before Brooklyn was a thing – when few of my Manhattan friends would take the L train to visit me in Williamsburg, and when the prospect of a new life in Chicago seemed more alluring than another summer tending to the open wound of a breakup. I bundled my meager belongings into a rented U-Haul I was splitting with a vague acquaintance; after two days on the road I dropped him at his girlfriend’s place in Hyde Park and never saw him again. 

I landed with my friend Zoe and her roommate Valeria in a loft sublet on Grand and Wood, and spent those first weeks of June walking concentric circles around Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village, the loft the pin dropped on my mental map. Every morning I read the paper I would later work for at the cafe where people who would become loved ones waited tables. From that still point – friends who gathered me into their arms when I arrived with no job and no plan – I built a life in community with other writers and artists and doers and planners that I cherish.

In 2015 some of those loved ones gathered at a coffee roastery in a warehouse on the North Branch of the river to hold a benefit for Eiren, who was in trouble. There was singing, and dancing. Maybe there was a raffle? I can’t recall. What do remember was the moment when Nora picked up her guitar and started to sing, and the room fell silent around her. The next day I would fly to Seattle, my first and true home, to say goodbye to my father, in the last moments of his life. But that night I sat on a pile of pallets with my arms around Robin, tears running down our cheeks, as we marveled at all that we had together. 

Goodnight Chicago, Nora sang, her bell of a voice soaring through the space.*

You have skies
As red as any summer
Goodnight Chicago, you are mine tonight

Goodnight Chicago, you have eyes
As bright as any child
Goodnight Chicago, you are mine tonight

We closed on Thursday. We move next month. “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” per Joan Didion, but as the end comes into focus I’m excited to make a home with my love, to build something that is ours together.

In Waukegan I will walk concentric circles around a new pin and learn a new neighborhood, a new city, a new way of being in the world. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to quite say goodnight.

* By the wonderful Lucy Wainwright Roche. Watch a video of her version here.