There Are No Strangers in the City
What is a city, anyway? Isn’t it the liquored breath of another street promoter eager to place his tattered flyer about the next big comedian into your hands? Isn’t it the sommeliers arrayed along black granite bar tables who cast unconcerned glances in your direction as you walk past? Isn’t it the piano bar with sharply descending stairs at its entrance whose hastily-engineered drink specials attract a line that wraps around the block? Surely, the city must also be the street ensemble, whose melody and thunderous beat give joy to the weary souls of city-goers who stop for a moment to dance with full abandon.
Cities were not an unfamiliar concept to me: in fact, I had been brought up living roughly thirty minutes away from several cities. First, it was Nashville, a glimmering row of slender red brick buildings with neon colored lettering which read: “Now Open,” “Real Country Music Lives Here,” and “Bar-B-Que.” Next, it was Detroit, a city with a rather homely character. There, the buildings were crème, brown, and grey and the streets — uniquely webbed with cracks — were traced over with cryptic utility markings. Finally, it was Pittsburgh, a city of carved stone buildings, shops and stores of the finest antiques from decades past, and urban parks with evergreen canopies and the choruses of live music. It was a place where city buses rolled slowly by with tremendous indifference to the long stretches of cars trailing behind them.
What was a city to me, anyway? I grew up in a neatly manicured, red brick house in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. Our neighborhood occupied a quaint and densely wooded suburb carved through by concrete and cul-de-sacs. Somehow, I lived far enough away from cities to wonder what I had yet to discover and close enough to confirm that they were, after all, nothing to write home about.
But of course, fate would have it that an invitation to travel to Chicago, for free, would find me during my first-year at Penn State. And I would have been a fool to decline it — winters in State College were irksome (not to say that Chicago would have been any more pleasant) and I welcomed a change of scenery. Besides, my four friends and I would be travelling on serious business: we were awarded a trip to Chicago on account of the aplomb with which we, as the only competing first-year team at a business case competition, defeated other upperclassmen at my school. The Chicago round would bea proving ground of sorts, where we would put our wits to the test against the finest teams from universities in the northeast United States.
I stepped into the State College airport with my carry-on and an auxiliary bag with the words “EXPRESS for Men” emblazoned on the front. This place was the least bit an “airport” — it was small and relatively lifeless — although I appreciated it for its simplicity. It was a dark February morning and the sun had not yet extended its first tendrils of light through the blanket of darkness laid upon the place. I looked through the glass paneling behind my gate’s service desk to get a view of the plane. I saw that it was an abysmally small jet, and I felt my legs tense underneath me.
Here’s to two hours of no leg room!
Through the pane of my egg-shaped jet window, I looked on at airline technicians hauling our things in their shuttles. As my plane rose into the air and the glinting luggage shuttles shrank to the size of matchbox cars, I closed my eyes and dreamed about all the things I would soon experience.
Hours later, we touched down in the asphalt-colored, wind-carved labyrinth of Chicago. I remember feeling so overawed at the place, that a city of such historical splendor and architectural virtuosity could belong to as drab a place as Illinois. At any rate, as my group’s Uber sped through yellow lights and empty crosswalks, I recorded many of the sights in my mind. The steel buildings were chrome-colored and shone like glass mirrors against the sky; we drove past the Bean, which was snow-glazed and eerily vacant at 9:15am; we passed underneath long tunnels and waved out the window at corporate-types walking to work clad in their trench coats and tapered trousers; and, after all the sightseeing we arrived comfortably to our hotel, the Fairmont Chicago, in the heart of Millennium Park.
The place was marvelous! Soft white light shone from the ceiling onto camel-colored marble and a wine bar encircled by copper and glass paneling interrupted the floor plan with the sounds of clanging glasses, slow pours of chardonnay from olive-toned bottles, and business travelers chatting away with their legs crossed, one over the other, at high tables. I found myself taken by the swagger of Chicago and the rich aesthetic of the Fairmont. This, I thought, must truly be what cities are like!
I imitated the folks around me and took my place at a table facing the lobby entrance. My friends had left a short while earlier to set up their rooms. One by one, they made their way back to the lobby where I was. Haskel was the orderly, even-keeled one in our group who was, if we’re not mincing words, already a business professional in a college student’s body; Sean was our walking almanac, and encyclopedia, and atlas, quick to chide you if there was something you did not know that he regarded as ‘common knowledge’; Neil was Mr. Charisma — a well-learned and well-traveled fellow who made sure we all got along; Erica was our resident technologist (by virtue of her major) and tour guide, responsible organizing our team files and making daily food passports for Chicago’s many cultural districts.
Another stream of people followed behind my friends, and soon we found ourselves among a number of our soon-to-be competitors. I spent a good while sizing them up, and by my estimation they were aces. I was sure that they had attained the highest levels of professional competence burning gallons of midnight oil and trampling over their peers to reach the highest rungs of student leadership at their universities. Now, they were here to plunder this competition of all its spoils — and those were, among other things, a Visa gift card worth $1,000 and a two-way ticket to Seoul, South Korea. According to the competition organizers, one “could not simply understand the richness of a city” until they had seen Seoul. The South Koreans, apparently, had achieved an enviable blend of cultural tradition and modernity (as if no one else could manage that?) through their urban planning and design. Where a tourist could gaze up at metropolitan skyscrapers that carved Rorschach shapes out of the clouds, there were also traditional wooden houses tightly arranged in cobble-stone villages resemblant of hanok and ancient Joseon architecture.
The firm hosting the competition was located in the Aon Center, a commercial tower in the business district of Chicago. On the day that we were scheduled to compete, I could sense that all of my teammates felt the gloom of impending defeat hanging over us. We were hopelessly out of our depth, and we knew it. As predicted, our team got smashed during the competition.
As I gazed sorrowfully out of the tower windows, ignoring the noisy celebrations of the team who had just advanced to Seoul, I felt a measure of panic. Everything about what I was seeing portended an ugly storm: I noticed rolling storm clouds, like billows of black smoke, weaving their way through the ivory skyscrapers around us. There was no time to lament our defeat, we had to get out before we were stranded in Chicago! The rumble of thunder — faint and assuredly far away — prompted a notification on my phone: my flight was now delayed.
When we arrived at the airport, we observed O’Hare in disarray. This place was not quiet and docile like the airport in State College. It was uncontrolled, aggressive, and disorienting. My friends made their way to their own gates, seeing that their flights were still on time. I reckoned that although my teammates and I were on different planes, I would have similar fortune with my flight. But everywhere I turned, scenes of utter madness ensued. At the airline counters, flight attendants found themselves harangued by customers who were newly stranded. I let out a subdued chuckle, thankful that I still had better luck than the Delta Diamond flyers who would be spending their night languishing in a 2-star hotel common to the rest of the United States population.
I felt my phone vibrate once more.
My flight was canceled.
I was stunned. But the other flights that my teammates were on departed successfully?
I picked my head up to survey the rest of the airport. Most of the frenzy had ceased. Now, customers sat on the floor and against walls with their heads in their hands; the lines at airport restaurants continued to lengthen; business men and women paced restlessly, barking into their phones at answering machines that felt no pity for them; and, I saw students — yes, people like me! — from the University of Chicago, Philips Exeter Academy, Loyola, and Northwestern frantically arranging plans to return home.
I was now firmly in the grip of misfortune — almost every flight in O’Hare was cancelled, and if I was to make it back to campus, it would not be by plane. I resolved that I was not willing to spend any more time in this ill-omened city, so I made my plans to shuttle to a forlorn Greyhound station far from the Chicago airport. It was just about the only thing I could do. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t deign to put myself in such an urban house of horrors, but I found myself caught between Scylla and Charybdis: either I paid the exorbitant fees to extend my stay at the Fairmont Chicago or I traveled home for a sixth of the cost by public transportation. I decided on the latter.
O’Hare provided a bus for all customers who wanted to take the Amtrak or Greyhound out of Chicago. As our bus left the airport behind, I watched the city markedly transform. The billboards that once advertised jazz clubs, Michelin-rated restaurants, and high-rise apartments turned to advertisements for legal counsel, gentleman’s clubs, and fast food chains; now, the buildings no longer shone like glass mirrors, they were red-cinder canvases for political messaging, human portraits, and abstract artwork done by cans of spray paint.
I arrived at the Greyhound station under a spell of nervousness. This was no longer the city that mesmerized me. I was in the underbelly of Chicago — where the storefronts were boarded up and shielded by iron fencing, where gas stations closed at 8:00pm and government buildings were dark, and where people did not leave the safety of the indoors to wander the streets. This was the part that city mayors and urban developers tried to shield from people like me; this ‘Chicago’ was much less sterilized than what I had seen in the days prior.
At the Greyhound station, the only vending machine in the place, the only storehouse of nourishment in a five-mile radius, was entirely empty, its glass smashed and its contents ravaged. I winced at the sight. My shoes stuck to the floor — well, to the residue of dried Sprite and Hi-C. And the bathroom…mercy, the bathroom looked worse than a jailhouse latrine. I closed my eyes and drew in a few deep breaths. This was, in the realest sense, a city. There were no tourists here: this place was unapologetically unusual. There were no fables to read here: this was a live performance of all the dramas and harsh facts of the human condition.
There were no strangers here, only men and women living lives in parallel. We all were journeying through raw funk of city-life, trying to make it somewhere, anywhere other than what constituted here. Some of travelers like myself were only resigned to this waystation for a little while but, for others, this was one of many stops on a lifelong odyssey. I thought that if I had known this part of cities then I wouldn’t have been so indifferent to them after all.
For so long, all that I knew about cities were what they presented on their exterior — a persona maintained by tourists, transitory entertainment, travel brochures, and throngs of so-called “locals”.
I was not really disenchanted by cities. I just wanted to be part of the real thing — to see how other people found their way in places as capricious and resistant to stereotyping as we all were.
