I visit lots of places around the country – most often as a peripatetic consultant under the constraints and pressures of a work assignment. A work assignment puts you on a strict schedule without much time for some necessary extras – like actually walking around an old downtown or neighborhood, trying to seep its patina and various visual details and other nooks and crannies that make it a different, more persuasive place than others you’ve visited along the way. No, there is never enough time for that. You arrive, meet people, have client conversations, hold more meetings, and then maybe, you might squeeze in an hour or two to walk around the community you’re writing a planning document for. Or, if you’re visiting during the late spring, summer, and early fall months, you might have enough daylight left in the sky before dinner and decampment to the hotel to take a few more photos of that cute row of Queen Anne cottages you drove by earlier in the day.
Invariably during these work trips, I sometimes feel that I did not learn enough about the place, its history, architecture, and people. I want to know what makes a place a place. When you’re in the community, the client pays you by the hour and you have to make do with the time and scope of work you have. That’s work life, I guess, but you wish you had the time to soak in a city a bit more. Or do you always have to wait for vacations to do that?
Over the years, to counteract this stubborn constraint, I have in the last year made it a point to devote time once a month to go out on a late Friday, Saturday, or Sunday afternoon, or whenever works in my hectic schedule, and visit a community or neighborhood that I have either not stepped foot in for a while or, at least, want to learn something more about it. I will relish the time to see and understand a place at my own pace, as a collected, serene stroller or “flaneur.”
One of my more recent strolls happened to be in the Uptown neighborhood on Chicago’s north side this past month. I have traveled through the neighborhood countless times over the years on my way from the Loop to Evanston and beyond, and yet, I have not walked it since I last heard jazz singer Kurt Elling perform at the renowned Green Mill more than a decade ago. I’ve had drinks at Fat Cat cocktail bar more recently than that, but it was always a short trip to meet friends, never to stop to see how much Uptown has morphed into Chicago’s new hipster playground. More on that topic for a later post.
I chose Uptown due to its recent public art program, much of it sponsored by Uptown United, the manager and service provider for the Broadway Avenue Special Service Area – a special taxing district that funnels tax monies for improvements in a downtown or neighborhood business district, commonly called a business improvement district in other locales. Uptown’s public art program has garnered much publicity as the neighborhood’s public art collection has grown substantially just in the last few years, much of it concentrated as a walking gallery along Clifton Street a half-block west of Broadway adjacent to the Chicago Transit Authority’s Wilson Avenue stop. The gallery boasts 70-plus murals and other small-scale wall art. The purpose of the gallery is to promote a sense of tranquility amidst the Broadway Avenue bustle of cars and the intermittent roar of passing CTA trains. It also provides opportunities for artists to create color and animation in an otherwise forlorn street.
Public art is a strong interest of mine. I want to know its intrinsic value in making places more attractive and engaging, not just for the sake of installing murals and sculptures just to keep up with the next town or neighborhood. In some communities I have worked in, a new mural covers up the blank wall left over from a building’s demolition. In others, a sculpture garden is placed in an out-of-the-way pocket park that no one ever visits. So, to me, public art should be located in places that facilitate some type of transformation, whether it helps a place become more activated and desirable for people to gather or it forces us to think, contemplate, or even question our assumptions about the world. Can public art also tell a story about the community and the people that live in it? Any combination of these aims makes for success in my view.
Being a newly-enthused flaneur does not mean I have to do the walking all by myself. For my Uptown stroll, I asked my former work colleague and current SSA manager, Justin Weidl, to tag along and provide some background and commentary on the Clifton Street art gallery. To him, the gallery was a way to foster a better street and pedestrian environment in blocks that were once gritty and unseemly but now made all the more pleasant with the recent rehabilitation of the Wilson Avenue CTA stop, improvements to the Wilson Avenue streetscape, and the welcome addition of Clifton Street gallery. He is not wrong there. This stretch of Uptown looks much crisper and brighter in the streetscape details, even if a little bit of grit was lost along the way.
As we walked along Clifton Street, Justin explained the origins and meanings of many of the murals – there were too many to talk about actually, so the big ones sufficed for the warm June afternoon I was there. One mural titled “For the Bears Fan” depicts three abstracted figures tussling over a football (underwritten by the Chicago Bears, of course); another consists of floral patterns of light and dark blue colors outlining the figure of a father holding a dead daughter, a reflection of the lives lost during the Syrian and Afghan wars. These and other smaller, whimsical art pieces made the street more endearing. Along with its serious side, as a whole, the street seemed both emotive and playful. Before seeing Clifton Street, Justin also took me to a nearby newly-built mixed-use development where more whimsy was found in murals painted on the walls of the bottom-floor parking spaces. Imagination appears in all the right places.
After the stroll, Justin and I headed to a nearby watering hole for both libations and thoughts about public art as well as running a Special Service Area in Uptown. To Justin, the Uptown community, for the most part, has had a positive reception to the public art installations – it gives the neighborhood color, vibrancy, and motivation for both artist and resident participation – while some voices in the neighborhood believe the murals will be a precursor to more gentrification in Uptown. Time will tell.
For me, I learned that providing ongoing financial and philosophical support to public art can make a big difference in building a critical public art presence in a place, as compared to ad-hoc, one-off installations here and there. It made a lonely street a more walkable one. There were also fascinating stories told from the various murals, even a few about Uptown itself. They all had meaning. There’s more to Clifton Street, however, as public art proliferates in other parts of Uptown. I look forward to more walking in this neighborhood soon.
The Places of Sense Chronicles 