INTRODUCTION

A Walk on the Wild Side: Touring Chicago with V. I. Warshawski

A lone heron spreads its wings and rises from the marsh. It circles briefly, then heads south, disappearing in the shrouding mist. A handful of purple-necked ducks continues to nibble at delicacies in the fetid water. Their families have come here for millennia, breaking the journey from Canada to the Amazon at what we newcomers think of as the south side of Chicago.

The patch of marsh where they rest is small, about half a square mile. It’s the sole remains of the wetlands which used to cover the twenty-five miles from Whiting, Indiana, north to McCormick Place, the monstrous convention center that squats next to Lake Michigan. Only fifty years ago much of this area, including the eight-lane highway that connects the south side with the Loop, was still under water. The marsh has been filled in with everything from cyanide to slag, with a lot of garbage to give it body.

The locals call the remaining bit of swamp Dead Stick Pond from the eponymous rotting wood which dots it. It appears on no city maps. It is so obscure that Chicago police officers stationed ten blocks away at the Port of Chicago haven’t heard of it. Nor have officials at the local Chicago Park District office. To find it you have to know a native.

I’m not native to this neighborhood, nor even to this city. I first saw Chicago at two on a June morning in 1966. I was coming from a small town in eastern Kansas to do summer service work here for the Presbytery of Chicago-volunteer work in a time of great hope, great excitement, a time when we thought change possible, when we believed that if we poured enough energy, enough goodwill into the terrible problems of our country we could change those problems for good.

The vastness of the city at night was overwhelming. Red flares glowed against a yellow sky, followed by mile on mile of unbending lights: street lamps, neon signs, traffic lights, flashing police blues-lights that didn’t illuminate but threw shadows, and made the city seem a monster, ready to devour the unwary.